Somewhat tangential, but I sometimes think about the sort of tradeoffs you’re talking about in a different emotional/narrative lens, which might help spur other ideas for how to communicate it.
(I’m going to use an analogy from Mother of Learning, spoilers ahead)...
There’s this scene in Mother of Learning where the incredibly powerful thousand-year-old lich king realizes he’s in some sort of simulation, and that the protagonists are therefore presumably trying to extract information from him. Within seconds of realizing this, without any hesitation or hemming or hawing, he blows up his own soul in an attempt to destroy both himself and the protagonists (at least within the simulation). It’s cold calculation: he concludes that he can’t win the game, the best available move is to destroy the game and himself with it, and he just does that without hesitation.
That’s what it looks like when someone is really good at “letting it go”. There’s a realization that he can’t get everything he wants, a choice about what matters most, followed by ruthlessly throwing whatever is necessary under the bus in order to get what he values most.
The point I want to make here is that “grieving” successfully captures the difficulty aspect, in a way that “letting it go” doesn’t. But a sometimes-workable substitute for grieving is ruthlessness.
Say you have to trade off between two sacred values. My Inner Villain says something like:
Humans hate trading off between sacred values, they’ll hem and haw about it, make a big dramatic show out of the whole process—“grieving”. But a large chunk of “grieving” is performative—not all of it, but a lot. Cultivate an identity of ruthlessness and coldheartedness, and you can instead perform a role which just makes the hard choices without the drama.
I think my preferred group level solution is to have some people around who do ruthlessness and some who do grieving (with accompanying broader strategies) who keep each other in check.
Somewhat tangential, but I sometimes think about the sort of tradeoffs you’re talking about in a different emotional/narrative lens, which might help spur other ideas for how to communicate it.
(I’m going to use an analogy from Mother of Learning, spoilers ahead)...
There’s this scene in Mother of Learning where the incredibly powerful thousand-year-old lich king realizes he’s in some sort of simulation, and that the protagonists are therefore presumably trying to extract information from him. Within seconds of realizing this, without any hesitation or hemming or hawing, he blows up his own soul in an attempt to destroy both himself and the protagonists (at least within the simulation). It’s cold calculation: he concludes that he can’t win the game, the best available move is to destroy the game and himself with it, and he just does that without hesitation.
That’s what it looks like when someone is really good at “letting it go”. There’s a realization that he can’t get everything he wants, a choice about what matters most, followed by ruthlessly throwing whatever is necessary under the bus in order to get what he values most.
The point I want to make here is that “grieving” successfully captures the difficulty aspect, in a way that “letting it go” doesn’t. But a sometimes-workable substitute for grieving is ruthlessness.
Say you have to trade off between two sacred values. My Inner Villain says something like:
Yeah.
I think my preferred group level solution is to have some people around who do ruthlessness and some who do grieving (with accompanying broader strategies) who keep each other in check.