I think it’s actual helplessness, not “learned helplessness”. “learned”, in this context, usually implies “incorrect”.
“that’s fine” means I believe that a change in my actions will cause more harm than it does good to my life-satisfaction index (or whatever we’re calling the artificial construct of “sum of (possibly discounted) future utility stream”). It’s perfectly reasonable to say it’s “terrible” compared to some non-real ideal, and “fine” compared to actual likely futures.
Unless you’re just saying “people are hopelessly bad at modeling the world and making decisions”, in which case I agree, but the problem is WAY deeper than you imply here.
I’m not sure what cause you to like this framing and what it does to you psychologically, but personally it seems important to me to differentiate what’s aligned with my preferences and what’s fixable as 2 different concepts. I think having a single word for both “things that can be changed, but are okay as they are” and “things that can’t be changed, but are not okay as they are” would render my cognition pretty confused, but maybe that’s a cognitive hack to feel better or something.
Interesting—I do suspect there’s a personality difference that makes us prefer different framings for this. For me, it would be maddening to have preferences over unreachable states.
I think it’s actual helplessness, not “learned helplessness”. “learned”, in this context, usually implies “incorrect”.
“that’s fine” means I believe that a change in my actions will cause more harm than it does good to my life-satisfaction index (or whatever we’re calling the artificial construct of “sum of (possibly discounted) future utility stream”). It’s perfectly reasonable to say it’s “terrible” compared to some non-real ideal, and “fine” compared to actual likely futures.
Unless you’re just saying “people are hopelessly bad at modeling the world and making decisions”, in which case I agree, but the problem is WAY deeper than you imply here.
I did a bad job of saying that I’m trying to highlight the attentional failures involved specifically.
I’m not sure what cause you to like this framing and what it does to you psychologically, but personally it seems important to me to differentiate what’s aligned with my preferences and what’s fixable as 2 different concepts. I think having a single word for both “things that can be changed, but are okay as they are” and “things that can’t be changed, but are not okay as they are” would render my cognition pretty confused, but maybe that’s a cognitive hack to feel better or something.
Interesting—I do suspect there’s a personality difference that makes us prefer different framings for this. For me, it would be maddening to have preferences over unreachable states.