A blogpost in the works is something like “Grieving/Letting-Go effectively is a key coordination skill.”
i.e. when negotiating with other humans, it will often (way more often than you wish) be necessary to give up a thing that are important to you.
Sometimes this is “the idea that we have some particular relationship that you thought we had.”
Sometimes it will be “my pet project that’s really important to me.”
Sometimes it’s “the idea that justice can be served in this particular instance.”
A key skill is applying something Serenity-Prayer-Like. “May I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Your attachment to a given thing is often doing useful work, because, well, the thing is actually important. And sometimes that thing is worth fighting for, and sometimes you need to let it go, and sometimes you need to let a particular piece of it go, but it’s remember why the thing matters so you can still fight for it later.
My question here is “is the better term here ‘let go’, or ‘grieve’?”
I’ve been using the word grieve, largely because of this post. I think the process of letting go of special things is often grief-shaped. You keep expecting things to be a particular way, and facing the fact that they can no longer (or never were) that way is painful, and it requires both time and some skills to process that.
This is somewhat a stretch of what most people mean by the word “grief”, but I think it’s appropriate.
That said, a key goal of mine right now is to have a good, scalable coordination framework. And using nonstandard definitions is costly for scalability. You can do it once or twice, but if you’re doing it all the time you’re building up an impenetrable wall of jargon. Is this Common or Expert level jargon?
“Letting go” doesn’t capture everything important, or communicate the magnitude of how hard the skill is, but it is a phrase I expect more people to know, and might be close enough.
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.
FYI there’s some good discussion over on the FB version of this post, where several people came out in defense of “grieving”. (“Relinquish” did come up over there too)
I like “letting go” better because to me “grieving” is placing some frame around the kind of letting go being done. When I think of grieving I think of the process of dealing with the death of a loved one. But I let go of things all the time without grieving, or because I already did all the grieving a long time ago for a whole category of thing and so now I just let things go because I never was really holding on to them—they were just resting within my grasp.
“Relinquish” might be a good alternative. To me “grieving” is more about emotions and is an ongoing process whereas “letting go” or “relinquishing” is about goals and is a one-time decision to stop striving for an outcome.
Query: “Grieving” vs “Letting Go”
A blogpost in the works is something like “Grieving/Letting-Go effectively is a key coordination skill.”
i.e. when negotiating with other humans, it will often (way more often than you wish) be necessary to give up a thing that are important to you.
Sometimes this is “the idea that we have some particular relationship that you thought we had.”
Sometimes it will be “my pet project that’s really important to me.”
Sometimes it’s “the idea that justice can be served in this particular instance.”
A key skill is applying something Serenity-Prayer-Like. “May I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Your attachment to a given thing is often doing useful work, because, well, the thing is actually important. And sometimes that thing is worth fighting for, and sometimes you need to let it go, and sometimes you need to let a particular piece of it go, but it’s remember why the thing matters so you can still fight for it later.
My question here is “is the better term here ‘let go’, or ‘grieve’?”
I’ve been using the word grieve, largely because of this post. I think the process of letting go of special things is often grief-shaped. You keep expecting things to be a particular way, and facing the fact that they can no longer (or never were) that way is painful, and it requires both time and some skills to process that.
This is somewhat a stretch of what most people mean by the word “grief”, but I think it’s appropriate.
That said, a key goal of mine right now is to have a good, scalable coordination framework. And using nonstandard definitions is costly for scalability. You can do it once or twice, but if you’re doing it all the time you’re building up an impenetrable wall of jargon. Is this Common or Expert level jargon?
“Letting go” doesn’t capture everything important, or communicate the magnitude of how hard the skill is, but it is a phrase I expect more people to know, and might be close enough.
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.
FYI there’s some good discussion over on the FB version of this post, where several people came out in defense of “grieving”. (“Relinquish” did come up over there too)
https://www.facebook.com/raymond.arnold.5/posts/10223038780691962
I like “letting go” better because to me “grieving” is placing some frame around the kind of letting go being done. When I think of grieving I think of the process of dealing with the death of a loved one. But I let go of things all the time without grieving, or because I already did all the grieving a long time ago for a whole category of thing and so now I just let things go because I never was really holding on to them—they were just resting within my grasp.
“Relinquish” might be a good alternative. To me “grieving” is more about emotions and is an ongoing process whereas “letting go” or “relinquishing” is about goals and is a one-time decision to stop striving for an outcome.