It seems like there’s something missing here and I don’t know how to add it. You make your childhood behavior of not being upset over things sound bad through framing, but you don’t offer many (or maybe any) examples of it being ineffective. You mention that more recently you’ve been experiencing a sense of general malaise on the weekends, but the extent of that problem isn’t clear nor is it obviously linked to the fix it mentality. Many people have malaise on the weekends and sometimes that’s just because they’re tired from the week and need to recuperate. I don’t think moving away from a major life strategy is a good response to experiencing weekend malaise unless you have a very good reason to believe they’re connected.
I only make this comment because I too practice the “fix it or stop complaining about it” method and don’t find many problems with it. I don’t think the angry parent slapping their kids framing is accurate. Stop complaining doesn’t mean mentally slap yourself every time a negative emotion comes up. It means OODA loop a bit, and if you realize fixing the problem is going to be worse overall than not fixing the problem and suffering the consequences, suffer the consequences lightly because complaining will make you feel worse.
Kid comes up to their parent and says,
“I’m hungryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.”
“Ok, well when was the last time you ate? Can you get a snack here?”
“No we’re in the car and I just ate our last snack.”
“Well would it be better for us to take a 15 minute detour and get some more snacks or suffer the hunger a little bit and eat a nice meal in 30 minutes at home?”
“That’s right, I’ll wait until we get home.”
This framing is more in line with how I view “Fix it or stop complaining about it.”
I think this post would greatly benefit from explaining how “Fix it or stop complaining about it” didn’t work for you. Maybe you have in later writings, but I’m not quite sure how to find them because I don’t see any relevant pingbacks.
Agreed that there’s something missing. I didn’t provide much of a model about what emotions are, mostly because I didn’t have much of one when I wrote this. It was also the case that for some time I used my lack of a mechanistic model of emotions as an excuse to ignore the ways I was obviously hurting.
In response to Raemon’s comment here, I and a few others gave some more concrete thoughts on what negative repercussions are.
I intend to write some follow up posts with what I’ve learned in the intervening years. One thing I need to expand on is what I actually did with “fix it or stop complaining”, because if I take your comment at face value, we were clearly not doing the same thing, yet we both felt it sensical to call what we did “fix it or stop complaining”.
Another thought, these days I’m thinking a bit more in terms of “disavowed desires” instead of “repressed emotions”. Desires (or subagents) feel like the mental things that generate loops across time, that make things come up again and again. Emotions are the transient expressions of these desires. Emotions actually can “just go away” if you ignore them, but I haven’t found that to be the case for desires (I’m thinking less “I desire to have some lunch” and more “I desire to be accepted by others”. Well, it’s less “can I get this to go away rn?” (which you can almost always do with [drugs/video games/media/activity/etc]) and more “will this pop back up?”).
This post of mine includes the exposition of one disavowed desire I’ve struggled with which generated a lot of emotions over the years which I ignored. The header “A Serious Pardox” describes the disavowed desire. Knots by R.D Laing describes in poetic language a lot of these emotional paradoxes.
All that being said, I’ve spent the last yearish more in a mode of understanding and building agency. This has felt possible because I feel I’ve unraveled enough emotional paradoxes that I’ll know if/when I’m doing something that hurts me (agency isn’t safe when you’re not aligned). I’ve got a fewthreads about the process of building agency with an eye on not backsliding on emotional stuff, and another post which frames a lot of this journey.
It seems like there’s something missing here and I don’t know how to add it. You make your childhood behavior of not being upset over things sound bad through framing, but you don’t offer many (or maybe any) examples of it being ineffective. You mention that more recently you’ve been experiencing a sense of general malaise on the weekends, but the extent of that problem isn’t clear nor is it obviously linked to the fix it mentality. Many people have malaise on the weekends and sometimes that’s just because they’re tired from the week and need to recuperate. I don’t think moving away from a major life strategy is a good response to experiencing weekend malaise unless you have a very good reason to believe they’re connected.
I only make this comment because I too practice the “fix it or stop complaining about it” method and don’t find many problems with it. I don’t think the angry parent slapping their kids framing is accurate. Stop complaining doesn’t mean mentally slap yourself every time a negative emotion comes up. It means OODA loop a bit, and if you realize fixing the problem is going to be worse overall than not fixing the problem and suffering the consequences, suffer the consequences lightly because complaining will make you feel worse.
Kid comes up to their parent and says, “I’m hungryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.”
“Ok, well when was the last time you ate? Can you get a snack here?”
“No we’re in the car and I just ate our last snack.”
“Well would it be better for us to take a 15 minute detour and get some more snacks or suffer the hunger a little bit and eat a nice meal in 30 minutes at home?”
“That’s right, I’ll wait until we get home.”
This framing is more in line with how I view “Fix it or stop complaining about it.”
I think this post would greatly benefit from explaining how “Fix it or stop complaining about it” didn’t work for you. Maybe you have in later writings, but I’m not quite sure how to find them because I don’t see any relevant pingbacks.
Agreed that there’s something missing. I didn’t provide much of a model about what emotions are, mostly because I didn’t have much of one when I wrote this. It was also the case that for some time I used my lack of a mechanistic model of emotions as an excuse to ignore the ways I was obviously hurting.
In response to Raemon’s comment here, I and a few others gave some more concrete thoughts on what negative repercussions are.
I intend to write some follow up posts with what I’ve learned in the intervening years. One thing I need to expand on is what I actually did with “fix it or stop complaining”, because if I take your comment at face value, we were clearly not doing the same thing, yet we both felt it sensical to call what we did “fix it or stop complaining”.
Another thought, these days I’m thinking a bit more in terms of “disavowed desires” instead of “repressed emotions”. Desires (or subagents) feel like the mental things that generate loops across time, that make things come up again and again. Emotions are the transient expressions of these desires. Emotions actually can “just go away” if you ignore them, but I haven’t found that to be the case for desires (I’m thinking less “I desire to have some lunch” and more “I desire to be accepted by others”. Well, it’s less “can I get this to go away rn?” (which you can almost always do with [drugs/video games/media/activity/etc]) and more “will this pop back up?”).
This post of mine includes the exposition of one disavowed desire I’ve struggled with which generated a lot of emotions over the years which I ignored. The header “A Serious Pardox” describes the disavowed desire. Knots by R.D Laing describes in poetic language a lot of these emotional paradoxes.
All that being said, I’ve spent the last yearish more in a mode of understanding and building agency. This has felt possible because I feel I’ve unraveled enough emotional paradoxes that I’ll know if/when I’m doing something that hurts me (agency isn’t safe when you’re not aligned). I’ve got a few threads about the process of building agency with an eye on not backsliding on emotional stuff, and another post which frames a lot of this journey.