It's a very interesting problem with psychology and the locus of control -- I think, ultimately, it depends on what works for you and solves your current psychological funk at the time.
Some people think they control everything about their lives -- they do think that if they put in the time, effort, and energy, they can achieve anything. When they don't, they blame themselves endlessly. Sometimes, learning that it was something beyond your control (ie social forces were stacked against your particular endeavor) can be liberating and break the person out of personal blame an hopelessness and let them start again.
On the other end of the spectrum is feeling like an endless victim. Sometimes, it's easy to blame everything and lament how everything is stacked against you. This provides psychological solace but can prevent you from moving forward because you're convinced you won't be able to. In these cases, some of the stories of 'self-made' optimism can help get you out of a spot of hopelessness into action.
In this situation, though, what's medicine to one is poison to the other. I can think of times in my life where each view was helpful and warranted, even if they're hard to reconcile with each other.
In this case, the 'truth' isn't really knowable because we can't objectively observe a system we're a part of. So, until we know, I guess it's whatever view gets you where you need to go.
A lot of religious/theological texts and frameworks talk about the balance between self forgiveness and self efficacy, and the need for perspective.
"It was said of Reb Simcha Bunem, a 18th century Hasidic rebbe, that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. One was inscribed with the saying from the Talmud: Bishvili nivra ha-olam, “for my sake the world was created.” On the other he wrote a phrase from our father Avraham in the Torah: V’anokhi afar v’efer,” “I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out and read each slip of paper as necessary for the moment."
People throughout known history have tried to solve what it means to have free will yet for our freedom to be circumscribed by the world we are part of.
Denying freedom altogether is logically the simplest way out, and is often done on behalf of other people, but I don't think anybody chooses this way for themselves, not at a deep level. Psychologically, we need agency, and it's cruel to deny it to others. So we keep trying out new ways of framing it.
> I can think of times in my life where each view was helpful and warranted, even if they're hard to reconcile with each other.
Almost anything is "within your power". The right sequence of muscle movements, performed by your body, could bring an end to most world conflict, cure near every disease we have, spoof any cryptographic protocol, reinvent basically every creative pursuit…
However, as a regular human, with a brain not quite the size of a planet? Your actions are constrained by your knowledge, reasoning speed, reasoning ability (honed by past experience), mental state, emotional state, alertness, distractedness, loneliness, blood sugar level, blood protein level, percentage water…
You can do more than what you can do at this moment. But you can't do more than you can do at this moment. But you can probably get yourself in a position where, next moment, you can do more than you could do this moment.
Sounds like you're saying we shouldn't bother trying.
> In this situation, though, what's medicine to one is poison to the other. I can think of times in my life where each view was helpful and warranted, even if they're hard to reconcile with each other.
Moral philosopher John Rawls's uses the concepts of original position and veil of ignorance for a thought experiment that is the only fair basis for making decisions about moral principles and how society should be structured. You can think of it as "What we'd all decide for the world if each of us did not know ahead of time which circumstance we'd be born into".
> The Veil is meant to ensure that people’s concern for their personal benefit could translate into a set of arrangements that were fair for everyone, assuming that they had to stick to those choices once the Veil of Ignorance ‘lifts’, and they are given full information again.
> One set of facts hidden from you behind the Veil are what we might call ‘demographic’ facts. You do not know your gender, race, wealth, or facts about your personal strengths and weaknesses, such as their intelligence or physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but simply have them by luck. As such, they do not deserve any benefits or harms that come from them. By removing knowledge of the natural inequalities that give people unfair advantages, it becomes irrational to choose principles that discriminate against any particular group.
Unpopular opinion (therefore throwaway account): avocado toast guy is right.
Sure, the math doesn't add up. An avocado toast and a coffee every morning won't add up to a real estate deposit. But that's not the point; the point is that people who are barely making ends meet having avocado toast at a coffee shop have the wrong mindset. I'd argue they are barely making ends meet because they're having avocado toast at a coffee shop, and multiple other expenses they can't responsibly afford. I've worked with young people barely making any money out of school, who still religiously went to the pub with their mates for the proverbial pint, and never skipped on Costa del Sol holidays.
I grew up in a lower-to-middle middle class household. Eating out was something we did on special occasions (some birthdays, high school graduation, etc). Travel and holidays were limited to the one holiday a year, to a beach 45 min away from where we lived. It does seem like young people these days have an incredibly distorted sense of what they "deserve" or what they can afford or what's "normal".
Now after decades in tech, a couple of stints at FAANG, I'm pretty comfortable financially. There's a lot of things I can afford in the strictest sense of the word (a 300k Lambo, a boat, whatever), but I know better than to spend money on things I don't really need just because I have enough money to buy them.
Love avocado toast but are on minimum wage? Go to the store, buy bread and avocado, make your own goddamn toast, and organise a picnic with your friends in the nearest park.
I don't think it's actually a case of "spend less and you can save for some goal, like a home" but more like "why spend less now when no matter how much I save, even my whole paycheck, houses aren't going to be affordable to me EVER". I have a really good salary, but where my family lives we absolutely cannot afford to ever buy a house, based on what inflation looks like. I could save everything we had except for rent and grocery costs and we still couldn't save at a rate to match home inflation for the past 10 years. Don't say to "just move", because our roots are here and that's absurd to suggest that we cut ties with everyone we know just to have a chance at the old "american dream".
I'm all for fixing systemic problems, taming the dragons, etc.
Collectively, that's great. I'd argue that western civilization has never been kindler, gentler, inclusive and diverse than it is at this moment in history. So we've made great strides.
However all of this does very little for the average individual unhappy in their unique situational challenges.
If you're unhappy with the hand you're dealt, and keep shifting the blame to society, you will probably remain unhappy for a long time.
If, on the other hand, you decide to change things in or about yourself, you will find that you have significantly more agency over the situation.
A wise person once told me that whenever you have stress in your life it's because your expectations don't match reality.
I learned that sometimes what had to change was I had to "learn to accept reality", as reality was something that couldn't be changed. As Bruce Lee said, the reed that bends in a storm survives it and grows, while bamboo, being rigid, will snap and break.
There's no panacea to the problem of being happy and content in our short lives. But there are things you can do to improve your odds of enjoying it more while you're here.
In the meantime, we should continue to fix systemic problems, injustices, etc.
> A wise person once told me that whenever you have stress in your life it's because your expectations don't match reality.
I can't agree with this at all.
If expect to have to work 60 hours next week and then I do, should I reflect on why that's stressful?
Or if I'm expecting to lose my house because I don't have a job or money... Where's the stress coming from? I'd probably be less stressed if I were under the illusion that I'd be able to keep my house without money!
Every so often essays posted to HN really hit home and this is one of those times. I feel like this topic has been central to a lot of frustrations I've had in recent years.
A lot of the discussion here seems to be focused on individual agency and how much people are responsible for their circumstances or not, but for me many of the underlying issues are really about lack of understanding on the advice-givers.
Sometimes someone is capable of changing their circumstances, but just doesn't know how to go about it. They just never were taught how, or whatever, and when they turn to others for help, they get bad advice. The people they turn to might really care about the person and want to help, but just aren't good mentors.
The avocado toast example is important as a flawed position not necessarily because of broader issues about individual versus societal responsibility, but because it illustrates how completely ignorant people can be about their fellow humans' circumstances. This has a whole host of consequences that are extremely powerful, including not providing advice that would actually help, to not recognizing that good people sometimes just make mistakes, that good or bad mentoring actually does matter, and so forth and so on.
So maybe someone is entirely capable of improving their financial situation. But is telling them it's because they're eating avocado toast too much really going to help them? No, because the worldview that avocado toast is causing financial ruin is just as flawed as the worldview that everyone is a completely helpless victim. Cruel optimism isn't just cruel optimism, it's ignorant optimism, and proves the point by its very nature that the system is broken in some way: a person who believes avocado toast is the source of financial distress themselves probably is not sound in their financial reasoning, and if they are not in financial distress, it's probably not because of their sound financial reasoning, but rather, other factors.
If you cannot correctly identify the systemic impediments to someone improving their situation, and offer realistic advice to them in those circumstances, you're part of the problem, or at least, you're not recognizing the problem. Avocado toast is kind of a perfect example of opportunity costs applied to moral reasoning or something: it's not that it blames the victim, it's that the advice is actively harmful if for no other reason that decent advice is not being given, and then becomes an example of the very thing it's trying to argue against.
Thank you very much for your kind words. It makes me incredibly happy when I hear that something I write resonates with others, if only because it validates my own feelings.
> If you cannot correctly identify the systemic impediments to someone improving their situation, and offer realistic advice to them in those circumstances, you're part of the problem, or at least, you're not recognizing the problem
I'd say it's similar to telling someone who is cleaning, "you missed a spot". Technically helpful, but annoying, but misses the larger point. But, at the end of the day, it's advice that you can take or leave. Why get so offended?
> If you cannot correctly identify the systemic impediments to someone improving their situation, and offer realistic advice to them in those circumstances, you're part of the problem, or at least, you're not recognizing the problem.
A personal example I can think of has to do with how I managed my spending in the past: I would make sure not to overdraw from my checking account. Not because I am incapable of budgeting but because I didn't know any methods of budgeting. If I were to hear someone lament about their lack of making ends meet despite good income I would first try to get an understanding about how they budget since I know that was the actual mechanism that helped me make the decision not to buy the proverbial avocado toast.
Of course, finances could still be difficult due to cost increases not being matched by income increases; that is a genuinely unfortunate situation which I'm not sure how to fix. In this case, I would offer condolences over advice ("shit, that sucks, I'm sorry" not "just get a better job, lol") because I don't know what I would do in that situation.
Ideas should be judged on their merits, but based on previous behavior I wouldn't necessarily trust Johann Hari's writing out of hand - ie other things in the book.
Hey, thanks for commenting. Your comment actually got me thinking of something I've been meaning to get deeper into for a long time, so I wrote another post about it: https://tegowerk.eu/posts/death-of-the-author/
I've known people in my trade and others trying to get into the trade with similar difficulties. We're all dealt a certain amount of, to put it this way, brain power. Some I've tried to train just couldn't understand the concept of what I was trying to convey, even with pictures and drawings. Others got it well enough, but just either didn't care or became bored.
When I was learning electricity and struggling a little, the instructor told me part of the problem was I didn't yet know the right questions to ask. This blew and opened my mind at the same time! I've used that statement on myself and others ever since. But I also except some won't ever be able to understand these questions.
I love these terms, definitely describes the situation well. I'm not sure how you'd describe the best mindset here. Pessimistic stoicism? Understanding the system is bad, but also realizing you have to work with the hand you were dealt.
My generation (millennial) tends to frustrate me, in that while a lot of people are correct in that the system is setup to lead them to failure, there are so many escape hatches to actually succeed.
I mean think about it, yeah, things are a lot more expensive now than my parents generation, but we also have these advantages:
- We all walk around with super computers in our pockets
- We have instant access to pretty much all of humanity's collective knowledge, practically for free
- Most people have pretty easy access to credit (which is admittedly a double edged sword)
My unscientific observation is that the people that complain the most about "the system" are actually some of the most privileged people, which makes them sound sort of spoiled and ridiculous.
I don't know, on one hand if you came from poverty in a crime stricken neighborhood you have my sympathy and understanding. On the other hand, if you came from a middle class background, you went to college and majored in something utterly useless (I won't mention the degrees... but you know them), racked up a huge debt, and now you're upset that nobody has a great job for you... I have slightly less sympathy. I realize that's a bit of a strawman, but it also just seems to be something I see a lot. If there's a big mistake my generation has made, it's having everyone go to college for degrees they'll never really use. And for some reason the trades have this huge stigma, even though you can make a perfectly good living as an electrician or a plumber.
I've always talked about shitty optimism which is being optimistic about things where the risk to oneself is minimal. I'm often guilty of it without even noticing.
// Fat? Just start running! Never mind that you can’t afford a gym subscription and live in a car-centric hellscape that’s not even bikeable, let alone walkable
So here's something that's true: you can only move forward from where you are and with what you have. So while it's surely easier to lose weight if you can hire a coach and a nutritionist - if you can't do those things you nevertheless have to find a way!
So if you are "poor and fat" as in this scenario, the idea that you need a gym membership and perfect running streets is a trap. You don't have those things and therefore you are going to be fat forever.
The reality is that plenty of poor people lost weight when they decided to. They found a way - whether by walking around the block or taking the bus to a highschool running track or whatever. It's not easy but it was the only way to do it.
So how to avoid this mental trap? Rather than obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else, obsess about the fact that someone in your situation and even worse can do it and has done it. And then start.
This reminds me of a conclusion I have come to in life. You have been dealt the cards you have been dealt. Sometimes, usually, it isn’t fair. Now how best can you play your hand? You still might lose, but you can only do the best you can. Being upset, feeling sorry for yourself, whining, complaining, flipping the table over, really doesn’t change anything and is wasting time and energy that could be put towards improving your hand.
And this is the problem with "generic" advice from self-help books. They are usually written by someone with privilege from a middle or an upper-middle socio-economic background. What works and is applicable in their situation might be irrelevant in another. For the author of the book, doing exercise means devoting one hour of their leisurely daily routine while not missing anything else. For an impoverished person, doing exercise means leaving their kids screaming and unfed after a long day at work.
The real purpose of the media is to expose and raise the awareness about systemic issues affecting large portions of the population. Then society should attempt to address those issues through the political institutions, with the participation of both the affected and the unaffected group.
I think the mistake is viewing the task as a dragon that must be slayed rather than 10,000 hamsters which need be stomped on in 10,000 days. If we can reframe our large problems into a sequence of small (and potentially even gratifying!) tasks, life becomes easier.
Fat people should not be running anyway. First, it's ineffective for weight loss, second, your extra body mass puts stress on your joints, resulting in injuries. To lose weight you need a diet, not exercise. And if you want to exercise anyway you should ride a bike, not run.
I agree with you that the exercise example is a little soft, but my sense is it was meant to be one of many, and you might inadvertently be supporting their argument a bit.
There's probably some term for this phenomenon in formal logic or argument, and if there isn't, there probably should be, but...
It seems to me often with these kinds of things you can always say "if you want X enough, you can find a way," and that's logically true, but in practice the effort involved or the threading of the needle is exactly the problem. People have lives, and maybe taking the bus isn't feasible because you're working two jobs, have kids, and literally don't have the time without jeopardizing those things. It's some kind of logical trap, where you can provide all these examples of things to do, in some imaginary context where nothing else in life matters, or where success comes by making exactly the correct sequence of N steps of complicated decisions that is extremely implausible once uncertainty and normal levels of human error are taken into account.
The authors also basically provided an example of the neighborhood not being walkable and then you offer walking around the neighborhood as a solution. I bring this up not to be antagonistic or hostile to you, but I think this is part of what they're talking about: someone has X obstacles, and then in the course of getting advice, those obstacles are ignored in part or in whole. Even if it's unintended, it creates a loss of credibility on the part of the person giving advice (whether or not that credibility loss is warranted or not): "if you're ignoring my problem X, do you really understand my situation? And if not, can I trust that what you're saying will work out?" Then they might even ignore good advice, which then makes the problem worse.
I agree that you can still lose weight if by no other means than not eating as much, and I'm deeply skeptical of someone's inability to lose weight in the absence of some kind of internal physiological limitation. But as someone who's sympathetic to where you're coming from, I kind of read your comment and felt like you were just kind of illustrating the author's points. At what point at a population level do we start recognizing that these systemic factors are in fact causing problems for individuals, and that individuals cannot just bootstrap their way out of it completely? In the same way that you can come up with a complicated series of excuses for a person, you can also do the opposite, whatever that is termed -- you can come up with a complicated series of explanations of how they are culpable by not doing exactly the right series of things that would never be even discussed about a whole other subgroup of society.
I guess it seems to me that dismissing "obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else," and asking them instead to obsess about their own situation, is basically the thing the authors are talking about.
> Rather than obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else, obsess about the fact that someone in your situation and even worse can do it and has done it. And then start.
AKA: "why don't you just have 10x more willpower?"
Is there anything at all effective you can really do against the dragons? We might see them as particularly destructive lately but we've been breeding them to do just that for the past ten millennia or so.
On an individual level? Probably not. As a group? Of course, just like it's been done many times before: through activism, building a movement, gaining momentum and critical mass, eventually culminating in regulatory intervention. We've beaten plenty of dragons before in our past, from leaded gasoline to women's suffrage.
I try not to attack big problems head on. Instead I ask myself, what can I change in my daily habits that will eventually, erode the dragon away? If the dragon is in a cave and I can dump a bucket of water in there every day, eventually the thing will fly away or drown.
Regulations can work. Sometimes even something as basic as disclosure can drive significant change. In contrast the oh there is just nothing that little old me can do approach is never going to work.
> Cruel optimism, the way Hari interprets it, boils down to the folly of suggesting personal solutions to systemic problems.
This is an interesting start but feels too narrow as a definition of the term.
Cruel optimism, in general, seems like it should mean "cruelty by means of optimism". As in, you don't trouble yourself with how something (which you are morally responsible for) isn't going well and some person(s) will be negatively affected, and you justify that with the assumption that everything will turn out fine in the end, or the problem is much milder or easier to solve than it really is.
Neglecting responsibility for a problem justified by downplaying the problem, imagining the problem away.
Yes the concept is from Lauren Berlant, who is quite distinguished in her field, affect theory. She has a feminist viewpoint and tends to be blame neoliberalism for of everything awful, but for that genre - which is not usually my cup of tea. Anyway, I think she has written some interesting pieces.
I found interesting this paper which cites Berlant's concept of cruel optimism: "Disinformation as the weaponization of cruel optimism: A critical intervention in misinformation studies".
It discusses the state of disinformation studies with example such why academic interventions have failed to "correct" e.g. people who believe in QAnon.
This is correct. It is hard to do all the time. But it's a better way to live. Happiness / unhappiness is a choice (depression other mental illnessesses and additions are conditions to be treated, out of scope, it is not "unhappiness").
Think of it this way.
You can be poor, have kids to feed, homeless, whatever. And unhappy.
Or, can be poor, have kids to feed, homeless, whatever. And happy.
You can wallow in self-pity, blame yourself (or others, society) for your situation, be cynical and pessimistic. Or, be happy, see the positives, be optimistic, try and improve your situation.
What is your basis for the assertion that it's always a choice? If it's personal experience, have you considered that yours is not necessarily representative of other people's? Even if you were happy while being in a bad spot before, that doesn't automatically generalize even for yourself, much less for everyone else.
This is an interesting juxtaposition. I am deliberately intensely optimistic - I also happen to have a sadism paraphilia. I've had the intuition these mindsets are related, but this is the first time I've seen a mechanism.
A sufficiently intense optimism might say "I don't care that giving up social media gives you withdrawel pains, you're doing it!". A sadistic attitude towards myself (or whoever's masochistic enough to ask my advice) might help cut through the kind of pity that would prevent pushing a painful but healthy change.
The notion of lazy pessimism is not a pure concept, in the sense that it did not emerge in someone's mind independent from any argument or bias. Who's interest does this notion serve? In which argument would someone use this term and why? And who are we really talking about.
Honestly, it made me squirm. Sounds like a conservative on the freshman debate team trying to sound "compassionate." Like, those Mexicans aren't lazy. They just need to realize that their attitude needs adjusting (said the guy who knows not one person from Mexico.)
This is more clever than deep and certainly less thoughtful than it might seem. Read some James Baldwin. Please.
Sure, but I mean, often you can’t solve the “systemic problem” so the next best thing is to at least try to work on yourself. Necessary but not sufficient I guess. But cruel?
I think cruel is when you fail to acknowledge the deck is stacked against the person. A millionaire telling someone they are poor because they are spending some of their money on comforts is, at the very least, tone deaf. I can see calling it cruel.
TFA just points out that the opposite tack (It's all society's fault so I'm screwed no matter what I do), is also not helpful. Also (IMO; not sure if author of TFA would agree with me) the "lazy pessimism" is at least partly a push-back against "cruel optimism." If the optimism were paired with more empathy, then lazy pessimism wouldn't be the obvious alternative.
Yeah the premise seems to be the people offering optimism have the ability to change the systemic problem but don't, offering cheap talk via optimism instead. To think that "the elites" could all collectively agree to solve every systemic problem the proles complain about is ridiculously naive.
To be fair, those directors were told it was their fiduciary duty to maximize profits, and the systems surrounding them clamor with nonstop praise. We allow these empires of selfishness to be amassed, we have chosen which wolf to feed ever since we stopped trust-busting.
Somehow life was given to you and now you have an unavoidable fall-back decision that is always in the fabric of your consciousneess (specially when everything feels terrible):
Rebelling against personal responsibility has a deterministic fatal fate that no narrative will protect you from.
I love this article. I felt my blood pressure rising as I read the first section.
For anyone struggling with the problems he uses for examples, I think the example exhortations ("Just start running!" "Just be yourself!") illustrate that you should be skeptical about advice from someone who has never solved the problem in question, or solved it accidentally with resources you don't have. It's possible you can learn from their advice, but there's a good chance it won't apply to you in a simple way.
Tellingly, in the first part of the article, it was easy for me to gloss over the parts that touch on problems I don't have. Where I got upset was when it talked about the problems I do have. I think a great deal of the disconnect comes from people with privilege being unable to imagine how people can survive without it. Their prescription is for everybody to live like they have privilege, which is the only thing they can imagine, and accept the suffering that results. Some people can eat whatever they naturally gravitate towards and be healthy... so you should eat anything you want, and if you end up with diabetes, that's the proper outcome for you. Some people can afford $22 avocado toast every day, so you should eat that toast, and if you run out of money for rent, that's fine, that's what happens to people like you. Some people can be blithe and careless about their mental health and be happy, so you should be careless too.
No matter what empathetic language you dress it up in, I think it's a pretty brutal message, that the way the most privileged people are able to live is the only way worth living. You should study like you're a Harvard legacy, manage your money like a trust fund baby, and take care of your body like you're the twenty-year-old offspring of a model and a professional athlete with centenarians on both sides of the family, because that's the only way worth living.
Seen from that perspective, telling people not to bother with individual solutions to their problems is an even more flamboyant display of privilege than someone saying "just be frugal!" or "fix your mental health issues with exercise!" Offering someone a solution, however inadequate, at least acknowledges that their lives require effort and compromise, and that a life of effort and compromise is worth living. It's shitty and inadequate, but it's better than being told that you simply must eat that $22 avocado toast because life without $22 avocado toast would be too ghastly.
I get the 30,000 foot political perspective. Collective and individual solutions are different and therefore competing, and politics doesn't allow for complexity or nuance, so public desire for collective solutions can only come at the expense of belief in individual solutions. I see that logic. However, because people are currently facing these problems alone, they are resorting to individual solutions, and many people are benefiting from individual solutions in ways that matter to them, even if it looks meager and meaningless from a more privileged perspective. It comes off as awfully snobbish and disconnected when you deny the value of the benefits (however small) that people realize from their efforts to manage their health, their finances, etc. And you don't have to do that to promote collective solutions. At least let's hope not, because if so, that's a really tough messaging problem to solve.
[+] [-] i_dont_know_|3 years ago|reply
Some people think they control everything about their lives -- they do think that if they put in the time, effort, and energy, they can achieve anything. When they don't, they blame themselves endlessly. Sometimes, learning that it was something beyond your control (ie social forces were stacked against your particular endeavor) can be liberating and break the person out of personal blame an hopelessness and let them start again.
On the other end of the spectrum is feeling like an endless victim. Sometimes, it's easy to blame everything and lament how everything is stacked against you. This provides psychological solace but can prevent you from moving forward because you're convinced you won't be able to. In these cases, some of the stories of 'self-made' optimism can help get you out of a spot of hopelessness into action.
In this situation, though, what's medicine to one is poison to the other. I can think of times in my life where each view was helpful and warranted, even if they're hard to reconcile with each other.
In this case, the 'truth' isn't really knowable because we can't objectively observe a system we're a part of. So, until we know, I guess it's whatever view gets you where you need to go.
[+] [-] zBard|3 years ago|reply
"It was said of Reb Simcha Bunem, a 18th century Hasidic rebbe, that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. One was inscribed with the saying from the Talmud: Bishvili nivra ha-olam, “for my sake the world was created.” On the other he wrote a phrase from our father Avraham in the Torah: V’anokhi afar v’efer,” “I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out and read each slip of paper as necessary for the moment."
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
Ask "did I try my best", opposed to "did I get what I want"
[+] [-] dkarl|3 years ago|reply
Denying freedom altogether is logically the simplest way out, and is often done on behalf of other people, but I don't think anybody chooses this way for themselves, not at a deep level. Psychologically, we need agency, and it's cruel to deny it to others. So we keep trying out new ways of framing it.
[+] [-] mansoon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wizzwizz4|3 years ago|reply
Almost anything is "within your power". The right sequence of muscle movements, performed by your body, could bring an end to most world conflict, cure near every disease we have, spoof any cryptographic protocol, reinvent basically every creative pursuit…
However, as a regular human, with a brain not quite the size of a planet? Your actions are constrained by your knowledge, reasoning speed, reasoning ability (honed by past experience), mental state, emotional state, alertness, distractedness, loneliness, blood sugar level, blood protein level, percentage water…
You can do more than what you can do at this moment. But you can't do more than you can do at this moment. But you can probably get yourself in a position where, next moment, you can do more than you could do this moment.
[+] [-] eevilspock|3 years ago|reply
> In this situation, though, what's medicine to one is poison to the other. I can think of times in my life where each view was helpful and warranted, even if they're hard to reconcile with each other.
Moral philosopher John Rawls's uses the concepts of original position and veil of ignorance for a thought experiment that is the only fair basis for making decisions about moral principles and how society should be structured. You can think of it as "What we'd all decide for the world if each of us did not know ahead of time which circumstance we'd be born into".
https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/joh...
> The Veil is meant to ensure that people’s concern for their personal benefit could translate into a set of arrangements that were fair for everyone, assuming that they had to stick to those choices once the Veil of Ignorance ‘lifts’, and they are given full information again.
> One set of facts hidden from you behind the Veil are what we might call ‘demographic’ facts. You do not know your gender, race, wealth, or facts about your personal strengths and weaknesses, such as their intelligence or physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but simply have them by luck. As such, they do not deserve any benefits or harms that come from them. By removing knowledge of the natural inequalities that give people unfair advantages, it becomes irrational to choose principles that discriminate against any particular group.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
[+] [-] dasil003|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TiredOfThisCrap|3 years ago|reply
Sure, the math doesn't add up. An avocado toast and a coffee every morning won't add up to a real estate deposit. But that's not the point; the point is that people who are barely making ends meet having avocado toast at a coffee shop have the wrong mindset. I'd argue they are barely making ends meet because they're having avocado toast at a coffee shop, and multiple other expenses they can't responsibly afford. I've worked with young people barely making any money out of school, who still religiously went to the pub with their mates for the proverbial pint, and never skipped on Costa del Sol holidays.
I grew up in a lower-to-middle middle class household. Eating out was something we did on special occasions (some birthdays, high school graduation, etc). Travel and holidays were limited to the one holiday a year, to a beach 45 min away from where we lived. It does seem like young people these days have an incredibly distorted sense of what they "deserve" or what they can afford or what's "normal".
Now after decades in tech, a couple of stints at FAANG, I'm pretty comfortable financially. There's a lot of things I can afford in the strictest sense of the word (a 300k Lambo, a boat, whatever), but I know better than to spend money on things I don't really need just because I have enough money to buy them.
Love avocado toast but are on minimum wage? Go to the store, buy bread and avocado, make your own goddamn toast, and organise a picnic with your friends in the nearest park.
[+] [-] ok_dad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordfrito|3 years ago|reply
Collectively, that's great. I'd argue that western civilization has never been kindler, gentler, inclusive and diverse than it is at this moment in history. So we've made great strides.
However all of this does very little for the average individual unhappy in their unique situational challenges.
If you're unhappy with the hand you're dealt, and keep shifting the blame to society, you will probably remain unhappy for a long time.
If, on the other hand, you decide to change things in or about yourself, you will find that you have significantly more agency over the situation.
A wise person once told me that whenever you have stress in your life it's because your expectations don't match reality.
I learned that sometimes what had to change was I had to "learn to accept reality", as reality was something that couldn't be changed. As Bruce Lee said, the reed that bends in a storm survives it and grows, while bamboo, being rigid, will snap and break.
There's no panacea to the problem of being happy and content in our short lives. But there are things you can do to improve your odds of enjoying it more while you're here.
In the meantime, we should continue to fix systemic problems, injustices, etc.
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
This was a breakthrough for me as well. Accepting reality as it does not mean you have to like it, but it gives a foundation for moving forward.
I would quibble that it is important to separate reality as it is today, The future it Can Be, and the future it Can't Be.
If you cant accept reality as it is and that some futures are impossible, you will miss the best future that CAN have.
You need to accept the cards you are dealt and then play them to the very best of your ability.
[+] [-] DangitBobby|3 years ago|reply
I can't agree with this at all.
If expect to have to work 60 hours next week and then I do, should I reflect on why that's stressful?
Or if I'm expecting to lose my house because I don't have a job or money... Where's the stress coming from? I'd probably be less stressed if I were under the illusion that I'd be able to keep my house without money!
Stress is not just expectations.
[+] [-] greatiscones|3 years ago|reply
A lot of the discussion here seems to be focused on individual agency and how much people are responsible for their circumstances or not, but for me many of the underlying issues are really about lack of understanding on the advice-givers.
Sometimes someone is capable of changing their circumstances, but just doesn't know how to go about it. They just never were taught how, or whatever, and when they turn to others for help, they get bad advice. The people they turn to might really care about the person and want to help, but just aren't good mentors.
The avocado toast example is important as a flawed position not necessarily because of broader issues about individual versus societal responsibility, but because it illustrates how completely ignorant people can be about their fellow humans' circumstances. This has a whole host of consequences that are extremely powerful, including not providing advice that would actually help, to not recognizing that good people sometimes just make mistakes, that good or bad mentoring actually does matter, and so forth and so on.
So maybe someone is entirely capable of improving their financial situation. But is telling them it's because they're eating avocado toast too much really going to help them? No, because the worldview that avocado toast is causing financial ruin is just as flawed as the worldview that everyone is a completely helpless victim. Cruel optimism isn't just cruel optimism, it's ignorant optimism, and proves the point by its very nature that the system is broken in some way: a person who believes avocado toast is the source of financial distress themselves probably is not sound in their financial reasoning, and if they are not in financial distress, it's probably not because of their sound financial reasoning, but rather, other factors.
If you cannot correctly identify the systemic impediments to someone improving their situation, and offer realistic advice to them in those circumstances, you're part of the problem, or at least, you're not recognizing the problem. Avocado toast is kind of a perfect example of opportunity costs applied to moral reasoning or something: it's not that it blames the victim, it's that the advice is actively harmful if for no other reason that decent advice is not being given, and then becomes an example of the very thing it's trying to argue against.
[+] [-] victorstanciu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkerside|3 years ago|reply
I'd say it's similar to telling someone who is cleaning, "you missed a spot". Technically helpful, but annoying, but misses the larger point. But, at the end of the day, it's advice that you can take or leave. Why get so offended?
[+] [-] lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|3 years ago|reply
A personal example I can think of has to do with how I managed my spending in the past: I would make sure not to overdraw from my checking account. Not because I am incapable of budgeting but because I didn't know any methods of budgeting. If I were to hear someone lament about their lack of making ends meet despite good income I would first try to get an understanding about how they budget since I know that was the actual mechanism that helped me make the decision not to buy the proverbial avocado toast.
Of course, finances could still be difficult due to cost increases not being matched by income increases; that is a genuinely unfortunate situation which I'm not sure how to fix. In this case, I would offer condolences over advice ("shit, that sucks, I'm sorry" not "just get a better job, lol") because I don't know what I would do in that situation.
[+] [-] iicc|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari
[+] [-] victorstanciu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloomingeek|3 years ago|reply
When I was learning electricity and struggling a little, the instructor told me part of the problem was I didn't yet know the right questions to ask. This blew and opened my mind at the same time! I've used that statement on myself and others ever since. But I also except some won't ever be able to understand these questions.
[+] [-] overgard|3 years ago|reply
My generation (millennial) tends to frustrate me, in that while a lot of people are correct in that the system is setup to lead them to failure, there are so many escape hatches to actually succeed.
I mean think about it, yeah, things are a lot more expensive now than my parents generation, but we also have these advantages:
- We all walk around with super computers in our pockets
- We have instant access to pretty much all of humanity's collective knowledge, practically for free
- Most people have pretty easy access to credit (which is admittedly a double edged sword)
My unscientific observation is that the people that complain the most about "the system" are actually some of the most privileged people, which makes them sound sort of spoiled and ridiculous.
I don't know, on one hand if you came from poverty in a crime stricken neighborhood you have my sympathy and understanding. On the other hand, if you came from a middle class background, you went to college and majored in something utterly useless (I won't mention the degrees... but you know them), racked up a huge debt, and now you're upset that nobody has a great job for you... I have slightly less sympathy. I realize that's a bit of a strawman, but it also just seems to be something I see a lot. If there's a big mistake my generation has made, it's having everyone go to college for degrees they'll never really use. And for some reason the trades have this huge stigma, even though you can make a perfectly good living as an electrician or a plumber.
[+] [-] scandox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frogulis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzelement|3 years ago|reply
So here's something that's true: you can only move forward from where you are and with what you have. So while it's surely easier to lose weight if you can hire a coach and a nutritionist - if you can't do those things you nevertheless have to find a way!
So if you are "poor and fat" as in this scenario, the idea that you need a gym membership and perfect running streets is a trap. You don't have those things and therefore you are going to be fat forever.
The reality is that plenty of poor people lost weight when they decided to. They found a way - whether by walking around the block or taking the bus to a highschool running track or whatever. It's not easy but it was the only way to do it.
So how to avoid this mental trap? Rather than obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else, obsess about the fact that someone in your situation and even worse can do it and has done it. And then start.
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluetomcat|3 years ago|reply
The real purpose of the media is to expose and raise the awareness about systemic issues affecting large portions of the population. Then society should attempt to address those issues through the political institutions, with the participation of both the affected and the unaffected group.
[+] [-] boomerango|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 988747|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greatiscones|3 years ago|reply
There's probably some term for this phenomenon in formal logic or argument, and if there isn't, there probably should be, but...
It seems to me often with these kinds of things you can always say "if you want X enough, you can find a way," and that's logically true, but in practice the effort involved or the threading of the needle is exactly the problem. People have lives, and maybe taking the bus isn't feasible because you're working two jobs, have kids, and literally don't have the time without jeopardizing those things. It's some kind of logical trap, where you can provide all these examples of things to do, in some imaginary context where nothing else in life matters, or where success comes by making exactly the correct sequence of N steps of complicated decisions that is extremely implausible once uncertainty and normal levels of human error are taken into account.
The authors also basically provided an example of the neighborhood not being walkable and then you offer walking around the neighborhood as a solution. I bring this up not to be antagonistic or hostile to you, but I think this is part of what they're talking about: someone has X obstacles, and then in the course of getting advice, those obstacles are ignored in part or in whole. Even if it's unintended, it creates a loss of credibility on the part of the person giving advice (whether or not that credibility loss is warranted or not): "if you're ignoring my problem X, do you really understand my situation? And if not, can I trust that what you're saying will work out?" Then they might even ignore good advice, which then makes the problem worse.
I agree that you can still lose weight if by no other means than not eating as much, and I'm deeply skeptical of someone's inability to lose weight in the absence of some kind of internal physiological limitation. But as someone who's sympathetic to where you're coming from, I kind of read your comment and felt like you were just kind of illustrating the author's points. At what point at a population level do we start recognizing that these systemic factors are in fact causing problems for individuals, and that individuals cannot just bootstrap their way out of it completely? In the same way that you can come up with a complicated series of excuses for a person, you can also do the opposite, whatever that is termed -- you can come up with a complicated series of explanations of how they are culpable by not doing exactly the right series of things that would never be even discussed about a whole other subgroup of society.
I guess it seems to me that dismissing "obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else," and asking them instead to obsess about their own situation, is basically the thing the authors are talking about.
[+] [-] goodpoint|3 years ago|reply
AKA: "why don't you just have 10x more willpower?"
[+] [-] hoseja|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victorstanciu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomerango|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0llusk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
Long term, consider making fewer personal offerings to the dragons and plan to relocate to an area with lower dragon density.
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
This is an interesting start but feels too narrow as a definition of the term.
Cruel optimism, in general, seems like it should mean "cruelty by means of optimism". As in, you don't trouble yourself with how something (which you are morally responsible for) isn't going well and some person(s) will be negatively affected, and you justify that with the assumption that everything will turn out fine in the end, or the problem is much milder or easier to solve than it really is.
Neglecting responsibility for a problem justified by downplaying the problem, imagining the problem away.
[+] [-] derelicta|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riialist|3 years ago|reply
I found interesting this paper which cites Berlant's concept of cruel optimism: "Disinformation as the weaponization of cruel optimism: A critical intervention in misinformation studies".
It discusses the state of disinformation studies with example such why academic interventions have failed to "correct" e.g. people who believe in QAnon.
Open access link below: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175545862...
[+] [-] njharman|3 years ago|reply
This is correct. It is hard to do all the time. But it's a better way to live. Happiness / unhappiness is a choice (depression other mental illnessesses and additions are conditions to be treated, out of scope, it is not "unhappiness").
Think of it this way.
You can be poor, have kids to feed, homeless, whatever. And unhappy.
Or, can be poor, have kids to feed, homeless, whatever. And happy.
You can wallow in self-pity, blame yourself (or others, society) for your situation, be cynical and pessimistic. Or, be happy, see the positives, be optimistic, try and improve your situation.
[+] [-] int_19h|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|3 years ago|reply
A sufficiently intense optimism might say "I don't care that giving up social media gives you withdrawel pains, you're doing it!". A sadistic attitude towards myself (or whoever's masochistic enough to ask my advice) might help cut through the kind of pity that would prevent pushing a painful but healthy change.
[+] [-] Julesman|3 years ago|reply
Honestly, it made me squirm. Sounds like a conservative on the freshman debate team trying to sound "compassionate." Like, those Mexicans aren't lazy. They just need to realize that their attitude needs adjusting (said the guy who knows not one person from Mexico.)
This is more clever than deep and certainly less thoughtful than it might seem. Read some James Baldwin. Please.
[+] [-] talentedcoin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|3 years ago|reply
TFA just points out that the opposite tack (It's all society's fault so I'm screwed no matter what I do), is also not helpful. Also (IMO; not sure if author of TFA would agree with me) the "lazy pessimism" is at least partly a push-back against "cruel optimism." If the optimism were paired with more empathy, then lazy pessimism wouldn't be the obvious alternative.
[+] [-] fullshark|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodpoint|3 years ago|reply
Many social problems are not caused by you or by "society" at large.
You live in a "car-centric hellscape"? Shops only sell unhealthy food? The board of directors of some companies took these decisions.
[+] [-] quxpar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebastianconcpt|3 years ago|reply
Rebelling against personal responsibility has a deterministic fatal fate that no narrative will protect you from.
What will you do?
[+] [-] dkarl|3 years ago|reply
For anyone struggling with the problems he uses for examples, I think the example exhortations ("Just start running!" "Just be yourself!") illustrate that you should be skeptical about advice from someone who has never solved the problem in question, or solved it accidentally with resources you don't have. It's possible you can learn from their advice, but there's a good chance it won't apply to you in a simple way.
Tellingly, in the first part of the article, it was easy for me to gloss over the parts that touch on problems I don't have. Where I got upset was when it talked about the problems I do have. I think a great deal of the disconnect comes from people with privilege being unable to imagine how people can survive without it. Their prescription is for everybody to live like they have privilege, which is the only thing they can imagine, and accept the suffering that results. Some people can eat whatever they naturally gravitate towards and be healthy... so you should eat anything you want, and if you end up with diabetes, that's the proper outcome for you. Some people can afford $22 avocado toast every day, so you should eat that toast, and if you run out of money for rent, that's fine, that's what happens to people like you. Some people can be blithe and careless about their mental health and be happy, so you should be careless too.
No matter what empathetic language you dress it up in, I think it's a pretty brutal message, that the way the most privileged people are able to live is the only way worth living. You should study like you're a Harvard legacy, manage your money like a trust fund baby, and take care of your body like you're the twenty-year-old offspring of a model and a professional athlete with centenarians on both sides of the family, because that's the only way worth living.
Seen from that perspective, telling people not to bother with individual solutions to their problems is an even more flamboyant display of privilege than someone saying "just be frugal!" or "fix your mental health issues with exercise!" Offering someone a solution, however inadequate, at least acknowledges that their lives require effort and compromise, and that a life of effort and compromise is worth living. It's shitty and inadequate, but it's better than being told that you simply must eat that $22 avocado toast because life without $22 avocado toast would be too ghastly.
I get the 30,000 foot political perspective. Collective and individual solutions are different and therefore competing, and politics doesn't allow for complexity or nuance, so public desire for collective solutions can only come at the expense of belief in individual solutions. I see that logic. However, because people are currently facing these problems alone, they are resorting to individual solutions, and many people are benefiting from individual solutions in ways that matter to them, even if it looks meager and meaningless from a more privileged perspective. It comes off as awfully snobbish and disconnected when you deny the value of the benefits (however small) that people realize from their efforts to manage their health, their finances, etc. And you don't have to do that to promote collective solutions. At least let's hope not, because if so, that's a really tough messaging problem to solve.
[+] [-] huy77|3 years ago|reply