Ironically, the root of most "bogging" is thinking too much instead of just doing things that need doing or that ripely present themselves.
The author has reflected so much that they've created a bespoke system of abstract beliefs with catchy names and various example cases that they can summarize into a 5000 word essay and probably even extend into a book.
For a writer, that's a sneaky but effective way to do their thing. (Or alternately: for a compulsive contemplator, writing is a sneaky way to justify the contemplating.)
But for most people, reading something like this and reflecting on whether you also "gutterball" and also have "toothbrushing problems" is effectively feeding the beast.
Many many of us in this community carry an urge to intellectualize and systematize and engineer things, but if you're interested in "de-bogging" that urge itself might be the thing to look most critically at.
Before reading the article, I was nodding along reading your comment. Having read the article... it's actually pretty good! "Just doing things" might be the right general approach but I feel that sometimes it's easy to get stuck contemplating. I think the post offers some interesting heuristics for getting unstuck.
Edit: Reading even further, it's actually one of the best posts of this kind I've read in years. The author is spot in the behavioral patterns he's noticed. Damn.
"Often, when I’m stuck, it’s because I've made up a game for myself and decided that I’m losing at it. I haven’t achieved enough. I am not working hard enough and I am also, somehow, not having enough fun.
These games have elaborate rules, like “I have to be as successful as my most successful friend, but everything I've done so far doesn't count,” and I’m supposed to feel very bad if I break them. It’s like playing the absolute dumbest version of the floor is lava."
My biggest problem is contemplating all of the steps and future work that will go into a project, then getting disheartened as I begin. Eventually I delude myself into believing it’s not worth the effort as it might fail anyway.
It’s probably a self-confidence thing, but so are most of the funny names in the article.
I should probably just focus on step one once I decide the end result is valuable.
The article all throughout points to the same root cause you point to. It clearly presents a mirror where we can see reflected all the stories we often fabricate to trap ourselves. Perhaps the author created a system. But I saw it rather as a device to better bring to awareness common but elusive mental patterns that keep us stuck. Although I'd agree with you that intellectualizing is often part of the problem, how do you then treat a disease, if the only medium available to administer the medicine is also the cause of the disease? How do you tell people that their mind is the reason they suffer without telling them?
Even your own comment, as valuable as it is for pointing it out, feeds exactly the same beast that it accuses the article of feeding. That's the real irony.
> they've created a bespoke system of abstract beliefs
swatcoder, can you please tell me how you particularly manage to learn from your mistakes?
Some people create personal theories of how the world works, and then put their theories into action: A successful example is Charlie Munger and heres his talk explaining some of his excellent theories: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY
Some people overthink things and label things. That can be unhealthy, and Adam touches on that with his "Stroking the problem" section. But the opposite can be unhealthy too: not thinking at all and repeating over and over making the same mistakes.
> catchy names
Useful when communicating with others if it is an uncommon concept. I like to search for the perfect word or perfect catchphrase when thinking about a problem or solution because it helps my thinking.
> various example cases
How do you do it? Don't you look at specific issues you find in your own life? Examples yes? And then generalise from that?
I just don't understand what you're complaining about. The closest I can think is that you're anti-intellectual or you're a "Just do it" prosyletiser - the implication being that thinking is unnecessary and the problem.
Academic over-thinking is its own problem: is that your issue?
Like most things: we need to find the right balance. Thinking too little is bad in a different way from thinking too much.
> intellectualize and systematize and engineer things
I'm just gobsmacked at your choice of words: is systemizing and engineering bad? I define engineering as making good compromises. Maybe you could find some catchier phrases from what you are trying to say ;-). "intellectualize": is thinking good or bad?
I suspect I'm falling into the trap you mention - perhaps we both need to learn to write as well as Mastroianna!!
Navigating the world comfortably involves a balance of contemplation and action.
As I tried to allude in my comment, most people here, myself included, are already heavily biased towards the former. We train ourselves to think deliberately and rationally, breaking down challenges into components, using and inventing abstract symbols and operations to get from where we are to where we need to be. It's our profession in many cases, and often we were called to that profession because we've got some natural inclination to approach the world that way.
And it's valuable! I don't know that I could work on hard problems or take sound actions on some of the biggest and most impactful matters in my life without that. I value that I'm good at it, and practiced in it, and (like the author) think there's value in sharing the fruit of that work with others.
I did exactly that in my original comment and I'm doing it again here.
What I'm expressing is not a general critique against intellectualizing. It's cautionary advice that -- for many of the people here -- they (specifically) may experience more benefit resisting the urge to intellectualize rather than indulging in it.
It's not anti-intellectual, nor is it especially novel.
You can find comparable encouragement in both "Eastern" and "Western" traditions and from countless modern synthesizers of these traditions (Alan Watts, Werner Erhard, etc), who encourage brainy "bogged" intellectuals to just "bonk" themselves and stop expecting more thought and analysis to be the road away from their problems.
In many cases, it's the intellectualizing itself that invents/perpetuates problems that simply cease to be if one can practice simply acting.
Some people need the opposite advice, but few of them are going to be reading these comments in the first place and generally have different complaints than being stuck in s "bog".
My father is very academic and he tends to start projects but not finish them. I also recognise the same fault in myself. But I've fought it hard and won a few times with some long-term successes (using a variety of personal strategies to avoid my unproductive tendencies).
We have many concepts related to what you are saying: analysis-paralysis, productivity porn, ivory tower, etcetera, etcetera.
I find the fields of psychology and philosophy are mostly tar-fields of unactionable thinking. Unfortunately I also find them interesting!
Finding the gems in the tar is hard, but Adam seems to find a few of them.
I agree that most people are not biased towards action, and fixing that is the first step. However, the article is clearly aimed at people who have made that change and now are faced with the more subtle question of "how do I think about the problem such that the action I choose is likely to be appropriate."
The blog author does well to id/categorize the issues. People need a way to quantize+act on the issues - various systems exist for that. Key is to feel progress (on a particular direction/plan or at least in hindsight).
Ideas that track such progress:
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1-3 high quality decisions per week (credits to Bezos, tho he does 1-3 per day).
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1-2 important/not-urgent tasks per week.
1-2 small, not-important/(semi-)urgent tasks per day - these are also a form of "toothbrushing" that each adult has to do.
"When we constantly pull everything apart trying to see how it works, we may end up with only an understanding of how to destroy something. We can have piles of spokes, rims and axles, but the beauty only happens when we see the wheel rolling." - Nick Sand
It’s hypnotic writing in the style of Yudkowsky, Ron Hubbard or supplement scam videos on YouTube. On one hand it is pretending to be thinking rationally about things but with a heavy dose of fantasy mixed in that can put readers in a muddled mental state. They drone on and on and on so that you either give up reading it or go into a trance.
Supplement videos never get to the (or any) point though - you can watch it for hours for amusement or just look up the company to see what they are selling. It's like that infinite GIF of a truck heading towards the security pillar, shown from all camera angles.
I really, really hate how many of my problems are toothbrushing problems. I know I just need to get over it and start brushing, but... ugh.
Anyway, can't recommend Adam's writing enough. Subscribed after his second post and have never regretted it. If you liked this, you should also read "You can't reach the brain through the ears", an excellent piece about failing to communicate.
There is a liberating side to toothbrushing problems: the stakes of any given unit of effort are low.
With diploma problems, if you blow it, you really blow it, with often irrevocable long-term consequences. All of your effort is building to a high stakes climax and if you miss your shot, that effort can all end up wasted. It's videogame permadeath mode for life.
But with toothbrushing problems, you can have an off day and usually make it up today. Of course, every day's effort does matter. You can't make every day an off day. But I find something very comforting about problems where some random variance in my output does smooth out to the mean over time.
You know, that’s actually a great way to look at it.
I think I feel like I can’t let myself excuse any slack, because I’m worried I’ll just start excusing everything — one day off at the gym becomes a week off, becomes a month off.
But I guess the point is that no matter how much you have failed, the toothbrush problem is always best served by you starting again tomorrow, no matter how many tomorrows it takes.
"Everything needs maintenance." It's not just something a wise old engineer would say; it's life. Life itself is a Toothbrushing Problem.
That is to say, if all your problems are Toothbrushing Problems then you're doing pretty good! That means you're living. At that point you can do one or all of these things:
* Complain about your Toothbrushing Problems (<- you are here, haha)
* Bring NEW problems into your life
* Work to make your Toothbrushing Problems a bit less troublesome
The HN crowd would probably say that 3rd bullet is where great startups are born ;D
I'm floored by how good this article is, and I just read another, and was also floored. His writing reminds me a bit of Raptitude in its - everything-is-fucked-heh-let's-try-to-function-anyhow attitude. And the writing is so, so good, and wildly relatable.
Thanks for sharing this link. My god there is something about this writing style that's just incredibly entertaining to read.
Most of the time I get so bored reading such long articles, like the New Yorker ugh. But this is the first time I've enjoyed such a lengthy read! I hope I can decrypt what the author is doing to make reading such fun.
Literally all of his posts are like this. It’s crazy.
These two are more life-advice-y, but he also does some fairly deep dives on various problems he sees with scientific research (and psychology in particular), and his writing is no less entertaining.
In fact, one of his posts is actually about how he thinks scientists should make more effort to make their papers fun to read!
Indeed; it seems like being happy is a lot of work; I wonder if the type of people the author mentions in the "Impossible satisfaction" section aren't wrong.
Bog in many slavic languages is God in English and used in many proverbs and idioms. This makes a hilarious headline, I thought this was about exiting god mode.
Huh! There is a YA novel I really like, The Girl Who Drank The Moon, and this casts that in a very interesting light.
There is a bog -- a swamp -- that covers the known world, and this bog is treated in a religious way by the author as the embodiment of nature, of the fertility of the world. The bog also spawns a bog monster, who may have been the first living creature.
"In the beginning, there was the Bog. And the Bog covered the world and the Bog was the world and the world was the Bog."
> Terrible situations, once exited, often become funny stories or proud memories. Mediocre situations, long languished in, simply become Lost Years—boring to both live through and talk about, like you're sitting in a waiting room with no cell reception, no wifi, and no good magazines, waiting for someone to come in and tell you it's time to start living.
It really resonates with me. During my life it did happen a couple times that I found myself "stuck in mediocrity" as the OP puts it. "Waiting for someone to come in and tell you it's time to start living" is a great analogy of how it feels when you finally realise it's time for a change
There is no need for a practical answer, because it has been answered 1000 times.
The reason why people are stuck in the bog is pretty much fear. The fear of being rejected, accepted, sharing publicly (aka being judged).
Telling people to "unfear" themselves is impossible, because its not the same as learning a skill. It takes years of unbundling your behavior, therapy and doing pretty much the opposite of what you are doing now.
Most of my problems lay in the fact that I do not like the way I am right now but do not have the power to get there or the power to make peace with myself. It's cliche but it IS impossible. Yeah it is a bog I made for myself but I did not ask for it.
I kinda think this is a genetic thing. My father is like that too -- he is never happy, rarely content with himself, even when he already achieved a lot.
I've recently watched for the first time Neon Genesis Evangelion (+ The End of...), and powerful (and a bit painful) art like this seems to be a good slap in the face to get out of at least some of the versions of that bog - I'm a bit sad that I didn't watch it years earlier when I was stuck in some bogs...
(Another commenter there mentions a quote recommending books - great literature I'm pretty sure in that context, not "self help" books... I guess I should hurry up and read Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being already ?)
Fellow Neon Genesis fan here. Watching the original series was an incredibly frustrating experience for me. It does not follow the typical hero’s journey. There few wins, if any. Mostly losses. Idiot Shinji was a helpless and pitiful protagonist, so much so that you eventually stop rooting for him. The 1.11, 2.22, 3.33, and 3.0+1.0 rebuilds were much, much better in my opinion. But they also lacked that depressing trajectory that made the original series so unique.
> But they also lacked that depressing trajectory that made the original series so unique.
Agree. Also, in that end, there's hope, even if the characters are still flawed, they have been forced to confront their issues and illusions, and (finally) are set on a realistically human path of growth.
> The 1.11, 2.22, 3.33, and 3.0+1.0 rebuilds were much, much better in my opinion.
Disagree, because of the above. Sure, plenty of eye candy (of both kinds), but it's gratuitous in Rebuilds. The "biblical" (mid-)themes are even more confusing. The character growth is only kind of earned if you actually watched the originals (with maybe the (tragic) exception of latest Rei and "dad", who finally does get a redemption arc). And even there, at a cost, as all the suffering of old Asuka (and our whiplash of empathizing with her) has basically been erased along with her original, all the while the new pilot, Mari, is never fleshed out, so her being there at the end doesn't feel earned, with her having been all along weirdly untraumatized and also hot for Shinji (gratuitous again). Many main characters literally get wished into a fairy tale ending.
Oh come on. If Shinji's father had given him a 15 minute brief and debrief for every battle, that job would have been another day in the office for Shinji.
He could of had a normal life, but the show sets him up to be trapped in hyper emotional relationships, influencing him to make irrational decisions all the time.
He's a high school guy being manipulated by everyone around him, to fight battles he doesn't understand.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is just fantastic. I think it’s well worth your time. I’ve read it a few times now. With each subsequent read at a different point in my life, it’s been interesting to see new insights and perspectives emerge. If you end liking it, another one from Kundera I particularly enjoyed was “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”.
> And while many religions teach that God intervenes in human affairs, none of them, as far as I know, believe that he responds to whining. (Would you worship a god who does miracles if you just annoy him enough?)
It's not exactly as you say but it's roughly how I interpreted the parable of the unjust judge.
That parable came to mind immediately. There is in fact a god that labels unanswered nagging as acting unjust. A lifetime ago in seminary I knew a guy who rage quit after spending months contemplating the implications of that passage and observations about how common it is to see others unanswered prayer. Don't know what happened to him but he would just mutter that his beliefs didn't matter since "jesus defacto makes the claim he is unjust and defeats himself", the problem of suffering indeed.
Regarding “declining the dragon”: In my case “doing the brave thing” doesn’t feel good. It is the moment of greatest suffering and is usually followed by some useless anxiety that takes some time to dissipate. That’s why I’m avoiding it. It is only by recognizing that the suffering will end only after doing the brave thing that I can challenge the dragon.
Best thing I have read, probably for years (outside of books). The insight here is brilliant. It doesn’t necessary help you get out of the bogs really, but for that a therapist might help. The lede is “brushing your teeth”. So much of life working depends on varieties of this.
Last night I happened to listen to an episode[1] on EconTalk where the author of the post (Adam Mastroianni, a psychologist) was a guest. Definitely worth a listen.
Adam also supports "open science framework" (https://osf.io/) and publishes his research and related artifacts there, which I really appreciate!
> But most of the people I know who feel this way haven’t survived any atomic bombings at all. They’re usually people with lots of education and high-paying jobs and supportive relationships and a normal amount of tragedies, people who have all the raw materials for a good life but can’t seem to make one for themselves. Their problem is they believe that satisfaction is impossible. Like they’re standing in a kitchen full of eggs, flour, oil, sugar, butter, baking powder, a mixer, and an oven, and they throw their hands up and say, “I can’t make a cake! Cakes don’t even exist!”
I found this an unpalatable paragraph in an otherwise insightful article.
It seems to be, I don't know, recursive? Like saying "one reason you may be stuck in the bog is that you're stuck in the bog," and ignoring the reasons people believe they don't have an out even with the ingredients for a "good" life. Drilling down into those reasons would, I think, result in exactly this same article...?
Yeah, I agree, that metaphor lacked an explanatory conclusion.
If I had to fill one in, I'd say that people often blame the external world for not providing the ingredients necessary for happiness, when they actually do have them on hand already. What they are lacking is choosing to compose them into a meaningful whole, which requires effort on their part.
That makes sense. Maybe it's better described as "not having the recipe" or "not knowing what land looks like"...? I'm still not sure it's very useful though... it still feels like the awareness of "I am in a bog, and land exists" is a prerequisite for understanding the article at all.
I love the fact that he records voiceovers of his articles! I listen to podcasts on a regular basis, and this substitutes for podcast perfectly: it's shorter, but 10x higher quality.
The author scrounged together enough time, energy, and motivation to write the article. This suggests that they got out of the bog; at least for a little while :shrug:
That's not what I got out of it. It sounded like he instead was making an effort to recognize and categorize some of the problems he's experienced, and thereby create plans to avoid or mitigate them.
I'm sorry but the article employs the "Star Trek" method of wrapping complex phenomena into simple metaphors ("explosive decompression is like putting too much air into a balloon") But any truthful explanations of well known behavior, like self-sabotage for example, do not manifest. I'd rather see some guesses at an evolutionary cause of such things than attempts at poetry. It also seems like a cold reading with a cutesy innocence that belies feelings of superiority of having figured it all out. I think the writer is very talented though, so maybe something great will develop.
First step is realizing you're in a statespace of low utility gradient. Colloquially put, everything's meh.
Second step is to examine the separable components of said statespace. Is one increasing while another decreases? You're about to make a big life decision! Are they all meh? Well fuck.
Uh I mean, decompose them further and repeat. Eventually you'll find a meta level where the components of the meh are divergent vectors that sum to zero, and there's your buried n-lemma.
If everything's truly flat and boring for long enough, eventually you'll dig down to causal bedrock where the quantum noise will create signals for you whether you want them or not. Doesn't matter, because at this point, does anything? So just do the thing, you have nothing to lose.
I don't agree. If the article started explaining how and why to de-bog oneself without defining bog, that would be annoying. But this one simply has a short, helpful, interesting introduction and then immediately defines "bog" before moving on. It's well structured IMO
He has "history" in the name of his blog and he thinks that knights expected to fight dragons? I mean, it is like that in a manga but not in real life.
Quite a few knights in the day were nobles who had large landed estates to manage but were expected to impress their peasants in time of war. They were lucky enough to go to war with heavy armor and mounted on a horse whereas the peasants might get some weapon that is easy to handle without a lot of training like a spear.
Maybe I'm being too generous, but I didn't take that to be meant in a literal, historical sense. I mean for the purpose of metaphor, a literary trope is just as good as factually accurate history. The point is that people can relate.
> He has "history" in the name of his blog and he thinks that knights expected to fight dragons? I mean, it is like that in a manga but not in real life.
I mean, "experimental history", so I don't expect real, academic history... that said, yeah, that was an insane analogy to make. Knights weren't, as a rule, wandering monster-slayers - anywhere or ever, as far as I know.
Knights' bravery was tested on the battlefield, where they would have a very good expectation of survival until approximately post-Agincourt (where it became more socially acceptable to execute wealthy enemies instead of capturing and ransoming them). But that's also an extremely high-level description which may be so generalized as to be inaccurate.
> Medieval knights used to wander around hoping for honorable adventures to pop up so that they could demonstrate their bravery.
That is a loose pop historical way of describing the chivalric tradition, but it did exist in some fashion. The dragon reference also exists in a passage that is being airily allegorical, you're all being overly anal about accuracy.
The author has reflected so much that they've created a bespoke system of abstract beliefs with catchy names and various example cases that they can summarize into a 5000 word essay and probably even extend into a book.
For a writer, that's a sneaky but effective way to do their thing. (Or alternately: for a compulsive contemplator, writing is a sneaky way to justify the contemplating.)
But for most people, reading something like this and reflecting on whether you also "gutterball" and also have "toothbrushing problems" is effectively feeding the beast.
Many many of us in this community carry an urge to intellectualize and systematize and engineer things, but if you're interested in "de-bogging" that urge itself might be the thing to look most critically at.