Dealing with Big Problems
Aug. 19th, 2019 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tigertoyI have some big problems in my life. What they are isn't the point of this post; I'm looking at how I deal with problems. The least functional way I have of dealing with a problem is to metaphorically hide under the bed. The problem is too big to have any solution I can see. Thinking about it is distressing. So I just ignore it and pay attention to other things.
In a slightly more functional mode, I see that the whole problem is too big, but there is one part of it that I can address, and then I focus on that part. That part is something I can work on. The problem is that I focus on that part, however trivial it is, and continue to ignore the rest of the problem. If the thought of the larger problem comes up, I tell myself I'm doing the small thing so I'm taking care of it.
This is only slightly more functional than completely ignoring the problem if the part I've chosen is trivial. To take an example from my own past, my house is perpetually horribly cluttered. When I was actively playing Magic: the Gathering, my magic cards were a significant part of the clutter. I would direct the energy for dealing with the clutter into obsessively sorting cards while the rest of the clutter continued to build up.
The reason I bring this up, the real point of this post, is that I had an insight that as a society we are caught up in the same trap. For an example, consider the cold war. The problem that the world could be blown up in a nuclear war was too big to deal with, so there was a lot of hiding under the bed. However, there was also a lot of energy put into trivial gestures. School children were taught duck and cover drills and shelters were designated and stocked with emergency food rations. Doing these things helped people to feel that they were doing something, but if one considers an actual nuclear war, one realizes that these things wouldn't really make any difference.
More relevant to our situation today is the problem of how we're destroying our environment. We realize, when we bring ourselves to think of it, the extent of damage we're constantly doing to our planet, but we don't see how we can really fix it. But we've hit on recycling. "I'm recycling my plastic bottles," we say, "so I'm helping. I'm doing my bit." I can't argue that recycling in itself has no value at all, but it has much less value than we give it credit for. Many of those plastic bottles we virtuously put in the recycling bin end up in the landfill anyway, very few of them become more plastic bottles, and even when they do the process uses a lot of resources along the way. It would be better to not buy a one use bottle at all. It would be better than that to get our municipal water systems to the point where nobody felt they needed single use water bottles.
In a slightly more functional mode, I see that the whole problem is too big, but there is one part of it that I can address, and then I focus on that part. That part is something I can work on. The problem is that I focus on that part, however trivial it is, and continue to ignore the rest of the problem. If the thought of the larger problem comes up, I tell myself I'm doing the small thing so I'm taking care of it.
This is only slightly more functional than completely ignoring the problem if the part I've chosen is trivial. To take an example from my own past, my house is perpetually horribly cluttered. When I was actively playing Magic: the Gathering, my magic cards were a significant part of the clutter. I would direct the energy for dealing with the clutter into obsessively sorting cards while the rest of the clutter continued to build up.
The reason I bring this up, the real point of this post, is that I had an insight that as a society we are caught up in the same trap. For an example, consider the cold war. The problem that the world could be blown up in a nuclear war was too big to deal with, so there was a lot of hiding under the bed. However, there was also a lot of energy put into trivial gestures. School children were taught duck and cover drills and shelters were designated and stocked with emergency food rations. Doing these things helped people to feel that they were doing something, but if one considers an actual nuclear war, one realizes that these things wouldn't really make any difference.
More relevant to our situation today is the problem of how we're destroying our environment. We realize, when we bring ourselves to think of it, the extent of damage we're constantly doing to our planet, but we don't see how we can really fix it. But we've hit on recycling. "I'm recycling my plastic bottles," we say, "so I'm helping. I'm doing my bit." I can't argue that recycling in itself has no value at all, but it has much less value than we give it credit for. Many of those plastic bottles we virtuously put in the recycling bin end up in the landfill anyway, very few of them become more plastic bottles, and even when they do the process uses a lot of resources along the way. It would be better to not buy a one use bottle at all. It would be better than that to get our municipal water systems to the point where nobody felt they needed single use water bottles.