Solutions

Let's focus on something else besides solutions

How long have you had the same old problems? One area where I have consistently had the same old problems: my weight. I’ve been conditioned to see too much of me and no matter how many solutions I try a lasting real one escapes me. This dilemma tirelessly searches my thought processes for the solution that will set me free.

Solution: I hide the chocolate chip cookies behind the bread and chip basket on top of the fridge because if I can’t see them I won’t eat them. Sometimes I won’t even buy sweets because I don’t want to resist them, but then I feel like I’m living at the mercy of someone else’s idea of what my body is supposed to look like. So I get rebellious, and permissive, and turn thirteen again with the “you can’t tell me what to do” refrain shouting in my head.

The solution? I eat three big cookies because I can and I want to. Now I made myself a problem. And I need another solution. Oh no I’ll think. Why did I do that? What can I do about it now? OK, I’ll think. You know what to do. Hide the cookies and be really good with what you eat, just do it forever starting right now. This is the solution. You will lose weight and be thin like you’re supposed to. My weight is the problem and I know a solution.

Now just play this over and over for like forty years because that shit has been on repeat most of my life.

We live in an especially solution focused time. Needing, having, and finding solutions has high value- above peace of mind, above individuality, above community, above accountability, above actual happiness. When you are a solutions focused society by default you create the need for problems. So many solutions means a lot of problems, a persistence of problems, problems that have low hanging fruit solutions but that mostly stay unsolved in the interest of upholding the societal value of being good at finding solutions, don’t mind those problems.

We spend massive amounts of time looking for solutions. We get so focused on having the solution that we actually forget about solving the problem. It’s why I’ve had the same problems for so many years- I have the problem, and I know the solution, but I don’t actually solve the problem, so it continues. I know that the problem is eating too many calories, ridiculous body standards, and that I eat when I’m feeling emotional, upset, or bored. The solution is to not do that. The solution is not the answer. I don’t know that it actually solves anything.

Has it always been this way? I don’t know. I try to imagine people 500 years ago thinking about things in this solution focused way and I don’t think they even had the idea that it was possible to be solutions oriented. I think maybe they had a problem, and then they worked on it instead of working around it.

If you’re solutions oriented, does that also mean you are oriented to problems?Because it seems like you can’t have one without the other. You don’t get to ignore the thing that is part of the orientation. It would be like saying that there’s only good no bad, only dark no light. To me, solutions and problems are a coin, and coins have two sides.

What would be different if we just abandoned the whole idea that solutions are the bread and butter of living a good life? What would we do instead? It makes me think of Blockbuster Video. There was a time we all thought that renting movies would be the way we got home entertainment forever. And then streaming services arrived and Blockbuster ended. Could we do this with solutions based thinking?

I was listening to Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and in it he talks about how before clocks people didn’t used to have the same concept of time we do today and that fascinates me: that something as concrete as time was a whole different idea. That’s what got me thinking about how much we focus on solutions and how we rely so heavily on the beliefs of society and uphold them even if they don’t work for us. Because it’s the way it is we just do it anyway.

Burkeman talks about the idea that instead of us managing time, we let time manage us. Could we do this with life? Could we surrender enough that we could stop managing life and let life manage us?

What would it be like to see life not as a problem to be solved, but something to be experienced, lived? Could we replace solutions with curiosity? Experimentation? Could we stop seeing everything as a problem?

Because that’s the real culprit here- life is a problem. It seems like we’ve boiled down this amazing miracle to be something we have to solve and escape from rather than connect with and do the thing it says to do: live it. We have turned an experience into a problem. And then given all the value of life experience to finding solutions.

I think about the bigger picture of us thinking differently- how does it change the ways we connect and support one another as fellow humans? If people aren’t solutions or problems to be solved what does that do to society as a whole?

Focusing on solutions feeds problems. What you perpetuate perpetuates itself. Solutions and problems are hand in hand, and I think we can live better.

Thanks for reading! More soon,