The Problem with Solutions

The problem with solutions is that they are all temporary fixes. No problem has ever been permanently fixed.

Don’t think in the span of a year or ten years, or even a human lifetime. Think longer. What has been permanently fixed?

In the end, the “solutions” we come up with lead to more problems. We often hear that “No one could have predicted the new problems that would arise from implementing a given solution.” It’s true, except that there always seem to be some unforeseen issues that arise.

In a paradoxical sense, the unforeseeable is foreseeable. It’s almost certain that some negative effect will come out of resolving a problem. We just don’t know what it will be.

People sometimes ask me for help with their problems. I try to help, but my power is limited.

The issue is that for any solution I may give you to your problem, you will soon come back and tell me it didn’t work. You will need me to help modify the plan for you or help resolve new problems that have arisen due to fixing the prior ones.

You will also become reliant on someone else to resolve your problems for you. You will outsource your thinking and your being, looking for someone else to fix an unfixable problem, which is human life.

Human life, and what to do with this life, or how to fix any human issue, is an unfixable problem, as they all are. There is no permanent solution.

I believe a worthy path is to train the mind, to build it up to be able to handle a variety of situations, but even this does not offer a permanent solution to anything. The stronger your mind is, the more likely you will challenge yourself further and further, until you reach a wall. Then what?

Notice that people who have the “solutions” will continue to believe that they have them. When you don’t succeed or get the result you wanted, they will just say you didn’t apply the advice correctly. And that may be true. Perhaps you made some mistakes. But even if you apply all the advice correctly, eventually, it will not work. Give it time, and ultimately, you will find that advice disappointing. This is because we live in a changing reality.

The advice of a year ago is probably outdated already. And the advice everyone is following also loses its utility. For example, if a finance guru posts that you should invest in real estate right now, and his millions of followers read that advice and follow it, then the more people follow his advice, the more useless it will be. If everyone rushes to buy real estate, the prices will go up and up, making it a bad investment.

For the next piece of advice you receive, imagine if the whole world took that advice and realize that everything would collapse overnight if that happened. Then understand the futility of advice and the futility of “solutions.”

So when you realize that there is no solution to chase, what do you do then? You probably look for the solutions anyway, right? This is the human way. We won’t sit by and leave a problem alone. If a neighbor comes to me with a broken chair, I may help him fix it. But what if I make a mistake because I am not a professional, then the chair breaks under him, and he hurts his back. Then he goes to the chiropractor, which fixes his back and accidentally causes problems with his neck.

Then maybe he gets tired of the new problems caused by fixing the old ones, and he decides to live with his neck issues. In time, perhaps his neck gets better on its own.

You may say this is a pessimistic view that problems have no solutions. Maybe it is. Or perhaps it’s realistic. We are obsessed with problems and solutions. If someone gives me a problem, I usually know what to do – even if the thing to do is to ask another expert. But all of that problem-solving keeps us spinning our wheels, running in circles.

Today’s generation hopes to solve today’s problems and waits for the next generation to solve the new problems (unforeseeable ones) this generation will cause. This continues until the latest generation faces the current problems on top of problems that all the prior generations caused along the way.

At some point, there are too many problems to deal with.

Everyone that I know is a believer. Whether religious or not, they are believers. They believe in solutions. They think that the solution to the problem will fix something.

But the question isn’t really if the “solution” will work. It’s actually: when will it fail?

Consider that the “Solution” you have found may actually be the biggest problem of your life.

For example, someone prone to stress will resolve one stressor, only to have another one arise. They will find a technique that works to resolve the stress until it no longer works. They will remove themselves from a stressful situation, only to run into another one with new kinds of stresses. Stress is just used as an example here, but the problem could be anything. Given time, the solutions fail, and we chase more and more solutions.

The problem with solutions is that we become fixated on resolving one particular issue, forgetting about the larger context. Any fool can fix a specific problem and create a hundred new ones in the process. And this is what we tend to do.

Humans are masterful problem-solvers but even more skillful at creating problems.

The real problem is that we are conditioned to expect solutions all around us. We expect someone to give us an action plan to resolve everything rather than using the power of the mind. We want rote, formulaic solutions to a dynamic world that doesn’t care about our procedures.

When I talk to people in customer service and come to them with a problem, I find them behaving like robots. I get responses like “That’s not how we were trained,” “This has never happened before,” and “No one has ever asked.” They might as well say “Does not compute,” as perhaps a robot would.

The problem with solutions is that we only tend to have them for easy, direct problems and have forgotten how to seek them out on the challenging problems we face.

The challenging problems were unexpected, unpredictable, unforeseen. Yet, at the same time, it should be quite obvious that things that have never happened in the past sometimes do occur in the future. However, we behave as if that is an impossibility.

Our go-to solutions are designed to handle problems that have happened in the past, not new ones which may occur in the future. This is practical in the short run but leaves us with calamity in the long run.

However, trying to resolve the problems that have never happened and may never happen can also be a loser’s game. You can spend all your life preparing to resolve a perceived problem that may never happen. So that is not the solution either.

I am not saying we should be happy doing nothing, allowing problems to build up, and taking no action to resolve them. I am not saying we should stay on the course of perpetually “solving” problems without actually fixing anything.

I am asking you to be mindful that just because you fixed ten problems in one day, this is nothing to be proud of. For resolving 10, you may have caused 100 new ones.

The story of humanity is that we are excellent at resolving short-term problems, only to create more of them. But if we think deeply, perhaps we have never solved a single problem permanently.

Ask yourself: What problem have human societies truly solved? And what problems have we created?

Consider this: Even if we fixed all human problems, that would still introduce a new problem. What do you do with human life when there is no apparent problem to focus on? Starvation, homelessness, illness, social needs, etc., have all been resolved in this theoretical utopia.

You may see where this is going, but perhaps this utopic vision is a dystopia because no one would have any purpose or any problem to work on. Society would quickly degenerate and crumble, and we would once again have an abundance of problems.

The state of having no problems ultimately results in a plethora of problems.

Again, those are problems with no solution. The solutions would only create more problems.

This post is not about recommending that you try to fix a problem or not do so, or seek help with a problem or not seek it. This is also not about apathy and giving up on everything.

It’s about increasing your awareness and understanding. Stop running in circles, chasing your tail.

The human mind sees a problem and jumps into trying to fix it. Maybe we need to take a step back and ask ourselves if the problem is worth attempting to fix. If doing nothing is just as effective at resolving a problem as doing something, then what are we wasting our time for?

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Some of my best work was published recently - Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

You can read the book on Amazon and other major retailers.

Think Out Loud

“What were you thinking?”

Do you ever get asked that, but in a way that is judgmental and condescending, perhaps?

Well, maybe it would help to go over our thoughts out loud more often. If we shared our thoughts more openly instead of hiding them, then certain flaws in our thinking would become apparent. This is good because by seeing the flaws, we can work to correct them.

Sometimes I wonder – wouldn’t it be easy to go through life with some glaring flaw in one’s thinking? How would you realize this about yourself? If these thoughts stay trapped in the mind and we do not often share them, then we may have major problems in our thinking and not even realize it.

I believe the people who exhibit higher levels of thinking or have a very high expertise level in their field should occasionally help guide others by revealing their own thinking processes. Then other people could learn to improve their thinking abilities.

A quirk about me is that I have never been that interested in learning particular facts. I am not the person you want to see on Jeopardy – I would probably do embarrassingly bad. Rather, I have always been fascinated by the thought processes that helped people make their discoveries or solve difficult problems. I tend to think that if I have the right thought processes, then I can figure things out on my own with minimal facts. With the wrong thought processes, I could perhaps have infinite facts at my disposal and have no idea what to do with them. With the wrong way of thinking, I may even come to the wrong conclusions, which could be even worse.

Ultimately, rather than accumulating random facts, I aim to pursue a higher understanding - and I hope to help you get there too.

Something I have learned to do is to reconstruct other people’s thoughts. If you have ever seen a “true crime” show that was dramatized, these are reconstructed scenes. The dialog and interactions may be made up or intuited in some cases.

Similarly, when I see someone solve a problem, I always ask myself what they could have been thinking. I try to reverse-engineer how they got to the solution. Sometimes I feel like I have figured it out – and I have been able to decode their thought processes. But this is not always easy. Usually, I look at the actions they took. Then I ask what they would have thought that led them to take that action. If I can, I may try to confirm what they were thinking at a critical point.

I want to encourage us to see the value in thinking out loud more often. This could be especially valuable if there is a child nearby. People always say that children learn by example. But how can we have example thoughts? The thoughts are in our heads usually. In that case, we should be willing to think out loud or occasionally verbalize our thinking.

You may be thinking, of course, we all verbalize our thoughts. It’s called speaking. Yes, this is true. My point is that when solving problems, most of us don’t see the need to think out loud. If you have solved a problem before, you know what to do. You take the necessary actions and solve it. However, a problem that you have seen a hundred times may be new to someone else. They may benefit from hearing you think out loud.

Other than just with children, there may be other useful opportunities to practice thinking out loud. If you know someone who wants to learn in your field, and you are the expert, and they are the novice, consider thinking aloud through certain problems to help show them how to think through them.

I suppose some general thinking rules can be applied to anything. But I also suppose that to advance in a particular field, we will need to learn how to think through specific problems more successfully.

When I was in school, I was usually able to figure out a thought process to arrive at the solutions to problems, but often I would later learn that my way of thinking was very inefficient. I was focusing on the wrong things, perhaps. In some cases, if I arrived at the wrong solutions, I may continue to work on the problem, trying to figure out the right way of thinking through trial and error. I believe it would have been more efficient to learn the right way to think from the beginning. Or rather, to have had someone help me identify my wrong thoughts and then replace those with the correct ones.

In reality, our thoughts and actions are often intertwined. If you pay close attention, every action tends to reveal a thought process behind it. If I pick up a red rock from the ground and bring it up to my mouth and try to take a bite, you can probably guess what I was thinking.

You would guess that for some reason, I had thought this rock was a fruit. You may dig a bit deeper - how could I have thought this way? Perhaps I was distracted or dealing with a personal trauma that dampened my observational skills. Perhaps I was not wearing my glasses, and I have horrible vision. Perhaps I was starving and not thinking clearly. Some of this is guesswork, but you can be pretty sure that I had somehow imagined the rock to be an edible piece of food.

Again:

If you pay close attention, every action tends to reveal a thought-process behind it.

Much of our academic life is focused on learning facts, but perhaps we should also focus more on absorbing higher-level thinking. This could be from experts who have fine-tuned their thinking and have proven their ability to think through new problems. Someone good at solving only the problems that they are familiar with has not necessarily proved that they are thinking at a higher level.

Higher-level thinking would likely involve some of the following:

•        Experience – having sufficient knowledge and experience to approach new problems

•        Efficiency of thought – not wasting time on knowledge or thought processes that are irrelevant

•        Problem definition – knowing how to define the problem precisely

•        Questioning ability – knowing the right questions to help further define what is known and unknown

•        Reasoning ability – knowing which actions are likely to result in which outcomes

•        Creative ability – being able to use new ideas, resources, or systems to solve a problem

•        Simulation ability – using the above skills and abilities, a high-level thinker may be able to simulate problems and processes in the mind to help identify the most likely outcomes

•        Awareness of limitations – knowing when your abilities or resources are insufficient to solve a problem

Generally, a higher-level thinker will not need to use trial and error. Ideally, the thinking ability will be at a point where they can effectively solve problems in their mind and then execute the solutions.

If you wish to go the route of learning higher-level thinking skills, it can be worth the effort to learn some bad thinking as well. For example, what mistakes did Albert Einstein make in his thinking? Wouldn’t it be interesting to learn that? For a physicist, at least, this may be valuable to know.

Something I have learned is that often the novice will focus on things that are not so important. Part of what the novice needs is to gain experience, of course. But when a novice learns the right things to think about and focus on, this can make all the difference in helping to learn and to think more effectively.

Today, I am simply encouraging you to ask yourself if your thinking abilities could benefit from learning how others at a higher level think through problems. You may consider pursuing a mentor or teacher to show you not just what to do but also how to think through new problems. As you learn what to do and how to do it, remember to focus on the why or the thought processes you can use to help you advance further. To learn those thought processes, it helps if you can listen to someone think out loud.

Also, if you believe you could be a higher-level thinker, please realize that not everyone has this ability. If you take a moment here and there to reveal your thinking processes to those around you, it could be a great help to them.

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Here are some books that reveal the thinking processes of experts, if you are interested:

• Thinking Allowed by Jeffrey Mishlove (and many other authors)

• Think Like a Grandmaster by Alexander Kotov (about Chess)

• Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen (about Poker)

• Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol

• Think Like a Programmer by V. Anton Spraul