Pain and Fear are not Zero Sum Games

This morning on my walk I was listening to a podcast (Happier) by Gretchen Rubin.  They had a guest, Kate Bowler, who is a therapist and one of the topics of discussion was regarding talking about how you are feeling (in response to Covid-19) when you are talking to others.  There seems to be a fear of letting out your true feelings because some people have it worse.  So, while you may be stressed out about what will happen when you go outside, it's not the same as people that are having to work on patients dealing with the disease and therefore at higher risk.  While you may not have the same level of worry as someone working with patients, you can still not be 100% okay with how you feel and should not be ashamed of that.  There is no 100% rule on pain or fear.

 

That ties into a course I am taking on Model Thinking talking about how some models have a win/lose option where if one person wins, the other loses.  Other models are not that dependent.  Therefore, what I do may have an impact on your decision but it will not determine the overall outcome.  For instance, if I only want to go to a concert if my friend is going, if my friend says they are not going, I am not going to go either.  But if my friend is going, I can still decide not to go and my friend can still go.  So there are more than 2 options.  Or if my decision is independent of my friends, there is still another option.

 

Friend	Me	Outcome
Goes	Stays Home	1 Person Goes
Goes	Goes	2 People Go
Stays Home	Stays Home	0 People Go
Stays Home	Goes	1 Person Goes

 

The fact that we have so many decision points and so many decisions to make on a daily basis, I wonder how to keep from going crazy.  The other part of that is decision fatigue.  The more decisions you have to make (or options to choose from) the less satisfied you will be with the process and most likely the outcome.

 

I think back to when I was trying to pick out tile for a bathroom.  There are so many options.  I was pretty much paralyzed by the number of choices.  If the options had been presented in a different manner, it would have been easier to choose.  For instance:

• Do you want ceramic or porcelain?
• Do you want a solid or patterned?
• Do you want muted or bold patterned?
• Do you want natural tones or bold colors?
• Here are your choices

I'm not saying I would have had all those answers at the tip of my tongue but it would have been easier to go through that process than "Here is a showroom with 1000 choices, let us know what you want."

 

How does all of this tie together?  We like to think of things as black or white.  It's much easier to comprehend that way.  But you can see from the simple example of going to a concert that the choices we have are far from being one or the other.  We should not compare our pain or fear to anyone else.  What we have is what we have, what they have is what they have.  Neither is better or worse than anyone else.  It just is what it is at that point and time.