Most of the problems we face in our life do not have simple solutions. For someone struggling with weight, for example, there are likely a multitude of challenges: lack of time to prepare food, lack of time/desire/ability to exercise, stress from work/home life/kids, complicated feelings about food, challenges about who will eat certain foods within the household, grocery shopping, budget–the list goes on. Problems in our relationships are often similar, with differing expectations, wants and needs, feelings about various topics–again, the list is long. When I am working with patients on managing their blood sugar, a similar situation repeats.
The fact that things are complicated does not mean that they cannot be simplified. Why are blood sugars high? Not enough insulin. Why is there too much weight? Too many calories for metabolic needs. While these simplifications are helpful, ask “why” a few times, and things again get messy. For many of the problems in our life, we’re left with a kind of survivorship bias: the simple problems have been solved, so what remains are the stubborn, tangled ones.
Our brains are not particularly well constructed to understand complex problems. They struggle to make sense of 10 different factors, each responsible for 5%-15% of an effect, contributing to a problem. Our brains love stories, and use stories to make sense of the world. Typically, these stories involve a protagonist (me) and an antagonist that is causing the problem. This is convenient, because it means that the problems in my marriage cannot be caused by the protagonist (me), and must be caused by the antagonist (my wife). It means that the problems at work are not caused by me, but by my boss. And it reduces complex problems to simple stories, regardless of the reality of the situation. We instinctively divide the world into good guys and bad guys, even when that does not reflect reality. It feels good, but leads nowhere.
This desire for clear stories creates challenges because absent a clear narrative, a few things tend to happen. In the face of complexity, we sometimes freeze. We throw in the towel because the problem is so complicated, deep-rooted, and multifaceted we feel there is no hope of solving it. Becoming cynical or hopeless are close cousins of this freezing—when we can’t create a clear story and therefore see a clear path forward, it’s easier to decide that nothing works. A similar type of disengagement is distraction; instead of facing complexity, we busy ourselves with something simpler and more controllable—emails, errands, scrolling. Or perhaps we oversimplify, and try to make a complex reality fit a simple narrative: “It’s those greedy food companies and the empty calories they produce.” We reduce our views—and everyone else’s—to tribes or labels that substitute for actual understanding. Sometimes, we’ll pair this with hoping for a hero that will save us—a person or technical solution that will somehow lift our burden. The net result of all this is that we do nothing—and the problem persists. And when it does, we tell ourselves it’s proof the problem was impossible to solve to begin with.
The pattern repeats itself at every level. What we do in our marriages and workplaces, we also do as voters, citizens, and communities. The same human reflexes that make it hard to face personal complexity also shape how we confront collective problems. Take any complex challenge we face—global warming, inequality, societal division—and the same set of responses surface. This happens because our human response to complexity is similar, even if the problems, or the scale of the problems, are different.
Although we often freeze in the face of complexity, we don’t have to. We can instead choose to start working on what is in front of us. We do this with full understanding and humility that working on one part of the problem will not, in fact, fix the problem. That’s a hard place to be—to work on something but know our effort will not be enough to actually fix it. Thinking about the example with weight, walking every day will probably not be enough for weight loss. At the same time, all paths include more activity, and walking is what is feasible right now. As that habit gets entrenched in our life, we can then move onto the next factor, and the next, until we have accumulated real progress on many of the facets that make up the complicated problem we are facing.
Pairing humility with determination and courage in this way is difficult. After all, to be determined, we often have to have some confidence that our actions will fix the problem—but facing hard, complex problems requires us to let go of the idea that this step alone will lead to much measurable progress. To have courage we must believe we will accomplish our goal, but by taking on a small piece of a big problem we explicitly acknowledge that this small piece will not, by itself, fix the problem. Humility and determination can be held together, courage and determination can be held together, and courage and humility can be held together. Holding all three is a tall order.
When we pick one small piece of the challenge in front of us and start working on it—we recognize explicitly that this one change will not be enough. At the same time, we’re at peace with that. One change is not what we’re after. We’re after a starting place, a toehold into the problem, to not be frozen by paralysis. The way forward is not to fix everything, but to fix something, right where we are, again and again. If we can sustain that pattern, we can make progress against seemingly intractable problems.
Love,
Doc
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