A neighbor of mine, an older lady that lives a story below me and always feeds me and her cat with too sugary cookies, calls me the other day on my cell phone and tears me out of my stream of consciousness just when an important meeting with my bosses about negotiating my salary for a four-month job as a diving instructor was about to start. I was meddling, trying to turn my phone off, but seeing that it was the old lady I felt pity, apologized to everybody and answered. I don’t know, maybe she’s having a heart attack or a stroke possibly.
“Hello” I said in low voice and everybody at the table was politely listening to my conversation.
“Fran, the water pipe broke. There’s a leak and it pours in my apartment.” She was screaming and everybody must have heard what she was saying.
“Ma’am, I’m a diver, not a plumber. You usually call a plumber to solve that problem.” I told her patiently. “If you called a diver, I guess the leak must be pretty serious.”
Everybody at the table started howling with laughter and a serious meeting had an unexpectedly easy start. I don’t know why she calls me instead of addressing the building superintendent directly or her son for that matter, but later I helped her arrange a plumber and she gave me more of her sugary cookies as a sign of gratitude
This anecdote turned out in my favor but that was not an isolated case. Many of my friends resort to me when they have a problem. They besiege me and talk about their girlfriends, exes, job they’ve lost or they’re trying to get and how they can’t sleep or how anxious the problem is making them. I don’t know what they expect from me. I sometimes turn it into a joke and usually they laugh as they understand that the answer was all the time in front of their eyes.
What most people expect when they turn to you is not to actually solve their problems but help them make the right decision. That’s inherently wrong because nobody should be responsible for other people’s choices and I remember that sometimes the advices I took turned out wrong and I was sorry afterwards that I had asked for friend’s advice in the first place instead of following my own hunch.
People often confuse problems with complications as well as with everyday dilemmas which require decision-making. For instance let’s say you can’t sleep because you have a problem whether to date your ex again. You turn to a friend and tell him in all detail how the things stand with your ex and give him or her a transcript of your last phone call with her. Now, you expect your friend to give you an advice what to do with your ex and how to deal with her but you miss to put your friend’s standpoint in the equation who sees your real problem to be insomnia, not your ex. And of course, the best advice your friend can come up with is to forget your ex and to solve your insomnia by either meditating and taking relief though the right breathing or taking a sleeping pill or going to a bar, drinking yourself up, picking up a local girl if you can and getting into bed. In either case you won’t have insomnia any more. But did that really solve the issue you declared as a problem?
I don’t think so. And the reason for that is that we have a completely wrong definition of what a problem is, or better to put it, we often confuse it with other category, and that is complication and dilemma.
You’ve surely heard of the well-known expression: Houston, we have a problem. Problems are impediments that require an immediate action or they could become fatal. Example for problems I faced are: low fuel in the airplane, engine failure in flight, engine fire, ship flooding, man overboard, having a clinically dead person in front or out-of-air while scuba diving 120 ft below surface. These problems have their well-elaborate solving procedures: you send a distress call or declare an emergency and try to deal with it while taking advice from a professional over communication channels until help arrives.
Complications are minor problems that don’t have fatal consequences if you solve them in time. The examples I faced are: shutting the house door with keys inside, getting lost at sea or in the air, all kind of illnesses, encounters with wild animals while in them-friendly environment like meeting a jaguar in the Amazon or swimming with caimans, explaining the presence of a naked woman in your apartment to your girlfriend or taking an exam while drunk.
Dilemmas require constant decision-making and are part of everyday life. They are neither problems nor complications and may have various equally-good solutions. Dilemmas are for example: what shoes to wear, what jacket to buy, where to spend vacations, who of the two boys to date, where and what to study, whether to take blame for something and stress yourself out for it or just to forget it, what restaurant to eat in, who to marry and last but not least, whether or not to date your ex.
Some people may have a difficulties with decision-making and regard many life dilemmas as serious problems. That’s inaccurate and comes from inexperience in decision-making, especially when the person is young and usually proportionally improves with time and fuck-ups you have behind you.
So, again, being dumped by your loved-one or whether or not to date your ex again is definitely not a problem. It is a dilemma, an issue of personal taste and preference and nobody can solve that for you – because here’s nothing to solve. It’s not a problem nor a complication. The only advice I can give you at this point is not to resort in your desperation to OKCupid or Tinder or Badoo because they’re time wasters with bad odds for success which will in turn make you more miserable. Besides only desperate people hang on them and desperate people can hardly help other desperate people – I know that because I was pretty desperate in those times when I tried it. Furthermore it’s kind of weird to depend on a computer algorithm to find your happiness and it’s actually impossible. We all know that we fall in love and chose our partners by smell and genetic matching in a non-verbal environment, and not by reading someone’s music preference, looking at photoshopped images or fancying his or her wit.
So when you think you have a problem…
- In 99% of cases what you’re feeling is temporary anxiety out of dilemma and you’re not facing a real problem that you can influence or that in turn can endanger your life or health seriously.
- If you’re experiencing a break-up or job loss, that’s not a problem but again an opportunity. If you have an interview ahead, that’s not a problem but possibility. If your ex calls and nags you to come back to her, that’s not a problem, but a simple bugger. Turn the phone off and go to…wherever.
- In any of these cases you don’t have to act. Dilemmas and lots of complications usually solve themselves from alone by force of gravity, most of the times shortly after you stop worrying about them.