Yesterday I yelled at one of my kids for not doing what I asked him to do. He hates getting yelled at. So much so, he makes it a point to remind me every time he gets yelled at. When the dust settled, I had him sit next to me for an excruciating (for him) conversation about what we might do differently next time to avoid the yelling. He admitted to understanding my instructions and recognized he had multiple chances to do what I asked before the yelling commenced. We pinpointed the precise moment my asking turned into yelling so he could recognize the threshold between the two. And he understood why there have to be consequences for his behavior. And yet...
I could not get him to commit to changing his behavior to prevent getting yelled at the next time this happened. And there will always be a next time. After all the digging to uncover the root cause, all the exposition about the rules of civilized human repartee, and all the irrefutable logic laid before him, he still wanted to keep his options open. I have to commend his foresight. He knows agreeing to a set of boundaries now limits his ability to wriggle his way out of trouble on technical grounds in the future. And his carnal need for autonomy evidently trumps his disdain for my yelling. Time to look inward.
I put him through the exercise of root cause analysis for our conflict, but I didn't fully explore my side of the equation. I must figure out what I can offer that is so disagreeable he would zestfully jettison his beloved autonomy to avoid it. Like all elegant solutions, it should have second and third-order benefits. For example, instead of yelling, I can calmly force him to clean his room every time he doesn't do what I ask. If he's smart, which he is, he'll eventually come to the realization that keeping his room clean at all times negates this punishment completely. He avoids traumatic yelling, we get a cleaner room in the house, and he minimizes the effects of the penance if his room is already clean to begin with. The only problem with an example like this is the diminishing returns on pain. He would undoubtedly return to the homeostasis of not listening as soon as the sting of discipline fell below the autonomy-need threshold. This doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing, however. Rather, I'll have to seek out other sophisticated alternatives to yelling that also achieve mutually profitable outcomes.
This all sounds good on paper, but there's an X factor I'm neglecting. It's what causes us to go shopping when we're broke, say yes when we mean no (and vice-versa), and date people who are so obviously wrong for us. It's what separates us from the machines. I have a refrigerator magnet I've kept since college because it sums up this phenomenon perfectly:
"Warning: Due to a shortage of robots, the workers here have been replaced by human beings and may react unpredictably if abused."
We are not a rational species. And our unpredictability need not wait for abuse to come along before it manifests. This is acutely visible in all categories of self-defeating behavior. Once when I was a first-year high school student, I got a chance to sit at the cool kid's table at lunch. I was not a particularly cool kid, but all the cliques and groups were still taking shape, so the lunch-room bylaws weren't written in stone yet and I had time before I got found out and sent back to eat with my fellow dorks. Anyway, the topic of getting out of schoolwork came up, and each cool kid was sharing their best strategy for turning the work in late without getting penalized. Classic dog-ate-my-homework stuff. Revealing myself as an obvious imposter, I naively asked something my parents frequently pointed out to me. "Isn't the effort required to get out of the work more work than doing the actual work?" The subsequent scoffing was both raucous and unanimous. I returned to my cohort of dorks the following week.
The mental rigidity of the cool kids echoes the self-sabotage we bring about when our pride is at stake. It's the same reason we dispute parking violations when we're clearly at fault. We're too proud to "let the system beat us".
Hey.
Pay the $30, read the street signs next time, and move on with your life instead.
The human pattern of feeling externally victimized for our own behavior is cruel and pervasive. And it's easy to understand why. It's a mindfuck to realize you played a part in the orchestration of your own misery. Our default viewpoint, therefore, is to sidestep all culpability while wishing on a prayer that life isn't too mean to us. But nothing changes if nothing changes, and people who have a hard time accepting accountability for their circumstances tend to remain pinned under the irrationality of unjustified victimhood. It's a hallmark of narcissists, the world over. The rest of us, hopefully, will eventually come to a loose understanding that when the unexpected comes knocking, we may have been the one who inadvertently blazed its trail to our front door. But this realization only emerges by deliberately examining our decisions and behavior against the raging currents of our pride-preservation instincts.
For most, this is easier said than done, and for some, it's all but impossible. But there's hope. Because over the years I've practiced a strategy that helps put me in the mindset of a problem solver instead of a victim. It doesn't necessarily fix anything, but it rewires my brain to think more abstractly and go beyond the immediate emotion of the moment. Also, like cheap car insurance, this strategy is not meant for "acts of God". If you're walking home from work and a drunk driver jumps the curb and takes you out at the knees, it won't do much good to examine what you could have done differently. If you're the one in the car, however...enjoy prison, I guess.
Fine print aside, here's my strategy: When something happens that you consider bad or incongruous with your expectations, the first thing you need to do is ask yourself what you did to cause it, regardless of whether or not you feel responsible for it. You'll have to force yourself to do this as a practice, but that part gets easier over time. Allow yourself to feel the knee-jerk emotion of the situation for a moment, but only a moment. Then, step in and consciously run through all the decisions and behaviors that led to this event. Finding an answer to "How did I cause this?" is required. You have to sit there and think back further and further into the timeline of cause and effect, and you can't stop until you find at least one thing you could have done differently that might have made the unexpected or undesired outcome slightly less so.
I've never failed to find something. Not even once. Practicing this brings into focus the part of the decision tree usually obscured by victimhood. Thus, I regain agency over my circumstances because no matter what happens, I clearly see where I can alter my behavior to make it happen less in the future. Failure to do this exposes me to a higher possibility of being unable to trace untenable situations back to their true root cause, which 100% of the time is something I did or didn't do properly.
Anyone who learns to do this earns the power to get out of whatever mess they get themselves into, as well as hone the skills needed to prevent future messes from manifesting themselves uninvited.
It's not easy, especially at first. At first it feels ludicrous. And most notably when things involve other people, who you obviously have no control over. But rare is the time we act out against another person without a reason, however petty. So try it out. Start simple. Find something that bugs you but isn't catastrophic, and see if you can do something about your behavior to set the decision tree on a different path.
Thanks for reading. Until next week. 🌱
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Last Week's Photo
This is a wooden duck. I never know what I’m going to shoot until the essay is complete, which leads to some interesting surprises. I love the warmth of the colors of this one. It might be my favorite so far. What’s yours?
Future Topics I'm Thinking About Thinking About
Timing:
The three best things in my life are all a result of great timing. I'm not that good, so am I just that lucky?
Big Ass Trees:
There's something about living amongst 100ft trees that helps supply perspective on what doesn't matter. i.e., these things have been here a century or more. They're still keeping on. Things are probably gonna be ok.
Voluntary Explosions:
What's the difference between making a big change due to something holding you back and one that simply blows up your life? How can we tell which is which?
Which one should I tackle first? Comment below.