I went into the city to have lunch with ex-colleagues today, and of course most of the time was spent talking about the place we all worked at, even though two out of the four no longer work there. The company has gone through some large changes in many ways, and is not the same as it once was, not that long ago. It is a business administration SaaS company as well, which means it is going to suffer the slings and arrows of AI agents reducing the need for licenses. It is already having an effect on industry evaluations.
One of friends (the other no longer working there) is now in psychotherapy and since she had nowhere to be, we walked and talked for a long time about lots of different issues. She and I have a lot of overlapping interests and agree on a lot, but also disagree on a huge amount to. It is refreshing to speak with this group, because we all have our opinions and can argue for them, but there is no animosity or attacks, just discussion. It is rare in a lot of conversations with diverse groups now.
One of the many topics we talked about is the heuristic I have used since I was a kid, Knowing isn't Doing. It seems obvious, but a lot of life these days is using a lot of tools to "do" something more effectively, efficiently or easily, but the person themselves doesn't actually know how to do it themselves. An easy example is making an image or cutting and pasting using AI, where the result is far better than the person can produce themselves, but they did nothing. There is no skill, and the skill in prompting is reducing to zero also.
But what we talked about more was how a lot of therapy is much the same, where the time is spent talking about and "understanding" the problems, but not actually doing anything to repair or mitigate the issues. It is all intellectual, which may work for some issues depending on how they formed, but most of the time won't ever be enough to affect behaviours. As I see it, the reason that logically thinking through problems isn't going to work, is that most of the issue lays in much older areas of our brain than the prefrontal cortex. We can't logic our way out of it, if behaviours are triggered by much older parts of our brain, that will override the newer. So unless we find ways to short-circuit the behavioural loops, we will keep on repeating the habit.
This means that for most of our issues, we are approaching the solution the wrong way around. Instead of thinking through to solve the problem we are having within ourselves first, we should discover what actions we need or want to take, what kind of person we want to be, and then *do those actions. It isn't going to be perfect and suddenly we will be cured, but the process will start to retrain the older parts of the brain with new habits and in the process, give a huge amount of insight into the problems anyway.
We are Physical, Emotional, Mental and Social animals that require a balance across all components to truly have personal stability. However, due to the way we have set up our environment, we are increasingly out of sync with ourselves and while many might "know" something is wrong, few will actually dig deep enough to understand what that something is, and what needs to be done about it - let alone take the steps to act. Even most of those who go to therapy aren't actually looking for a cure, they are hoping for more tools to help them cope.
But no matter how much we know or how many tools we have, if we aren't able to apply them to our world in a way that not only keeps us from pain but helps us grow in potential, we are holding ourselves back. We are reducing ourselves and most likely, putting ourselves further out of sync in key parts of our life, as we keep reacting to the situation, rather than acting so we have control of ourselves in the situation.
This is a bitter pill to swallow for many though, because they don't want to believe that they have the ability to help themselves, because helping oneself is inconvenient, often difficult, mistakes can be made, and there is no one to blame. But, most of the daily problems we face that end up causing large problems in our life, only take a little bit of adjustment in how we behave.
Taraz
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