At an event yesterday, maybe four different men asked me: Why didn’t you write a book about solutions? (Women almost never ask this.) It’s a businessman’s need, this thirst for “actionable” solutions. And I’ve come to believe this need masks another, deeper one: for absolution.
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One man after another asks it, and often seems to think he’s the first to ask it. There is frequently a suggestion that writing criticism is easy. He could have done that himself! What would be useful is a plan, maybe even numbered.
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Pause for this great insight from a Twitter follower.https://twitter.com/lisakaysmsw/status/1046454919157485570?s=21 …
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Sometimes I hold out on principle. Sometimes I give in and start suggesting new tax rates. But what I always want to say is: Why does the existence of a book with criticisms so rankle you? Why do you itch to move on so fast to answers? What if you sat with it a moment?
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The books with solutions have already been written! If you are persuaded by
@winnerstakeall, persuaded of the need for systemic reform, hundreds of experts have written thousands of books on what fairer tax, labor, social, gender, education policies would be.Show this thread -
The rush to solutions reflects this hope: that barreling past diagnosis to get to prescribing will bypass the phase of blame. Criticism takes sides. Solutions can involve all.
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But would you ever trust a doctor who skipped past diagnosis and opened up the pill cabinet and started tossing bottles at you? Prescription follows diagnosis. Solution follows analysis. Action follows reflection. Doing follows seeing. And it has ever been so.
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In therapy, when a patient is doing a piece of emotional work and quickly says, “But what do I do about it?”, it is often appropriate to consider and treat this as a defense mechanism. I think you’re onto something.
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Psychiatrist here. Completely agree. Hoping to go to movement without fully feeling it.
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Anything to deflect away from the obvious solutions of empowering workers and eliminating externalities.
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I think about this a lot. We have created such a morally ambiguous world where we can't even agree who is a woman and what is theft (i.e. hacking). Reaching for simple solutions feels like a psychological survival mechanism.
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The quest for actionable solutions is how those who are strangling all of humanity express their own desperate suffocation.
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