Helping people is hard. Giving advice to people is rarely effective. Much advice boils down to: here's what I'd do if I were you. The trouble is that although you may see a way out of a given predicament as you imagine yourself facing it, you are not the one in that situation.
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Frequently, people with difficult lives face emotional or cognitive constraints that do not bind people without their problems. Frequently, career and social difficulties are symptoms (in addition to being problems in their own right).
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The trouble is compounded by a sort of double illegibility. Typically, a person who could use good advice does not understand that they are operating under a set of problematic constraints, or have a clear sense of what those constraints are, and so cannot explicate them.
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From the other perspective, a potential advisor may have no idea that such a set of constraints might exist either abstractly (so how could they roll mitigation strategies into their advice?) or specifically (so why would they?).
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Even supposing such constraints are clearly understood by both parties, there may not be an effective approach to handling them. Emotional instabilities, cognitive difficulties, and physical impairments are just extremely stubborn problems and we don't know what to do with them.
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Whenever I come back to town for holidays, I get to meet up with my extended family. Some of them are doing very well for themselves and seem happy. Others are struggling, immensely. I'm glad to see all of them, but reuniting with the second group is generally painful for me.
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When I look at their difficulties, they seem to ultimately stem from these internal factors. The "bad" decisions they've made are downstream of their emotional, cognitive, and social struggles. And it's brutal knowing that there's really nothing I can do to change these things.
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god that would be an awful trip
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