This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
I think when it comes to problems, the ordinary annoying problems that fill so much of life, we make things a lot worse for ourselves because we have a sort of dual objection to them. Right? So on the one hand, when you’re dealing with a problem, there’s whatever the problem is. But there’s also this background sense a lot of the time that we somehow shouldn’t be facing problems at all, that we thought we would have got to the stage in our lives by now where we didn’t have to deal with problems, That we could do our jobs really well if only there weren’t all these problems or that family life would be so great if only we didn’t have to deal with these problems. So we actually make it worse for ourselves because we’re dealing both with a problem and with this sort of indignation that there should even be problems in our lives.
It really helps if you can develop a taste for having problems in life. There are definitely specific problems that one would hope to avoid, that one would never wish on anybody, but if you think about what a problem is at the most general level, it’s just like some area where your limited capacities are running up against reality in some way and as a result there’s something you have to address yourself to. A life without any problems, I think, would be a life that had lost, what the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa calls, its resonance. There would be something very, very empty and meaningless about this sort of life with no problems.
A friend of mine describes the epiphany she had when she realized that, you know, she spent a lot of time thinking how well she could do her job if she didn’t have to deal with all these problems, and then realizing that actually, in a very profound sense, the problems were the job. The reason she was in that position was her creative and energetic ability to deal with unforeseen things and find resolutions to them. And apart from anything else, if your job didn’t feature any of those creative challenges, if it could be completely reduced to an absolutely predictable set of steps, it wouldn’t be any fun. It would also be extremely prey to being automated away entirely.