Dealing with Problems by Ignoring Them—Part III
Difficulties v. Problems
Introduction
In today’s post, we distinguish between problems and difficulties. Difficulties are just business-as-usual. Problems, which people normally go about trying to solve, are the things we need studiously to ignore.
—Ellen and James
Dealing with Problems by Ignoring Them—Part III: Difficulties v. Problems
Now in most of our endeavours, the road is never smooth and there are always unexpected difficulties to be surmounted as we go. We take these in our stride. After all, to quote Elbert Hubbard’s immortal Victorian epigram, “Life is just one damn thing after another.” When we encounter difficulties we deal with them and we carry on.
If the glass is dirty, we wash it. If we have run out of milk, we go ‘round to the corner store and buy another quart. If we have a dripping faucet, we change the washer.
If and when, however, it is not a case of “one damn thing after another” but a case of “the same damn thing over and over again,”1 whatever expedients we deploy, then we have on our hands what we might justly call “a problem.”
If the glasses are always dirty no matter which dishwasher detergent we use, or we are always running out of milk, or a new washer only ever stops the faucet dripping for a week or so, then we may have a problem to solve—we may need to increase the amount of milk we buy on our weekly trip to the supermarket; we may need to add dishwasher salt or get the dishwasher serviced; we may need to call a plumber.
A series of different difficulties—one damn thing after another—is just life as it is, business as usual. But when it is the same damn thing over and over again, no matter what we may try, then we may need to think again. We may need to do something sufficiently different from what we have been doing until now.
However it is usually not enough, in such circumstances, to try better answers to the same question. Instead we may need to try a different question altogether. For even the right answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer. Most questions are not worth answering, because answering them will not get us the kind of answer we need.
Similarly, most problems are simply not worth solving, because solving them would get us nowhere, or get us away from where we want to be, or take us via a far more roundabout route fraught with greater risks and costs than we need otherwise incur. We must especially avoid the temptation to measure the extent of our eventual success by the lengths to which we happen to have gone in getting there.
Why do people have problems in the first place? It is because they seek solutions. A problem is what you construct to serve as the scaffolding to enable you to build a useful solution. This is the way in which problems do indeed function as opportunities—they provide the scaffolding.
We seek a viable solution, a course of action where we can see our way clear to our intended destination—somewhere good we want to go. Now it is only in order to construct such a workable solution that we frame a problem in the first place, as the scaffolding—a very temporary structure—to give us access to the solution we are building.
If we cannot reach the solution we seek to construct, we may need first to construct different scaffolding, frame a different problem. Indeed, we may, as we go, need to dismantle and reconstruct the scaffolding we are using many times, at different stages of building a solution.
Next week: why there is no such thing as the situation…
© Copyright 2010, 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
as John Weakland had it (1982 pers. com.)