How to Think Archives - The Cracked Door

How to Write a Piece when You’re Tired

When you write a post a week, some weeks you must crank something out when you are exhausted. Here are my approaches to writing a piece on days when I am busy or otherwise tired:

1) Write something the day before:

If I know I will be busy one week, I often will make sure to complete two pieces that week just to get it done. Generally, if I do this, I combine that with my second strategy and…

2) Have writing ideas in your backpocket that are easy to write:

Some pieces require a lot of work, but having a few ideas be something relatively easy to crank out helps when you’re tired. For example, I have whole sets of writing projects that I find much easier to just write out without much thought.

3) Use something you have already recently written a while ago:

Can you submit something that you already wrote for some other reason? As long as they aren’t too personal or confidential. All I have to do is write a few quick sentences explaining the context and submit them.

4) Work on long-term projects

In addition to writing a piece a day, I spend 10 minutes working on long-term writing projects. This helps me slowly complete essays and stories that take longer than a single day to work on. Some days, after finishing it, I hold onto this longer piece for a busier day when I don’t have time to write a piece from scratch.

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Those are my strategies. Maybe you find yourself in a similar position and would find them useful to consider as well.

How Best to Respond to Anger? (Part Two in Philosophy of Anger Series)

This is the second part in my series about the philosophy of anger. In this part, I will focus on how to respond to anger.

When you are angry, you should first figure out why you are angry (that may seem kind of obvious). As you sort through that, you should evaluate how you feel about the fact that you are angry (in particular, what this tells you about what your needs are in life) and how you plan to respond.

In determining why you are angry, the following questions can help:

1) What injustice do you perceive, and/or what needs do you feel like are not being met?

This can often seem like an incredibly easy question to answer, since most manifestations of anger (especially rage anger) make us vividly aware of what we are angry about and what we are lacking.

But, it can err easily, so we should take this with a form of skepticism. In the heat of the moment, something may clearly seem like the source of our anger, but if we reflect a little more deeply, we may realize more complex issues underlie our feeling, that we rushed to a conclusion about what was happening, and/or that there was something wrong with our initial expectations in the first place. Anger can mislead us away from what truly matters.

Some forms of anger (especially the passive anger discussed in Part One) often blind us from what is making us angry and why. Such anger may orients us at ourselves only to have to realize that we were not the source of the problem. Rage anger has the opposite problem: it orients us towards external problems, which means that in some situations we need to pause and realize how our own actions may be contributing to the problem.

2) Is the injustice you perceive real and legitimate?

Like I already discussed in Part 1, a person can be angry at something that is not actually happening. Our emotions react to what we perceive to be happening, not what is actually happening, so we should pause to reflect on the accuracy of the interpretation of events that is causing us to feel angry.

Take, for example, a husband who thinks his wife is cheating on when she’s not. Maybe, he interprets whatever she is doing that day as her visiting another sexual partner when she’s just going about a normal day. Anger can lock this husband into his interpretation, putting him in a type of “go” mode by orienting him to do something about it.

It’s good to take a moment to determine if our anger is clouding our judgement about what is actually happening. Do you even have enough relevant information to know what is going on in the first place? In particular, what information do we have to understand what someone else is doing, and are we jumping to conclusions about their intentions?

Furthermore, maybe we need to reflect on our underlying expectations. We most often feel angry when some implicit expectation for how something will go does not occur. Sometimes our expectations are reasonable, but sometimes they are not. It can also be useful to reflect on our underlying expectations.

3) Who is responsible for the injustice, and how responsible actually is the person who I think is responsible?

Anger often orients us to blame a certain person or group. For externally-oriented rage anger, this tends to be someone else, and for the internally-oriented passive anger, that person tends to be oneself. Either way, reflecting on whether we are jumping too quickly to blame someone is useful.

4) What should we do to address the injustice?

This is the final and arguably most important question. Anger often orients us to act to fix the injustice in some way. This is reasonable: injustices are bad, and we should live in a world without that injustice or at least have the harm of what happened repaired as much as possible. If we cannot rectify the injustice, we at least need to develop a way to live with it resiliently. At the same time, anger can push us to act quickly to do something now, and whatever action feels right in the moment may not be the best way to resolve the injustice long-term.

The question of how to best address an injustice is a tactical question and an incredibly complex tactical question at that. Anger can cause us to narrow our thinking towards whatever specific response we are thinking about in that moment, but we often should pause and think about other types of solutions that may turn out to work better in the long run. For complex societal injustices, there will likely be legitimate debate about the best way to rectify the wrong.

For example, during the Civil Rights movements, different black leaders and organizations (such as Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X) proposed very different tactics for how black people should best respond to the racial injustices they encountered. Each strategy had their advantages and disadvantages, and thus probably different situations when they were appropriate. It may be better that the debate of how to respond remains open because different black individuals and communities will face different specific circumstances over time that will require them to adapt and figure out how to respond differently.

In this kind of big debate about how to respond to a major, multifaceted injustice in the world, I think the feeling of anger plays an important part in orienting us to act in the first place and helping us think through whether specific strategic responses feel like they would provide a lasting feeling of peace and justice, but we obviously also need to employ our many other mental faculties to think through what the best ways to address them.

All these questions may be answered at once or in a different order than the logical, linear order presented here. An emotion like anger may even direct us to process these matters in a nonlinear way. That’s fine, but I think these are all four important questions to think through before carrying out one’s desired response to anger. Even in an emergency situation, one can take a second or two to work through all of them. Anger tends to direct us to act quickly even potentially impulsively, so these questions form “doubt reflexes” that help reground us and think through our actions.

Now, none of this is meant to imply that anger, or any emotion for that matter is bad. I do not believe that emotions are bad or that “reason” is a better guide for making decisions than emotions. Insofar as these are separable, I think both are incredibly useful psychological tools humans have, and they work best working alongside each other.

On a practical level when making a decision, it’s helpful to think through a few different lenses or angles, including working through how one feels and what decision feels satisfying emotionally and what decisions seem best from the perspective of a rational calculation. This is both because undergoing multiple decisions making strategies slows us down and slowing down helps people make better decisions, and because these two ways of thinking seem to complement each other well, often picking up on the biases and blind spots from the other way of thinking.

A Philosophy Anger Part One: What is Anger?

How would you define anger to an alien from outer space who has never experienced the feeling. Anger is the type of thing that pretty much everyone seems to understand but is incredibly hard to define or describe, but I find thinking through what anger is to be incredibly useful in thinking about how to respond to the world around us, most specifically how to respond to injustices in the world. I think anger has far broader manifestations that the everyday understandings of the feeling don’t explore.

In this series, I will define anger, describe some of its different forms, and discuss how to best respond to anger.

Part One: So what Is Anger?

To me, anger is any emotional response to a perceived injustice. If I had to put words the most common everyday definition of anger, I would describe it as “an intense conflictive feeling against a perceived injustice that directs us to act to counteract that slight.” I think it takes many different forms far beyond this everyday definition though.

What I like about this definition is that it situates anger as a response to a slight as a way to orient us to act towards addressing that slight, but I think it limits too much the types of emotional responses people have when they experience such injustices. Humans have a variety of intertangled emotional responses to injustices that direct us towards different strategies of action, and I think in understanding this, we can think through how to approach the injustices in our world.

Defining a Few Key Words in My Definition

So, let’s first talk about what a “perceived injustice” means. First, we have “injustice.” What is just or unjust is an incredibly complex philosophical questions debated for thousands of years, so I will not venture into that discussion here. But suffice to say that every individual has a sense of what justice is that grounds our expectations for how people will interact with them on a daily level. This, often, intuitive or implicit set of expectations often seem to ground our emotional responses to the world. If I say, “Hello,” to someone, and they rob me, then this disrupts my sense of expectations of what that interaction would entail in a way that I would perceive as “unjust,” meaning I will probably feel angry. Whether robbing me in that moment was justified according to some abstract sense of justice or morality is less important for my emotional response because these implied expectations, not a rationale assessment of true justice, seem to form the basis for our emotional responses.

Next, “perceived” is important here. We get angry when we perceive an injustice. To be angry, we only need to perceive that something is unjust. That perception may or may not be true, but we could still feel angry about it. For example, if a partner believes their other is cheating on them even though their partner is not actually doing so, the emotions the first person feels is still anger, despite the fact that no injustice is not actually happening. One can be misinformed and yet still have an angry response.

Finally note that the injustice does not have to happen to the person in question. If I experience someone else receiving an injustice, then I may still become angry, even though I am not the person who experienced the injustice directly. One can even feel anger at an injustice that occurs in a fictional story where the injustice never occurred in the literal sense. The “perceived injustice” that causes one to be angry could just as easily happen to oneself as to another or a group of people.

A Broader Definition of Anger

The most important single difference between my definition and the normal definition is that the normal definition views “anger” as a specific emotion; whereas, I see anger as any emotional response to a perceived injustice. If the perceived injustice makes someone sad, then that sadness would constitute “anger” for them. Any time we perceive an injustice whatever emotions we encounter is anger, so when one experiences an emotion, the question becomes:

1) What kinds of emotional responses do we have to that injustice?
2) How do these emotions direct us to act?
3) What does all this say about us in general?

As a parallel, consider “anxiety.” Clinical psychologists will often broaden their definition of anxiety to include not just the regular definition of nervous anticipation of the future but to also include excitement, nervousness, enthusiasm, dread, and many other emotions related to the anticipation of a potential future event. They do this because on a practical level, people experience combinations of these emotions at the same time when they anticipate a potential future event, so it is useful in a clinical setting to combine them into one category.

Likewise, I consider it useful to combine the totality of our responses to a perceived injustice under the umbrella of “anger.” To me, when a person experiences an injustice, they experience a plethora of emotions, which include rage anger, frustration, fear or insecurity, sadness, disgust or repulsion, indignation, etc. Because of this, anger can look very different.

What all these different specific emotional responses have in common is that they are an emotion in response to a perceived injustice, and as such, the emotion directs the individual to act in a way to resolve that injustice. But specific elicited emotions may direct that individual towards very different (even contradictory) ways to act to resolve that injustice, but determining how to act to resolve the injustice is a core, if not the core, question in creating a healthy way to process and express our anger (something I will discuss in detail in Section Two).

A Few Different Types of Angry Responses

To show the variety of forms anger may take, here are two, opposite examples of patterns of anger, each of which fundamentally orients the given person to respond to the perceived injustice in a very different manner:

1) Rage or Active Anger: The first is the everyday understanding of anger: the person gets “mad” and starts acting, often aggressively (such as shouting or physically attacking someone), to counteract the perceived injustice. People often view this as a “hot” response since often when we are in this state, our bodies feel hot, and we feel the urge to do something. This form of anger seems to urge us to act to determine 1) who is responsible for the perceived injustice, 2) address or resolve the injustice by actively confronting/challenging what they did, 3) bringing those responsible “to justice,” and/or 4) preventing that injustice from being able to happen again.

I think there is a time for such responses, for example a time to turn over the proverbial tables and confront the “powers that be” for their injustices. Though, this form of anger can also error and/or become unhealthy when 1) it clouds other forms of judgement causing us not to use our other mental faculties to evaluate what is going on and how we should respond, 2) it only makes us aware of how others are part of the “problem” and blind to our own culpability; 3) directs us to act in an excessive, inappropriate manner, especially an excessively violent manner; and/or 4) causes us to go after someone who is not at fault, especially to “punch down,” directing our fury against those who are more vulnerable than us.

2) Passive Anger: In this angry response, we tend to perceive the injustice as a disruption or departure from tranquility. In contrast to the first form, which directs us to seek a resolution by changing the external world, this form of anger directs us inwards to do or become what is needed to restore a sense of peace and tranquility. For example, say in a conversation the other person says something offensive. The first form of anger may direct you to pushback and argue, to directly counteract the person for their statement (and if that fails, leave in a hush); whereas, the second form of anger would direct the person to say nothing and silently shrug, maybe steering conversation away from that topic without “ruffling feathers” so that the conversation can continue in “peace.”

This is a form of anger, although it contradicts the typical definition of anger. Instead of being directed externally against whatever seems to be causing the injustice, this form of anger gets directed inwards, orienting the person to act to reorient themselves to maintain stability, tranquility, or at least stasis. There are times when these kinds of actions are useful, but they tend to error and/or become unhealthy when 1) the stasis being pursued contradicts a better, more lasting resolution to the injustice, 2) when it leads to the person directing guilt or hatred onto themselves, especially for problems beyond their control, and 3) when doing what is necessary to maintain such stasis involves sacrificing essential aspects of oneself.

Conclusion

These are not the only two ways anger can manifest, but they provide a sense of the variety of what anger can mean for different people in different circumstances. Each orients the person towards a type of action in response to the perceived injustice, even if these two examples happen to orient towards partially opposite response. The first may direct one to aggressive action against an external threat and the second towards a passive, inward response

Now, just because one experiences an emotion that directs one’s action does not mean that that person necessarily performs that action; for example, maybe they become enraged, wanting to do something violent, but decide not to. Emotions seem to direct us towards certain types of actions/responses, but of course, we may also use other mental faculties beyond that emotion to ultimately decide to have a different response.

Finally, since anger is the emotional process a perceived injustice, the way in which that individual perceives the injustice will significantly shift how anger manifests in that specific circumstance, and overtime, our various emotional responses may form dispositions or habits that we subconsciously use to process the next unjust situation. In the next part of this series, I will talk about the best ways to respond to anger and the habits of anger we form over the course of our lives.

(Read Part 2 in this series here.)

A Tentative Defense of One-Side Advice Arguments

In two recent conversations with friends, each independently mentioned how they have come to value expository writing that maps out all the different sides of a complex issue and explains how various people or schools of thought have navigated the issue, letting the reader explore the various perspectives themselves and forming their own answer. This form of writing is important, but for whatever reason, when I write prose, I have been drawn to a certain type of opposite: presenting a specific side or angle as a persuasive piece in order to nudge the reader to consider that side. This essay is a tentative defense of such one-sided arguments.

Life is complex, and practical or everyday wisdom needs to include multiple, even contradictory, pieces of advice in order to successfully navigate this complexity. Books or other compilations of proverbs as a genre of literature handle this well. A proverb is a one-side suggestion for how to handle a particular situation, and many compilations of proverbs offer conflicting advice over the course of the work.

To a strict logician, this may at first glance seem like a contradiction, but in the complexities of life, two conflicting thoughts can be true in differing situations. For example, the early bird does get the worm, but the slow and steady also win the race. These popular proverbs in US society technically reflect opposite sentiments, but there are times in life when quick action is advantageous and times when slow pacing is more useful.

Everyday wisdom is best when it is well-rounded and can consider the potential values in all, including directly opposing, vantage points. This is where one-sided opinion pieces fit in. They, like a proverb, offer one side or vantage point about how to navigate this complex thing called life, and as such, have value in the tapestry of everyday wisdom.

Society and regular social discourse may favor certain angles or ideas and don’t give other advice or vantage points due consideration. Presenting these left out angles as one-sided pieces counters that tendency and gives this perspective its due. It too may not be the only answer, just like the mainstream angle isn’t, but by unabashedly preventing it in a one-sided way, one counteracts the tendency to ignore and forces people to give it its due.

There are times when encyclopedic maps of the entire landscape of an issue are useful, but such an “in the clouds” perspective does not always meet people where they are when figuring out how to navigate the complexities of everyday life where it occurs. For that, one often needs to trudge along on the ground and explore how each piece of advice is well-adapted to its specific circumstance to determine what lessons (if any) one will glean from it that day. Maybe that is why so many cultures synthesize their everyday wisdom into proverbs, since it precisely reflects what has worked to solve each of the problems of that day.

The Principle of the Five Why’s and How Can You Use It Better Listen to Others

The Five Why’s is a common technique among UX researchers and other qualitative researchers that has personally transformed my approach to conversations. UX researchers interview people all the time, and to understand what they think about something, they always make sure to ask five “why” questions about their opinion in order to get to the heart of their opinion on the matter. Humans often rush into assumptions and judgements about what the other person thinks, and this forces us to slow down and get to the heart of how they view the world.

Let’s consider a classic UX research example. Say you just developed a great new app, and you wanted to see whether people actually find it useful. So, you observe several people using the app and ask them what they think. The first person says, “I find it frustrating.” This is really useful information, but obviously, more details would help even more. So, a natural response would be, “Why do you find it frustrating?”

Say the person gives a quick answer like, “I find the interface confusing, so I can’t do what I want to do” or whatever their frustration might be. This gives you a better understanding of their frustrations, but you can dig even more. According to the Principle of the Five Why’s you should ask at least five follow-up questions about why (or in some cases, how) they feel the way they do.

This allows you to hone in exactly what their underlying needs and expectations are and how well your product meets those needs for them. Now, technically, not all follow-up questions have to be “why”. The idea is that like, “why” questions, ask questions that nonjudgmentally help uncover the underlying reasons for the opinions. For example, in this scenario, I may next ask, “What about the interface do you find confusing?” or “What are you trying to do, and how is it preventing you from doing it?” Both of these are not “why” questions, but they help orient me to understand why the person feels frustrated. Sometimes you have to learn some basic data about what their experience was before you uncover the next level of detail about why they had that experience.

I often use this principle in regular conversations as well. Too often people assume they know what the person is thinking and make assessments based on their initial judgements. Asking follow-up questions forces us to slow down and consider in-depth what that person is trying to communicate. After listening, one can still disagree with a person’s conclusions, but at least you will know why. In almost every situation, I have found at least some points of agreement even when I thought we had opposing, conflictual perspectives.

It also calms you down. In tense conversations, we often simply react. Maybe we presume they meant something hostile and respond in turn. This helps us survive threats but clouds our ability to empathize with others and reason through their ideas. Asking questions allows us to pause and reflect for a few more moments on what else might be influencing where they are coming from.

Feel free to try it in regular conversations, especially potential arguments or other tense conversations. Pause and ask a few “why” questions to understand the layers behind their thoughts before launching into your perspective on the matter. It will change the course of the conversation. Worst case scenario, by the end of it, you will still disagree with them just as much as you did initially, but often you will learn something and will discover a way to carry on nonconfrontationally in a way that involves both of you getting what you want. If you disagree, you have lost little by hearing them out and gained the ability to disagree productively since you now know exactly where the other person is coming from.

Now in every interaction, you don’t have to literally ask five questions. That exact number may not fit every interaction. The spirit of the rule is to ask follow-up questions that force you to engage with the reasons underneath someone’s impressions. For me, I often ask follow-up questions until it feels uncomfortable, until I feel my thoughts well up so strongly within me that I am eager to jump in. Then, I ask just two more follow-up questions. In the unlikely event that I still think they are totally wrong by the end of those two questions, I can jump in with my perspective. This slows me down and forces me to practice more constraint and helps me see a path to empathize and/or disagree in a positive and productive manner.

Seeing People’s Inner Child: De-escalating Adult Conflicts by Addressing Unmet Needs

Many adults still act like children. Some routinely; others only on their bad days. When you see someone lashing out impulsively or defensively when they argue with you, it can be helpful to step back and see their inner child to put their behavior into perspective.

This is not the same as agreeing with them: they still may be wrong. But seeing their tantruming inner child can help you understand what needs they feel are not being met and are causing them to lash out. This can be something you address directly. Figuring out a workable way to acknowledge and maybe address that need within the bounds of your own goals can be a practical way to get through the moment, especially when they are in a position of authority over you. This usually slows them down and helps deescalate the situation.

At the very least, it can help empathize with them. Empathizing is not the same as agreeing, nor is it the same as allowing or enabling any inappropriate behavior they may be doing. It is understanding their behavior enough to see the human inside, often a series of needs screaming to be heard, and confronting it directly. Even if your empathy is not safe to show in the moment or if they reject your empathy, empathetically acknowledging the feelings of another is about maintaining your own humanity and not allowing another’s behavior to curb your ability to acknowledge and address the humanity of others around you.

So, how can this help you respond? Others have spoken at length about how to use understanding to negotiate and reduce conflict (see this for example). One can use empathy to diffuse a situation by acknowledging their side, to demonstrate mutual self-respect, or if necessary, to set proper boundaries for one’s own needs.

Pausing to reflect on the needs the other has can help remove you from the intensity of the situation, which would help you form the nuanced response necessary. It can allow you to understand not only their needs, but your needs and develop an effective strategy for how to meet those needs in the moment. Often, when someone seems to come after us, our bodies move immediately into a reactive, defensive response. The perceived threat puts us into “go mode” and taking an extra second to understand empathetically gives us the space to pull back, assess the situation anew, and use both our emotions and reason to develop a better, strategic response.

Instead of launching, you pause and force yourself to think about it from their perspective, sometimes you realize aspects of your behavior that you do need to address. Worst case scenario, after you reflect for a bit, you still conclude that you are wrong, and in that situation, taking a step back allows you to help confirm that, and you are now in a better mental space to respond appropriately.

The Affluence Trap: Why More Money Doesn’t Always Mean More Freedom

You would think that those who make more money would have less financial troubles, but in many cases, you would be wrong. In surveys, people with higher income often report living from paycheck to paycheck.

This is because many wealthier people succumb to income inflation. This is a common human phenomena where those who make more money spend more on more expensive items and thus feel the need to make even more money. The millionaire struggling to afford the payments to keep his private airplane fueled, if you will.

Why does this happen? In short, because when many people make more money, they get a sense that they should live it up, buying more and more things. This can creep slowly and before you know it, one is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on simple payments.

Whether you are wealthy or of modest means, these are three tricks to counteract this tendency:

The first is to think about what you really want in your life. Too often people assume that because they are wealthier, they should want and do the things that other wealthier people seem to want to and do: to buy a big house in whatever neighborhood is considered “nice,” buy expensive clothes, eat out at fancy restaurants, etc. But are these things you actually want?

It is reasonable to shell out more for better quality or for the things one truly desires in life, but most of the time, more expensive does not mean better quality. Many luxury brands are not better in quality; they are just more expensive, and to a point, many fancier restaurants similarly do not have a similar increase in quality. In situations where the more expensive product has a useful feature for you, it can be worth it to pay more for it, but most often, restaurants or stores that charge more do so because people think of more expensive products as better, not because they are actually better.

Similarly, buy only the specifications that you need. This can include durability: paying a little more for something that will last a long time costs less money in the long run than having to replace it down the line. If you only need a normal computer with normal processing, shelling out thousands of dollars for the latest high-end portable “supercomputer” does not make sense. Some people (like software engineers) may need those specifications, but if you are not one of those people, don’t worry about it. Marketers often convince us to buy products beyond what they actually need.

Second, don’t buy on credit. People should not do this unless they absolutely have to, and those who are making higher incomes do not have to. (The less well-off often get trapped into buying on credit, crippling them with debt, but that is a topic for another article.) Spend the money you have, nothing more and nothing less. I am even hesitant to get out a loan and pay for expensive purchases: purchase what you can afford right now. If you are buying something that takes years to pay back, consider whether that thing is worth being overworked in a crappy yet well-paid job with an obnoxious boss to complete your payments, because that is in effect what you are doing. For example, would you rather have a cheaper used car that still gets you around but retire early? I have a friend who bought a second home in the countryside, which he never visits. Was it really worth it to him to have to work several decades to own a place he doesn’t do much with? No. It was self-defeating: to pay for his new home, he had to work a job that never gave him the free time to enjoy the home in the first place. Many major expenses like cars and a new home may not be worth sacrificing the majority of one’s life to.

Buying experiences like traveling to new parts of the world or having adventures can be a fulfilling yet strategic use of one’s wealth. If you can afford a few thousand dollars, spending it on a trip to some new part of the world you have never been to is likely a far more spiritually enriching use of money than using it for the first month’s down payment on a bigger house in another part of town. If your circumstances change, you can always claw back on experiences, but a mortgage locks you in for decades.

Finally, think for yourself about what is important for you and what you value. Many wealthier people simply enact the narratives of what it means to be wealthy they see around them consciously or subconsciously. They think, “Oh being wealthier means, I get a big house and a fancy car, eat fine foods,” and so on. This traps them into a certain lifestyle where they must work a very selective number of positions that can pay for such a lifestyle. What do you truly find meaningful? It may not be wearing fancy jewelry, and it may not be living in the standard place every other wealthy person lives in.

Like many humans, many wealthy people live with a type of insecurity, as if they have to prove their value to others. This can lead to them showing off their wealth as a sign of their status. “Look at me; I made it.” For those like this, their problem is internal: they need to work on themselves and figure out why they don’t value who they are. If they did value who they are, they would realize how useless and fleeting the approval of others (especially strangers they don’t know) actually is.

For others, they buy the things other wealthy people seem to buy rather than think through what they value and actually want in life. Unsurprisingly, these social expectations are ever expanding: companies will always present us with another thing we need to get until we stop listening to them. Pausing and thinking for yourself about what you actually want knocks us off of that treadmill.

I hope this helps in thinking about how to deal with income inflation. Don’t follow others with means into this trap. Swim against the current of our society telling us to spend spend spend and figure out how to enjoy your life on your own terms.

What You Can Learn about People based on the Questions They Ask

You can learn about some by the questions they ask. You not only learn what people think but more importantly, what people want to know about the world around them. This provides a window into who they are.

Here are a few common patterns of question askers to look out for:

1) Those who ask confirming questions:

When talking with you, these people ask questions to confirm what they already suspect. This can be a sign that they primarily resonate with their own past experiences.

Confirming questions are often close-ended, even yes/no questions. Examples might include:

“Oh you went to Italy. Did you like the pasta? I heard it was fantastic there.”

“Was that exam easy? I found that exam easy when I took it last year.”

These people expect a certain thing to be true, and only ask questions based on their past experiences or what they have heard to be the case. Obviously they may be wrong. For the above questions, maybe you found that exam difficult or did not enjoy or eat much pasta in Italy.

Habitually asking close-ended questions can demonstrate a retrospective orientation: they often consciously or subliminally are thinking about their past experiences, whether their own experiences or the experiences they have heard from others. Either way, their mental process for these questions often involves determining parallels from past experiences and using that to determine what must be the case for you in your situation.

2) Those who ask questions about facts

Another type of question asker asks about the facts or specific details of the situation, including the “who”, “what”, “when”, and “where”. For personal stories, their questions may focus on the details of the environment or on people’s external behavior rather than trying to understand internally what people were thinking or feeling.

Examples:

“What color was the car that cut you off?”

“What was the name of the town you visited?”

“What did she look like?”

Sometimes they can feel like detectives, uncovering the details for their police report. Sometimes a few of these questions can be helpful to understand to grasp what happened, but for emotionally intense experiences, for example, too many factual follow-up questions can form a type of distraction.

It can show a fixation of surface-level facts over emotional experiences. I often find these questions most frequently asked by people who are less likely to discuss feelings, preferring a more distant, action-oriented veneer.

3) Those who ask questions about feelings

Talking to this type of person can feel like you are talking to a therapist:

“How did that make you feel?”

“How do you feel about that now?”

“What was it like having that happen to you?”

In regular conversation, I find these less common than Type 2, but I still encounter them from time to time. They focus on how you feel and often seek to sympathize or empathize with your experience. I personally usually really enjoy these questions and frequently ask them, but some who are not used to talking about their emotions may find it overwhelming. This type tends to want to focus on and understand your subjective experience as a fellow human.

4) Those who ask questions about ideas

This type intellectualizes pretty much anything you are talking about. A philosophical conversation about the theory or social implications of the phenomena may seem like their favorite kind of conversation.

I will often see people who do this abstracting the specific things you are discussing into a broader theme to then discuss the merits of in the abstract (e.g. “I’m sorry you got broken up. What do you think the ideal person would look like for you?”). Some people may enjoy moving the conversation into such an abstract direction, but sometimes, it can also detract from the specific experience you want to talk about.

Some may also generalize to understand the social implications of the specific topic at hand (e.g. “I’m sorry that you had that experience during your last doctor’s visit. How do you think we should change the healthcare system to help prevent that from happening again?”). Doing this can veer the conversation close to “politics”, which may or may not be a good thing depending on the conversation.

People who ask these questions tend to themselves be abstract thinkers, those who generally prefer thinking about more theoretical rather than tangible topics.

5) Those who do not ask any questions at all

When speaking in one-on-one conversations, this type is the easiest to spot. They simply stand there listening to when you are done talking and do not ask any questions at all.

This group has two subtypes:

A) Those who seem to prefer to not talk at all: They may not ask any follow-up questions. That can mean they were not interested in talking with you or about that topic, whether they weren’t interested in talking with you specifically or they do not like talking in general.

B) Those who ask one or two simple questions (most often confirmation questions of what they already think like the first group) before ending the conversation. They also may not be interested in talking with you, but sometimes I will see people who seem genuinely interested in talking about the topic but not be able to ask more than one or two follow-up questions about the topic. This can mean they are an internal processor and may need your help guiding them through what about the topic you two should explore in more detail.

C) Those who, instead of asking follow-up questions, wait until you are done talking (or interrupt you) and go into their own point or story. Everyone can do this from time to time, but people who habitually do this often are not listening. Without being aware of it, they think of themselves and their experiences first and foremost.

6) Those who ask open-ended questions

This final group can be the most interesting but also the most complex. They usually ask follow-up questions, whether about your feelings, thoughts, or ideas of your topic. Good follow-up questions keep you within your own thought process and prompt you to explore it in more depth, but sometimes people will also ask open-ended follow-up questions that seek to extend or move your point or story to a related topic.

Examples:

“What do you think of what he did?”

“How would you have approached that differently if it happened to you now?”

“How has your perspective on that changed over time?”

They often have a genuine interest in understanding your perspective, but these questions can often be the most complex to answer, since they require you to think through how you would answer them.

What Are Emotions, and What Do They Tell Us About Ourselves?

Many are critical of emotions, seeing feelings as something that stifles them, as something they must overcome with reason and rationality, but that is foolish in the long run. We should be aware of our emotions because they teach us crucial lessons about ourselves and our needs.

Emotions are one of our internal mechanisms to orient us towards what we need. Thus, they are crucial. Even though sometimes emotions can be overwhelming or lead people to make decisions in the moment that turn out to be poor ones, we should not ignore or suppress our emotions.

Instead, we should seek to understand what they are telling us about what we need. Anxiety is a sign that we consider whatever we are anticipating as important. Worry and fear area signs that we are concerned about our wellbeing. Anger is a sign that we feel an injustice has threatened ourselves or others we care about.

At the end of the day, they are signals. Signals that can turn out to be correct or incorrect. Sometimes we are angry at something that we discover is not a real injustice, and sometimes, what we fear turns out not to be much of a concern. But often they are not wrong: our minds can be very good at assessing what is important.

Either way, it’s important to process the emotion, understand why you feel it, and then determine the best response to having the emotion. Through this, we can synchronize our emotions with our rational thinking. Using our reason to think about whether our emotion’s assessments are missing important information, and in turn, determining whether our rational self is ignoring something our emotions are picking up on.

A successful marriage between the two is a healthier way to respond to our emotions than suppression and a better way to use the tools in our psychological toolset to engage the world and live a good life.

Rethinking Presentations: Why You Should Stop Treating Presentations like Lectures

During my years of teaching teenagers, I have learned an important principle about trying to teach or otherwise foster knowledge in the world:

When teaching, those doing most of the mental work during your lesson are the ones doing most of the learning.

By this principle, if you want to teach something, then it is best to put them, not you, in the driver’s seat. To do so, position them to do most of the mental work during your lesson.

For example, take a classroom setting. In a lecture, the teacher does the most work: talking and thinking about how to explain things. Students are left with the mostly passive activity of listening (sometimes with some mild active activities like taking notes). ‘

Thus, lectures are designed to teach teachers, not the students, which is exactly backwards from what is supposed to do. I remember hearing this from many presenters: the act of preparing and then giving a presentation teaches them so much about the topic than anyone from their audience will ever be able to glean from it. This is because they are the ones doing most of the mental work.

This is similar in a workplace environment: presentations are one of the worst approaches to teach anything. If you want someone to learn or reflect on something you yourself have learned, it might be helpful to pause to reflect:

How did I learn this material, and how can I replicate that process during the time I have?

What kind of environment or activities would work to have my participants explore the activity on their own? How can I produce that kind of environment?

These would likely give you ideas for how to make interactive lessons where your participants, not you, are doing most of the active thinking.

In regular conversations, the principle applies the same. If you are talking with someone about a life problem, have them do most of the talking or other forms of thinking. In my experience, too many people interject and go into a type of lecture mode when they sense they have something to teach someone.

Not only do you not always have something to “teach” when only hearing a few short sentences about someone’s life, but more importantly, even if you do have something to teach, asking questions to get them to think it through themselves is almost always a better way to teach that thing. As you ask questions and hear them out, you can get them to come to your suggestion on their own terms.