Whether You Care Or Not
I have heard the term “good problem” a few times in the past couple of weeks and I wonder what it really means. I’ve particularly heard it in the context of three situations that have been presented to me as “good problems”:
These all seem to stem from the idea that having too much of something is a “good problem” to have. I guess I don’t see the distinction. A problem is a problem. Sure, having too many products, job offers, or infielders certainly beats not having enough products to make money, being unemployed or only having a second baseman. Still, it seems that what are often considered “good problems” really aren’t “good” at all, but just “better” than some arbitrary alternative. Wouldn’t you rather have just a few really good products that make a ton of money and that you can produce in an efficient manner? Wouldn’t you rather just have a job that you are satisfied with and that pays you enough money? Wouldn’t you rather just have four really good ball players who each play a single infield position well and can hit for average and power? I would think so. If you are spending money to develop products that you can’t make, or wasting it on infielders who you can’t play, or constantly looking for where the grass may be greener, you are probably tackling the wrong “problem”, or at least not going about solving it the right way.
I think our society today lives in a culture where having options is a good thing. We make our own choices in this day and age, so the more options we have, the better off we feel. But when does having too many options become a real “bad” problem? I mean, we have so many choices of restaurants to eat at, stores to shop at, brands to buy, and channels to watch that we just take them all for granted. That’s what capitalism is really all about, right? A series of “good problems” to have? I think “good problem” is an oxymoron. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Ever notice how some people never change? I mean some people go through life and mature and grow and learn. Others just sort of don’t. I’d like to believe that I fall in the former category rather than the latter, but it seems like I’m coming across more and more people who are pretty much the same as they were one, two, three, five, or ten years ago. Why?
The way I see it, there are four possibilities to explain this phenomenon:
Okay, here comes some fuzzy logic based on these four completely arbitrary answers to my question of why.
I just can’t believe that it’s number one because some people, I think, do change significantly over time. I don’t think it’s number four because old adages usually turn out to be true. So I would say that it is some combination of numbers two and three.
This is why I actually love this forum for myself. I can write whatever the hell I want, back it up, make weak arguments, and come out believing myself. It’s genius.
So, finally, my conclusion to this whole mess.
I look at people that I’ve known in my past lives as a high school student, a college student, a working professional, and a boyfriend, a friend, or an acquaintance (and these are the people I’m talking about since people you see all the time rarely seem to change anyway because you see them gradually change if they do at all) and I wonder many things. How could I have ever been associated with this person? Why did these people exit my life? What did I get out of them at the time? What did they get out of me? Do I seem the same to them like they seem the same to me? I never have answers to these questions. I’m sure I never will. Still, I’m eternally puzzled by the present lives of past friends.
The past year or so has afforded me quite a few opportunities to contemplate and think about an assortment of deeply psychological topics about my life or life in general. These moments are often catalyzed by discussion with friends, good books and movies, or other thought provoking events. My favorite times are when I can look back on each day of the week and find one of these moments in each of the previous days. This has been one of those weeks.
Early in the week I was able to reflect on relationships, religion and politics. As if that weren’t enough, I went on to ponder ambition, communication and wellness. To top it all off I ended the week by analyzing the importance of family, race, happiness and love. That is one heck of a week. The only thing lacking was the consideration of sleep.
I suppose it all started on the weekend of my birthday and continued on from there. Birthdays inherently force one to think about the past, the present, and the future. Mine was no different this year. I took advantage of the fact that I got to be surrounded by so many of the people that I most care about.
The funny thing about birthdays is that, in a sense, in only a single day, age gets incremented by one whole year. Of course, the reality is that a person uses the entire year for growth and the label is only applied on that one day. I guess it’s that old battle of age vs. experience.
What I’m trying to say is that I owe who I am today to all the people who have influenced me and helped me grow over the past year. This includes everybody who has had some impact on my life since November 6, 2004. I got to spend November 6, 2005 and the rest of this past week with all of the important ones who are still in my life and who continue to help me learn and grow every day. This is my ultimate thank you note to those people, who are really the only people who would probably bother to read this anyway.
In general, I think most people would consider me a fairly cynical person. I don’t think I’d necessarily disagree with this assessment, but it does affect me, and I am actually often offended by it. I don’t strive to be cynical; cynicism just finds me. Even so, every time it is pointed out to me, I think, “I need to be a more positive person.” For the most part, I surround myself with positive people, and most of the time I am about has happy-go-lucky as they come. Unfortunately “easy-going” does not equal “positive”. In fact, I’ve found that being care-free is often what leads to this jaded negativity that I must exude. When you don’t really mind things very much, you tend to let bad things happen without really noticing them. When these things build up over time, they eventually result in some sort of minor explosion that tends to look something like pessimism. Invariably, for me anyway, it isn’t really anything negative as much as it is a form of venting designed to help calm down a series of strong emotions. Still, I’m such a stubborn soul that I’ll take my own ranting to heart and go on believing whatever brash opinions I’ve formed in my state of conjecture. Then they stick around for as long as possible until someone pokes holes in their thin existence and I start questioning myself (after first nobly defending my original position of course).
The flip side of this, however, is the potential of being so overly positive about everything that you end up seeing everything through rose-colored glasses. This is not a place I want to be. I’ve known a lot of people who have lived like this and it never turns out well. This sense of bliss is usually just ignorance in disguise. So I guess the trick is finding the balance between positive and negative attitudes such that the combination equals happiness. I always talk about balance and how it’s what I strive to achieve in all aspects of my life. It’s easily the hardest thing to solve, though, because there are so many variables in the equation that it becomes almost impossible to balance both sides.
Since this positive-negative balance is nearly impossible to achieve, I often end up using compensation as the answer. By this I mean that when things are negative, I try to shove a lot of positive stuff on top of it to compensate. (Rarely do I throw negative stuff on positive things though…what’s the point of that?) The major problem with this method is that the negative aspects do not go away, they just get temporarily hidden, only to be exposed later when the fabricated positive items expire and disappear. I need to start trying to take care of those negatives to balance that side of the equation instead. To keep with the math analogy, I need to work on simplifying.
I started school when I was about three years old. It was “pre”-school, but it was school. From the early age of 3 to the ripe old age of (almost) 22 I was in school and school was my life; it was all that I knew. My life went from grade to grade, semester to semester, quarter to quarter, summer to summer for 86% of my natural born life, which basically translates to 100% of the life that I can remember. When I finally reached the end of the line I was in 16th grade, my senior year of college, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I finally graduated and entered the working world, started to encorporate into Corporate America, and began my new school-less life. I was out of school for just under two years before…
I went back. I decided I would go for my Master’s Degree because my company would pay for it, so why not? Besides, I missed school. It was always a piece of cake for me anyway. Why wouldn’t it be? I’d been doing it for my entire life. Plus, when compared to the daily grind of a full-time job, going back to school sounded almost refreshing, and for the most part, it has been. It is completely true that school is a joke when compared to my job. However, that’s exactly the problem: school is a joke.
When school is your whole life, it is so easy to see its importance. School’s purpose is preparation. First grade prepares you for second grade; sixth grade prepares you for junior high; high school prepares you for college. What does college prepare you for? Yep, you guessed it: nothing! It’s supposed to prepare you for “life”, but it so drastically misses the mark on that one that parents have to continually cop out behind the “but it expands your mind” excuse in order to justify why kids should go to college. Don’t get me wrong, though. Everybody should go to college. The experience alone is a priceless one. However, school in general and college in particular is pretty much a complete waste of time. Essentially it is a forced social life with some semblance of an “education” mixed in that is designed to help bide your time while you wait to become an adult. By the way, I’m totally fine with this. It’s a societal necessity and I think it makes good sense.
What I’m questioning now is: what can an adult who has already gone through this academic assimilation and absurdity possibly expect to gain by going back? Other than a “graduate” degree (and hopefully a raise at work), I don’t know that I’ve figured that out yet. It’s tough for me too. I mean, I didn’t really go back just to get the degree. I really wanted to learn new stuff and try to apply it at my job. The problem is, there isn’t much new stuff, and the few things that are new, I’m totally unmotivated about learning because I’m too busy worrying about work and all the other stuff that real life brings; that’s all the stuff that being in school was able to shelter me from. On top of that, because school was always easy for me and because I haven’t been out of it for that long, I’m so accustomed to the ease and the format of a school environment that I don’t feel that I need to try that hard to do well. Then, when I don’t do well, I get upset. That in and of itself upsets me too. I shouldn’t care about an A or a B. That stuff is trivial when compared to deadlines and expectations at work. So ultimately it sends me into a downward spiral for no good reason.
Being in graduate classes where students often know more than professors and a working world where employees almost always know more than their managers, what do you really expect? It’s an upside-down design, but that’s how it is. I’m sure I will eventually understand better the importance of “higher education”, but for the time being I think I’m just going to have to keep going through the motions, hoping to gain something out of the trivial tasks that come with it…for now.
could not open XML input