Polybook Day 11: The Dipshit List
I like to think about how intensity gets ratcheted up. How simple problems get way more complicated. How problems can be solved to make space for intimacy and fun and joy and friendship and building things together and replanting trees and doing the things you said you wanted to do from your God-given heart. And those things on net tend to be good things, for the individual and for society — better things than when one acts out of fear and despair.
Lucent wrote a wonderful piece about decomposing your desires, with an ethos I share deeply — that many feelings that are general feelings are actually an addition of vectors, like in linear algebra. He suggests that many prosocial feelings are actually a combination of other feelings in the right recipe.
There were big movements in psychology to see if there are “universal feelings,” and Paul Ekman and co. seemed like they found some. However that set of research to find the feelings that every single person on the earth can agree on as every single human possessing, as a grand psychological mission, is a different tradition and purpose from trying to make emotions useful to you or help you understand granular interpersonal dynamics.
All of this is a gentle preamble to a not so gentle dipshit list.
**How does this relate to the polybook and relationships? I think that the people who can complete *any* version of writing and working through a Dipshit list are likely to be substantially better partners to other people. Does this mean you should take The Dipshit List and give it as an activity to your partner to do as a shit test? No. Don’t do that. That would create a weird dynamic that would make them less likely to do the Dipshit List than more likely. Rather, just do it yourself. Keep it up as a practice. Over time, you will notice which people are implicitly just doing versions of it in their lives, and which people are literally not doing even the most soft fuzzy-pillowed version of it in literally any area. And you will notice their relative capacities to resolve drama on their own.
Can you write down what you do on a day and show it to your partner? Without freaking out? Without them freaking out?
When a partner tells you a bad habit you have, can you work to improve it, so they are happy, rather than doubling down on your “right” to have that bad habit?
The Dipshit List
People are bad at solving problems by not being a dipshit. But when you don’t solve problems you can solve by not being a dipshit, you end up with extremely complicated problems quickly. And then the core problem for you becomes — literally the new problem statement becomes — WHY is this person not solving problems that could be solved by not being a dipshit?
The method is simple.
Be open that you are not solving problems that you could be solving, by not being a dipshit.
Make a list of these problems.
Troubleshoot them one at a time.
That’s it.
You can get started right away, and solve a bunch of problems that can be solved by not being a dipshit .
Now, you may ask me, but what if you are a dipshit? What then?
Well then don’t go for super hard problems! The point is to work on problems that you can solve by not being a dipshit. If you are a dipshit, you can’t solve some problems, sorry. That might require something else.
But there is probably something small enough that even you, a colossal dipshit, can make progress on.
This is meant to be a little bit inflammatory. But only a little bit. The point of the above being extremely straightforward is that yes, some things are extremely hard. But some things are extremely straightforward. Considering everything in your life super hard is a way to not make progress on actually easy stuff that if you do, will make your life substantially easier.
You have to understand my perspective here. If we are thinking about bits, in computer science, something being 20% faster doesn’t actually improve its speed much. If an algorithm runs at N^2 versus N, then the coefficient in the front of it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter much if it’s 20N or 2N, compared to if it’s N^2 or N. This is Big O notation.
If you are doing regular engineering though, or architecture, or regular business, a 20% difference can easily make the difference between a project being literally impossible to a project being literally possible. A bar that is making 20% profit versus 0% profit or 20% loss is a bar that is going to survive year after year, rather than needing to close down. Having 20% more material for an engineering project for that day means that the workers have something to do that day if there is a bottleneck on the “optimal procedure” — meaning they can do something that day rather than needing to stop work. A 20% increase in something generally means you have the resources and brain space to plan for the future. Imagine if you were 20% stronger, right now. How would that feel? You wouldn’t even recognize your own strength in your own body, you’d feel so overwhelmed.
There are some hard things about the list that I am happy to be honest about.
Admitting 1 is difficult. Admitting that there is stuff you have control over that you can solve but are choosing not to solve can be psychologically difficult. Lots of people have lots of trauma in this area. Trauma tends to respond very differently in different people to different things. Often both the rough approach and the gentle approach do not work. That’s part of what makes trauma so challenging. The point of this exercise is to work on things you might have less resistance towards.
You do actually have to make a list that you care about. The list can’t be “I’m not making the Martha Stewart pancakes because I’m a dipshit. :D :D :D .” No. It actually has to matter to you. It actually has to be leverage points in your life. It has to be the stuff that unlocks the 20% more bandwidth so that you can make those pancakes.
You can’t blame other people for this. Your partner does the laundry and doesn’t sort it, and that’s why you can’t ever find your underwear? That’s not a problem with your partner for being a dipshit. Yes — they may be a dipshit. But you’re a dipshit here too. The point is to take control of the parts of your life that you care about that nobody is taking care of for you, or if they think they are taking care of it, are not taking care of it to your standards. The point of the dipshit list is to be empowered. You might be a dipshit but you are less of a dipshit, today, by being less avoidant about it.