Years and years ago, I knew a young woman in my friend circle who never could keep her car on the road.
Every time I saw her, she’d torn her car up and had to put it in the shop for an expensive repair.
She wasn’t getting into accidents. By all accounts she was a careful and safe driver. But the way she drove the poor car left it a wreck.
Lucky for her she wasn’t on the hook for the bills. Her parents covered that for her.
I always wanted to ask if it ever dawned on her that the problem wasn’t the car but the person behind the wheel. I don’t know if that ever occurred to her.
Machines don’t just break for no reason, no matter how many times my twins try to sell me on this.
Machines break when they’re used in conditions they weren’t designed for.
When that happens, and you’re stuck with a broken machine, there’s a choice to make.
Option 1 – You can keep fixing the broken machine. This is the option most will take as it’s the path of least resistance. There’s no thinking involved. Thing broke? Fix thing! Move on. Repeat the cycle.
The wiser among us will see the problem. If the kitchen’s full of smoke, you can maybe fix that by opening up the windows and the doors.
But shouldn’t you be a little bit curious about why there’s smoke in the kitchen?
That kind of curiosity comes naturally to me. Maturing into adulthood has been a harsh lesson in how few people share it.
In the minds of most people around you, the immediate painful symptom is the only concern.
What is causing the symptom? Who cares. Give me more pills.
Option 2 – You can upgrade the user so that they stop breaking it. I don’t know if my lady-friend ever stopped grinding her car into fine dust. We haven’t spoken in decades, but I like to imagine she’s become a better driver in the meantime.
There’s a simple idea here:
Your choices and actions contribute to the results you get. If you’re getting unwanted results over and over again, then changing your behaviors is the Golden Ticket to ending the problem.
But here’s the sting. It’s hard to sell people on the completely true belief that they are helping to make their unwanted reality.
We live in Therapy Culture. Nothing is your fault. No one is to blame. You aren’t responsible. Here, take this pill to fix everything bothering you.
With a driver grinding their car’s transmission into paste, you can pretty well identify the source of that problem and take steps to fix it with instruction.
It’s a little different with minds and bodies, and that is why you see this attitude in play nowhere more clearly than in the health and fitness [sic] industries.
I’ve always said that you can’t sell prevention, only cures. The masses won’t buy vitamins, but they throw billions of dollars at painkillers.
The saddest thing to see is in the “mental health” [sic] world where the so-called anti-depressants are the go-to for any kind of extraordinary psychological experience. Feel slightly uncomfortable? Here, alter your brain chemistry with a poorly understood chemical. We’re very smart.
We aren’t teaching people to become competent drivers of their “cars” — their bodies and their minds — but instead training them for addiction to quick-fix treatments that target their symptoms.
Digging beneath the symptoms to discover and treat the true cause of the problem is not good for monthly recurring revenue.
This is one of the weird counter-intuitive oddities that systems thinking helps us see. The more you treat the symptoms, the worse the cause gets. Which makes the symptoms even worse.
If my friend’s parents had invested in driving lessons, they might have saved themselves God knows how much in repair bills.
But that requires foresight, thinking beyond reacting to a crisis, and a desire to actually solve the problem.
Instead, they trained her to put the car in the shop every 3 weeks by focusing on the symptom of a broken car.
The lesson:
People waste so much energy and time on “fixes” that leave them in a worse situation on the other end. If they’d just fix the cause, all the pain would go away… and for a fraction of the cost (however you measure cost).
Think carefully about where you put your attention and where you invest your energy.
Matt Perryman