Choose Better Problems
The concept of ‘better problems’ is largely taken from author and physicist David Deutsch however I wanted to put it in my own words and try to apply it more broadly.
Life is about taking on better problems. Everyone has a responsibility to choose better problems when they can afford to.
Being in poverty is a bad problem to have since it depletes your physical and mental energy. Since getting to better problems requires both physical and mental energy, being in poverty makes it difficult to get to better problems, and that is why it is a particularly bad problem to have.
Once you have an income, skills, and some savings, maybe a better problem is to use a regret minimization framework to live your life the way you would have the least regrets near the end of it. Now you’ve gone from a bad problem of a lack of basic human needs to a better problem of existential fulfillment.
When we don’t pursue better problems, our lives and societies become static since we only concern ourselves with maintaining the status quo. While a peaceful status quo is something to appreciate, we must realize the current status of things is only due to a progression of better problems being solved.
There are a number of reasons why people don’t graduate to better problems.
Anxiety about regressing to worse problems can prevent you from seeing the better problems that are there for you to solve. If you earn above your needs and lifestyle and have money saved you can realistically pursue better problems than how to save money or improve your lifestyle. However, if you are constantly worried about losing what you have, then you will focus too much on a problem like saving money or preserving your lifestyle.
Taken to the extreme, and you get to a point where you compromise your integrity just so you can hold on to your job and maintain your lifestyle. You become a rent-seeker (to borrow a phrase from my favorite author Nassim Taleb).
That’s not to say that saving money and improving your lifestyle are shallow or ethically wrong problems. It’s just that the prolonged pursuit of solely these problems will not result in a better life (or community or society), and this is not obvious to a lot of people.
Bad cultural memes — memes in the sense of ideas that get replicated through behavior in society — can also prevent you from realizing what truly is a better problem to focus on. Politicians and the media will exploit bad memes for public approval or attention, which ends up taking the focus away from better and more important problems. For each bad meme you can usually find a more nuanced truth — however the nuanced truth doesn’t sell or spread as well as a bad meme so it can usually only surface in more long-form discussions (like podcasts).
Bad cultural memes have a way of taking over a person’s mind so that objectivity is not likely (or not possible in some cases). A meme’s only goal is to replicate and spread, and so the most effective ones trigger emotional or instinctual reactions that prevent thinking rationally and objectively. There are also bad memes that sound rational yet do not pass enough logical tests to be true. Here are some bad memes and their corresponding nuanced truths.
So it’s important to think independently, always pursue good explanations, and be aware of any bad cultural memes that you may have adopted unconsciously.
Trying to get to a place of pure utopia and being problem-free is another trap that can prevent you from graduating to better problems. If your goal in solving every problem is to reach a bliss-like state where nothing bothers you, you will undoubtedly set yourself up for misery as your life will begin to lack meaning.
Learn to enjoy the process of the problem you’re solving as well as the outcome, and realize that the potential for progress is infinite. If you struggle with focusing too much on the reward, try to randomize your rewards. Andrew Huberman talks about this in his podcast episode on how to increase reward and motivation. Here is the link to the segment of that podcast where he talks about this method in more detail.
Conclusion
Looking at life from a perspective of better problems can help give more context and meaning to your life, while at the same time making you more appreciative of your current position (by comparing it to the ‘worse’ problems that have been resolved by yourself or humanity).
The current problems you face are likely much better problems than your parents or grandparents faced. Leaving your future self, or your children (or the next generation) with better problems is something worth striving for. Whether you look at it from a personal, family, community, or business perspective, it’s important to identify what those better problems are so that you can focus on those and lead a more fulfilling life.
A better problem should objectively have a bigger impact on the domain that it falls under, and it’s likely to be more difficult and require a growth in knowledge. For example, in the domain of your personal finance, the problem of earning more money objectively has a higher impact on your personal finances (as long as you don’t raise your spending proportionally) than the problem of saving money. It’s also more difficult than saving money as it will require more creativity and logic (or conjecture and criticism to use David Deutsch’s words). Therefore it’s a better problem than saving money, and if you are in the position to choose between the two, you should choose to focus more on earning more money.
If we don’t pursue better problems when we can afford to, our lives and societies become static and we end up being rent-seekers who sacrifice integrity to maintain our lifestyles.
