More Interesting Problems to Have

We all have troubles, but do you have the right kind?

Image by Amanda Flavell on Unsplash

We in the Global North are all familiar with the phrase ‘first-world problems’. But where I’m from, a popular phrase that long predates its more politicised cousin is ‘Good complaint’. 

There’s a subtle difference between the two. Any minor issue that you’d only bother complaining about if you didn’t have any real problems is a first-world problem. Example: you need a phone upgrade and you can’t choose between the one with the good camera and the one with all the storage space. But a ‘good complaint’ is a problem that you can only have because your life is going so well, even by the standards of your first-world neighbours. Example: your fabulously wealthy aunt has just given you a €1000 Apple voucher, and you can’t choose between the phone with the Hollywood-quality camera and the one with more storage space than Hearst Castle. 

So if your friend starts moaning to you about how it takes them ages to get dressed in the morning because there are just too many designer suits in the wardrobe to pick from, the appropriate reply is ‘Good complaint’. 

I enjoy the occasional moan myself, so my current project is filling my life with stuff that gives you the kinds of problems you want to have, the sorts of things you want to complain about. My focus here isn’t Apple vouchers or nice clothes - though if you feel moved to send either my way I’m not gonna say no - but broader concerns to do with how I fill my time, what I’m aiming towards and how I relate to myself and others.

The major domains of my life all throw significant challenges my way more or less all the time, some external, some internal.¹ But there are challenges and there are challenges. The key question to ask myself is always: Is this a fundamentally good situation that’s got its complications because nothing in life is perfect? Or is it a bad situation that’s nothing but trouble all the way down? If a), the strategy is to be grateful for the good situation and learn to enjoy its challenges. Then they become moves in a game rather than a catalogue of oppressive burdens. (Ram Dass: ‘You can do it like it's a great weight on you, or you can do it like it's a part of the dance.’) If b), the answer is to get out of the situation, and then I won’t have anything to complain about.

The phrase that jumps into my mind these days when I catch myself fretting about the first kind of problem is ‘a more interesting problem to have’. Feeling bored and irritated every time you have to submit your own tax forms as a happy freelancer is a more interesting problem to have than feeling constantly depressed because your day job is grinding your soul into mush. Having the sort of minor relationship difficulties that even happy couples go through from time to time is a more interesting problem to have than wanting to be in a relationship and not being in one. Having teething problems after you’ve opened your first restaurant is a more interesting problem to have than sitting on your capital because you’re too afraid to take on the risk.

But none of these examples are drawn from my own life, exactly - I combine conventional and freelance work, am not in a relationship and don’t own a restaurant. So let’s get more concrete and take a look at just how much more interesting someone’s problems can get over a three-year period, using my own life as a case study. I’d use yours, but I don’t know you as well.

Oh, and apologies to whoever I’ve stolen the “more interesting problem” concept from - the phrase is my own, but it was definitely inspired by a post I read a while ago about moving forward in life, facing a new set of challenges, then moving forward again, facing a bigger and better series of challenges, and so on, in a sort of analogue to the process of Darwinian evolution. I’ve tried finding the post again but can’t so far. My gut says it was one of

apxhard

’s, though I’m not willing to rule out

Max Goodbird

,

Adam Mastroianni

or

Ektropius

. Anyway, thanks, whoever you are!

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I’m typing this from a cafe in Izmir, Turkey, and am just about to head up north to the city of Bursa.² I’m not from Turkey, from which I deduce that I’m currently travelling. It’s the first “jaunt” I’ve had in a good few years, a jaunt being a holiday where I spend weeks immersing myself in a country by moving from city to city and walking for miles, exploring every side-street that looks halfway interesting, visiting the museums, tramping through the archaeological sites, staring at all the graffiti, heading out at night, catching whatever concerts and one-off events I end up in the right place at the right time for,³ meeting locals, making friends, and generally planning adventures while leaving myself open to whatever wants to happen. My jaunts are some of my fondest memories, and I feel deeply grateful to be in the middle of another one.

Meanwhile, I enjoy my current job teaching adult migrants and refugees to speak English, and also enjoy the various other satellite jobs I do. As a working musician I get to cover some of my favourite artists and jam with singers, bands and choirs in bars, churches, nursing homes and theatres.⁴ And as a proofreader and copyeditor I get to work on everything from articles on European Union migration law to Minnesotan small-press novels to Greenlandic tour itineraries to online mission statements about uniting entrepreneurs, philosophers and artists in a shared war on poverty (in order: it’s a long story, it’s a long story, it’s a long story and it’s a long story).

Which doesn’t mean everything in my life is plain sailing. When I’m not travelling through Turkey I’m seeing a neuromuscular specialist every week who treats my so-far-intractable chronic condition by poking and prodding me in my sore spots, the idea being to train my body to get used to the pain rather than making it worse by tensing against it. I’m also seeing a Gestalt therapist every week who’s doing the same thing to my mind. I know there’s a bumper harvest to be reaped from poking at all my buried hurt, guilt and shame, and can even see the green shoots starting to emerge, but it’s the kind of process where things get worse before they get better and it’s not much fun.

I continue to struggle with relating to some of my family the way I want to - in spite, or rather because, of the fact that I love them so much. My social life is fine but could be better - nothing against the current crop, but I mourn the closer friendships I had in my 20s. And finding and maintaining a serious relationship feels as impossible as it always has - although the shadow work I’m doing is at least making the reasons for this a little clearer, and they’re kind of fascinating, and they deserve their own post.

Also, while all the projects I’m involved in are worthwhile in themselves, they’re utterly exhausting when taken together. Try as I might to protect myself, I keep falling back into the same old trap of overestimating my capabilities, pushing my body too hard, becoming exhausted, having a physical flare-up, then crashing completely as the flare-up initiates a chain reaction of symptoms that make it hard to get anything done of any kind. (And I mean of any kind.) This boom-bust cycle is my personal version of Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” premise, where once a year like clockwork the “civilisation” that is my lifestyle comes crashing down, and I have to spend months rebuilding it again.

So I’m taking advantage of the summer break to let some things go - while simultaneously taking this blog up again after a long absence, trying like hell to get my first studio album finished and promoted via a run of gigs, forcing myself to exercise more and even commit to regular yoga, getting slowly back into drawing and journalling,⁵ and generally filling the holes in my schedule as fast as I can make them.

Why?

Because pursuing my creative work stresses me out, but not pursuing it depresses me. Some people are genuinely happy clocking off and spending the rest of their day relaxing. I never have been and never will be, and I’ve tried very hard not to take on these big creative projects that don’t make me any money and often don’t make me happy either, and whenever I’m busy not taking them on I can’t shake the feeling for a single second that I’m trapping a boisterous songbird in a tiny cage, and my bodymind feels so full of unexpressed thoughts and feelings that it literally becomes a physical weight that somehow sits on my head and in my stomach at the same time, so I have to do this stuff, because I just do. I could waste time resenting it, or I could just get on with it, so I’m getting on with it.

It’s all about framing. The question is: are finally getting to the bottom of some of my deepest psychological issues, having more work available to me than I can safely take on, having millions of creative ideas hammering at my brain all the time that I never feel I have the time or energy to do justice to, and having a body that doesn’t let me away with anything less than doing what I and only I was put here to do, good problems to have? If I quieten down and look at everything with fresh eyes, the answer is yes. So the follow-up question is: should I be bitter about how constantly demanding my earthly existence is, or grateful for the wonderful amount of opportunity I’ve been given? If I stay quiet and fresh-eyed, I’d have to say it’s the second thing.

It wasn’t always like this.

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Rewind four years to when I started this blog. The world was locked down. No-one knew how long Covid was going to last or how bad it was going to get. I felt somewhat uneasy and disoriented as all my upcoming gigs got cancelled one after the other, but also secretly delighted to have all the time on my hands to write, meditate, record my own music and, well, start a blog. Confined to barracks and living off welfare, it felt great to just pour my thoughts onto the page day after day.

I’m not sure I knew it at the time, but I was also going through a nervous breakdown. The virus made us all a little OCD, but I already had OCD so it made me very, very OCD. I wasn’t just wiping down groceries and sanitising my hands every two seconds, I was taking well over an hour to put the bins out because I had to plot out every single mini-step of the process in advance to avoid the slightest possibility of transferring the virus from the bins to the house or the house to the bins. (None of my fear was based on having the virus myself; it all centred on unwittingly passing it on to family members, fellow shoppers, retail staff or bin collectors.)

Back then, my biggest problems revolved around how to move from one room to another without contaminating the door handles, go on a walk without potentially taking out the whole neighbourhood, and generally go about protecting people whose safety I cared about roughly ten times more than they did. You can look at these problems through any number of lenses, from obsessive compulsiveness to trauma response to the psychological ramifications of pandemics. But what I want to focus on here is how boring they were. Repetitive. Insular. No conceptual meat to ‘em. Just not very innovative or exciting intellectual territory.

Thankfully, a course of OCD-specific counselling eventually got me to the point where I could function more or less normally again. And that was that as far as my mind was concerned.

But my body wasn’t going to forget that easily.

A few months after the worst of the episode has passed, I’m living in a new place, getting on with my projects, when WHAM. I eat too much one night, feel weird the next day, start into my rice dinner, violently throw it up, go deathly pale, experience the worst stomach pain I’ve ever had, go straight to hospital, have an X-ray taken, am told there’s no immediate cause for concern, and go home.

That was three years ago and I’ve had a permanently tight stomach ever since. I know what makes it better and what makes it worse, I’m learning more about how to manage it all the time, it’s getting better very slowly in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of way, and I’m now at the point where I can combine looking after it with earning a reasonable amount of money.

That’s after three years of, let’s say, increasingly interesting problems. For the first few months, a lot of my day revolved around ‘What happens if I eat this? How about this? What activities cause the muscle to tense so much it’s hard to move? What activities don’t? How much can I do in a day when my available energy’s been halved? What kind of essay can I still write when the mild brain fog comes on? Do I need to change my writing approach to accommodate it?’

I improve over time. My friend invites me to Lisbon for his wedding, I go, and I discover I can digest sweet food and alcohol much better when I’m with a bunch of people than I can alone, and can do more in a day on holiday than I can at home. (Still true, and goes to show the role physical and mental tension play in this soup of aggravated-IBS-and-possible-fibromyalgia.) This takes care of the ‘Can I travel with this?’ question, which is a more interesting question than ‘Can I get out of bed with this?’

Next question: ‘Can I hold down a job with this?’ Not most jobs, no, but that just forces me to get creative about the roles I choose. I settle on part-time work as a note-taker, which involves nothing more than transcribing the content of applied-college lectures for neurodivergent students.⁶ As I continue to get healthier, I become able to take on increasingly demanding work that reflects more of my skillset.

Next question: can I date with this? Only with great difficulty, but where there’s a will there’s a way, and I get the job done - while often bemoaning the fact that my hangups prevented me from doing more of this back when I was perfectly healthy. What’s that saying about getting your head together while your body is falling apart?

This is all 2021-22. From there, the questions have progressed to Can I get the band back together…can I finally record that long-awaited (by me) debut studio album…having done that, can I now mix and release it…can I travel the way I used to…can I escape the stress-burnout cycle while earning a living, looking after myself and doing the things that matter to me…and can I reconstruct my life with stronger foundations so it can’t be toppled by external circumstances like it was in 2020? I’ll keep you posted.

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If I represented the above in a graph, it’d show the interestingness of my problems increasing with time, progressing from ‘How can I open this door without getting any germs on it’ three years ago to ‘Where should I have my album launch’ today. I’ve every faith that my problems will continue to get more interesting over time. I may or may not ever have ‘Where on earth am I going to put all this money’ problems, but am confident I’ll always have ‘How can I continue to make my outer life reflect my inner one as much as possible’ ones. The central aim being to fulfil and express myself as much as possible while making myself useful, rather than having to choose between the two.

My life has always been full of problems, and always will be. That’s how it goes for most of us: we all dream of a day when we can put our feet up and enjoy a carefree retirement, but even the most carefree retirement isn’t really free of care - how could it be? Life has a way of catching you out, like it did with the person I used to live with who did everything in his power to shut all responsibilities, obligations and even connections out of his life. In the time I lived with him he was the most carefree person I’d ever met - in the literal sense of having almost no-one and nothing to care about - and also maybe the unhappiest.

If you do set out to engage with the world, life becomes like a video game: as soon as you get to the end of one level, you’re thrown right into the next one. If I stay put too long Sonic starts glaring and tapping his watch, and if I delay much longer he starts lying down and yawning. You have heard it said that we’re never tempted beyond what we can bear, but verily I say unto thee, life always challenges you to the limits of your ability. If you develop more abilities, you take on new projects befitting those abilities almost without noticing it, and lo and behold, you’re being pushed to the limits of your ability again.

An even better analogy is learning the piano. For the dedicated student playing the piano never gets easier, because as soon as you’ve mastered the simple pieces you move on to more difficult ones.⁷ You never get to rest on your laurels, because you’re always setting out to be a little bit better than you were yesterday. So the basic “problem” of not being instantly good at the piece you’re working on never goes anywhere. All that happens is that the pieces you’re not very good at yet get more intricate; in other words, your problems get more interesting.

And thus endeth the essay. Oh wait, no it doesn’t, because I’m forgetting a -

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— MASSIVE CAVEAT —

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If your life is really hard and some days it’s all you can do to open your eyes and keep them open, I’m NOT saying your life is uninteresting and I’m CERTAINLY NOT SAYING IT’S NOT WORTHWHILE! The point I’m trying to make is a little subtler than that, and I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings, so here goes.

Imagine life is a race.⁸ All our lives we’ve been conditioned to believe that the purpose of life is to win the race. The problem is we don’t all start from the same place: some of us have to run ten miles to get to the finish, others only have to run a mile, for others it’s a few feet, and for the lucky few, they just have to shuffle their toe a bit and they’ve made it over the line. Instead of looking at those few and thinking ‘Well they clearly have an advantage, nothing to get upset over’, we think ‘They passed the finish line before we did, so they’re better than us’. Even worse, we look at people who are just standing around near the finish line, and think they’re better than us too.

Now imagine God watching the race. He’s not scoring the race according to who passes the finish line first; he’s only looking at who’s running and who isn’t. So the person who starts ten miles back and covers a lot of ground is judged to have achieved more than the person who just wiggled their toe. If all the runners could adopt the God’s-eye view of the race, they’d each have a totally different perspective on their performance.

The concept of privilege has got us all used to thinking in terms like this when it comes to certain socioeconomic and identity-based features of our lives, but of course it applies to absolutely everything that could possibly be affected by our genes and upbringing, i.e. everything: how happy we are, how easy to get along with, how intelligent, how gifted, how comfortable in social situations, how attractive, how good at getting a date, how nice, even how naturally decent we are. You look at someone who’s better at doing the right thing than you are, and think ‘They’re a better person than me’. But maybe they’re just wiggling their moral toe, while you’re sprinting from 20 moral miles out. Who’s “better” than who in that scenario?

From the God’s-eye point of view, our mission in life is laughably simple: to do the best we can in whatever situation we’re in. When I was in the grip of my OCD onslaught, the best I could do was incessantly wipe doorknobs down for a while, keep writing and meditating, make my life as beautiful as I could in trying times, and eventually do the counselling I needed to do and gradually lift myself out of the situation. All of this counted as covering ground in the race.

What does “covering ground” really mean, then? In my book, letting go of attachments and fears and sinking deeper and deeper into who you really are. Paradoxically, the more time you spend growing into who you really are, the more you’re in a position to help those around you. You help them simply by being completely yourself, just like the river benefits everything and everyone just by flowing to the sea.

This means that someone who’s born with a ton of energy and good spirits, giving them the ability to get a lot done and benefit a lot of people (which they may or may not even notice they’re doing), may not be “covering ground” in the sense I mean at all, because they’ve never had to. They’ve never needed to shed an attachment or let go of a deep fear, which means they’ve never really flexed their spiritual muscles.

You know what helps you cover a lot of ground in a short time? Breakdowns. As fellow traveller

Rebecca

explores here, they can actually be an excellent way of life’s forcing you to reckon with your deepest fears, attachments, core beliefs and self-perceptions - the ideas and beliefs you’re holding onto the hardest - and let go. If I hadn’t experienced my OCD at its worst, I’d never have known how deep it went in me, and wouldn’t have been motivated to finally tackle it. And tackling it has made me much more myself than I was before. The old cliché is true: problems are just opportunities in disguise.

In other words, tackling the problems I called “uninteresting” a few paragraphs ago was the prerequisite for my being able to authentically do the more interesting things I’m doing now. Just like bashing away at the C scale now is the prerequisite to the pianist’s getting to play the Waldstein sonata one day. I have faith that the same process is at work with the tangled mess of romantic and sexual hangups I’m currently pulling at. I’m staring down the barrel of the shadow today so that tomorrow I can enjoy reciprocal, healthy relationships that I never could have otherwise.

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So why bother distinguishing between “interesting” and “uninteresting” problems at all? In a way, the distinction doesn’t make sense. If someone is sprinting 20 mph from 5 miles out and someone else is sprinting just as fast from 30 miles out, their positions on the track may be different but their effort is exactly equal. We see one person who owns a successful nonprofit and another person who struggles to get out of bed; God sees them both sprinting 20 miles per hour and thinks ‘Well done!’

But I think the interesting/uninteresting distinction is worth keeping around for two reasons: 1) it keeps you grateful, and 2) it gives you a sense of perspective. On 1), a silly example would be the hotel room I’m staying in at the moment. It’s small, spartan and extremely stuffy, because I prefer to spend on museums, attractions and food than on luxurious accommodation.⁹ But sweating my nights away is a problem I only have because I’m in Istanbul. Is it a More Interesting Problem to Have than being too afraid of germs to leave the house? Yes. And voilà, there goes my bad mood.

As for 2), one of the saddest things about ongoing physical and mental health problems is that they tend to turn you in on yourself. With this insularity comes self-pity, a lack of hope and a lack of perspective, and none of those things are calculated to make you feel any better. That’s why one of the best balms for low moods is helping other people: bitterness and shame cut you off from the world and foster loneliness and alienation, while being of service to others fosters connection, which leads to happiness.¹⁰

If you’re really going through it at the moment, maybe all you feel up to today is opening a link on your browser and donating a small amount to a charity of your choice. But what a huge difference you’ve just made to the world! How good you’re going to feel afterwards! Look how much you’ve just widened your circle of impact!

As you work on your attachments and let more and more of them go, the effect should be that you become ever freer inside, and - as a direct result - ever more effective in the world. Your circle of impact gets wider and wider. You’re not necessarily much happier at first, because as soon as you whack one mole another one comes up, but the key thing to focus on is how free, authentic and effective you are.¹¹ So in my case, dealing with my chronic relational issues sucks, but if I hadn’t previously dealt with my OCD I wouldn’t even be in a position to deal with them properly, and once I’ve tackled this challenge I’ll be even freer, making me more able for the next challenge, and so on. You place the foundation, then you build the house.

This is why I like the More Interesting Problem to Have frame so much. If you’re making progress in your inner life - covering ground in the race - the question to keep asking isn’t ‘Am I problem-free yet?’ or ‘How do my problems compare to other people’s?’ but ‘Are my problems more interesting than they used to be?’ As you become freer and your circle of impact widens, your problems are guaranteed to become more interesting - so if you can answer your MIPTH question with ‘Yes’ then you know you’re on the right track. And so you maintain your perspective in the fray.

Again, the acid test is Are you feeling bad because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing in life, or because you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing and it isn’t always easy? The first kind of problem will always make you feel awful, and the answer is to stop doing whatever you’re doing (I know, easier said than done!). The second kind of problem melts away when you remind yourself that complications of this kind are OK, inevitable, the price you pay for following your heart.

The really good news is that it’s more fun to work on the Waldstein than on scales and beginner exercises. While the subjective level of difficulty you experience remains constant, the objective difficulty level of what you’re doing has gone up, and with it your enjoyment of what you’re doing. In the same way, the more attachments and hangups you drop, the happier you eventually feel, because happiness is nothing more nor less than the absence of attachments and hangups.¹² So you don’t have to choose between a life of meaning and a life of happiness. As far as I’m concerned, they end up being the same thing.

You never stop having problems, then, but after a while they start to feel less and less like problems. Life hasn’t got any easier on the outside, but it’s got much easier on the inside, because your problems are different and you approach them differently. You’re dipping your brush into that bright palette of colours you’ve been keeping under wraps and starting to splatter paint everywhere.

I may only have flashes of this wonderful truth at the moment, but - along with the experiences of people who are further along the road than I am - these glimmers are enough to convince me I’m running the right direction.

And as long as I’m covering ground in the race, it’s fine that my life continues to be full of problems.

After all, they’re pretty interesting ones.

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1. Though the more shadow work I do, the less I bother distinguishing between the two. I can trace just about all of my current external circumstances back to my internal attitudes and decisions, which isn’t about blaming myself for the past (we don’t choose our personalities any more than the country we’re born into) but giving myself some agency over wherever I go next (just because we don’t choose our default attitudes doesn’t mean they’re not highly malleable). And even if I didn’t believe I was responsible for my circumstances, I’d still be 100% responsible for how I respond to them.

2. And now I’ve moved on from Bursa to Gebze, near Istanbul. And now I’m finishing the piece off in Istanbul. What, you think it only takes me a day to write these things?

3. A few days ago that was the Turkish classical singer Ahmet Özhan performing alongside some whirling dervishes in an open-air concert venue in Bursa’s Kültürpark. A few days before that it was Melike Şahin in the ancient Greek theatre at Ephesus - I’d never heard of her, and just happened to be exploring the ruins that day. Elect me World President tomorrow, and henceforth every concert will take place in an ancient Greek theatre under the stars. You have my word.

4. In fact I suspect it was my music background, and not my slender previous experience in English teaching, that got me the day job. One of my classes involves leading a small singing group, who learn English through the song lyrics as well as via my instructions. I was asked in the job interview if I could take on something like that, which brings to mind Scott Adams’ concept of the “talent stack”: rather than becoming the best in the world at something, it’s easier to find a job you’re uniquely suited to by being reasonably good at a number of things that you can combine into a single career. My colleagues all have much more TEFL experience than me, but none of them have been accompanying choirs for seven years!

5. Hate to use this particular Americanism, but “diary-ing” isn’t a word yet. Oh well, at least I’m spelling it with two Ls.

6. Best part: the course was in film, a long-time interest of mine and something I’ve studied myself, so I was being paid to learn more about camera operation and editing software! And God bless the teaching-free classes where the students were busy at work on their own projects, leaving me free to clear my inbox and read Substack for hours on end.

7. It sounds like I’m drawing on my own life here, but I’m really not; I stopped being a dedicated student a long time ago.

8. Can’t remember if I’ve used this analogy here before. If I did it was years ago and you’ve all forgotten too, so no harm no foul.

9. Within reason. I’m at the age now where I Don’t Do Dorms Any More. Give me a room that’s only two inches wider than my bed, as long as I have it to myself.

10. People who don’t understand how Jordan Peterson could ever have appealed to so many people - and note that I don’t like the path he’s on or his political worldview - are missing the fact that the core pieces of advice he started out with are as useful as they are easy to neglect (I know I struggle with all of them): start by tidying up your immediate environment and work from there; take on the most significant task you’re capable of at any given moment; compare yourself not to who someone else is today but to who you were yesterday. This may not necessarily be particularly original advice, but very little advice is; I find ‘The only good things they have to say have been said before’ is a cudgel people save for those they dislike or have significant issues with.

11. I’m using “happy” here in the conventional sense of “a fuzzy, warm, pleasant feeling”. I do think it’s possible to feel a deeper, quieter kind of happiness even in the middle of extreme negative emotion, and that this is also a state that can be developed over time, but that’s another post.

12. If we follow the logic of this through, it means those who are assiduously working on the very building blocks of their personalities deserve more credit than the people flying around the world giving dharma talks. After all what’s more commendable, doing fun work or hard work; having lively conversations in your second language, or struggling to memorise your first words in it? As usual, take the God’s-eye view, and everything gets flipped upside down!