Your response
On my flight, the man behind me started playing a game on his entertainment system. He was old, and didn't get that he didn't need to aggressively hit the screen for it to register what he was doing. Every 2-5 seconds, as I was falling asleep, this man would prod the screen hard enough to temporarily lift my head off the headrest. I sat there, telling myself that I'd be fine, that I was strong enough to deal with it.
When you encounter a problem in life, you can solve it by:
- Changing something about yourself (in my case, remembering that this wasn't a big deal, breathing and moving on, etc.), or...
- Changing something about the environment — typically, having to do with the problem (the opposite of what I did — for example, telling this man to stop)
These are the only ways that a person can solve the problem. A few additional observations/opinions:
- Changing the environment is often easier than you think.
- Changing yourself is often harder than you think.
- Both options are viable and worth considering.
- People often try one approach, and if it doesn't work, resort to the other.
- People usually shy away from either approach. After all, both require effort. Instead, they let the problem persist, or die away with time.
- Some people, even when they decide to take action, are biased towards one of the above. As you can tell from the example, I bias towards changing myself (as do, I think, most others). I have a tough time believing I can change other people, or the environment I'm in. This bias has interesting interplay between the first two bullets — for example, I tend to do a lot of work to solve a problem.