It seems to me that a lot of suffering happens because vagueness has a way of maintaining itself by virtue of never being examined. Not that obsessive details are by themselves clarifying, if anything they can obscure the real problem by drowning it in a mountain of irrelevant observations, usually by placing the blame on other people and external circumstances, hence the importance of contextualization and not just specification.
Vague suffering is first of all not even expressed out loud, it's more like a general sense of unease which then latches out onto external things to avoid looking at itself. Anxiety is particularly prone to do that, because it tends to activate the mind and makes you think about a myriad of seemingly important subjects, but never the anxiety itself.
As soon as you express whatever it is that you dislike about your situation, it usually turns out to be significantly less than whatever your story-telling mind loves to engage with. Problems usually boil down to:
Not that those are easy to resolve per se, but as soon as you identify them, they usually seem a lot more approachable and solvable than a vague sense that "my life is a mess", or that "I feel behind in life", or perhaps even "I cannot do anything right".
When someone says something for instance that "everyone thought I was crazy for quitting my job", they are usually referring to the 3 or 4 people closest to them. When they say that "nothing is going right today" they are usually thinking of a sequence of 3 or 4 events that didn't go according to plan, not 10 or 15 of them. And when they say that "nothing has worked to solve this", they are again usually thinking of 3 to 4 attempts at most. 1
Words such as "every" or "always" are suspicious because their function is usually to stop further thinking, they are thought-stoppers. The first and main function of specificity I would say then is the ability to move beyond those thought-stoppers and articulate what exactly is going on.
Thought-stoppers tend to frame a problem as significantly worse than it is, and also makes it largely impossible to solve, because you cannot work on something as vague as a sense that "my life is a mess", you need specific problems so that you may then take specific actions. This is why a good recommendation when people feel overwhelmed is to dump all of their thoughts somewhere, whether it is through writing or speaking, so that they may explore their life situation as opposed to simply sit with it and complain.
The next step after figuring out the specific problems you have largely depends on their nature and the situation you find yourself in, both external but also internal. Sometimes you find out that your "problems" weren't really such, you were just clinging to assumptions inherited by other people, or an ideal self which does not serve you anymore. It's surprisingly common for people to have in their mind a convoluted series of things they "need" to do, which ultimately boil down to pleasing people they do not care about, and which is rife of mistaken assumptions.
Something like: I need to work at job I don't like so that I can afford a fancy guitar, so that I can be a better musician, so that I can impress a girl, so that she may sleep with me, so that I may respect myself.
Granted, I created a rather ridiculous example here, but the disconnect between the plan and the real need underlying here, in this case loving yourself, is incredibly common. As discussed in the previous piece, this is a case of solving the wrong problem.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is accept whatever is going on, at least it's an important step before attempting to change anything. There is a form of action which can more readily maintain the status quo than acceptance can, as strange as it sounds. This is because the former is grounded on an escape to a fantasy, which usually involves the mobilization of energy and motivation you might not have.
We are very familiar with those who get stuck in cycles of fruitless New Years' resolutions which get dropped off after about 3 weeks, because they never get clear on what exactly they want—they do the same convoluted sequence of goals as mentioned above: I want to lose weight so that I may look more attractive so that I may get a partner so that I can stop hating myself—and because they never build solid habits to work towards their goals.
But this cycle which consists in a burst of motivation, usually fueled by fear and dissatisfaction, and then followed by a predictable crash which then requires more motivation, is in fact how most people do things in our world, an unconscious strategy inherited by the school and work environment which constantly coerce you to do things for them.
The thing to notice then is that what many people see as inherent qualities, such as laziness versus motivation, are in fact clusters of skills you can develop. This is another major function of specificity: partitioning, coupled with the general mindset that it is possible to get better at things.
You can for instance notice that you are not very good at making decisions, and wish to examine it in more details. What you notice then is that you spend a lot of time being conflicted on decisions which are ultimately very trivial, whereas you tend to rush much more important ones, such as the type of people you share your life with. Those specific observations naturally lead to specific actions: you might want to simply try making decisions faster and see what happens. And then you might want to spend some thinking about the relationships you have, and whether you are fulfilled with them or not, and if not, what kind of people you would prefer to have in your life.
Those plans might or might not work, but the point is that specificity leads to a feedback loop, where you examine how you and the world interact with one another, figure out whether you like it or not, and if you don't, try to voice a specific direction in which you might want to go. All of this sounds incredibly basic, and that's because it is, but it is astoundingly rare to meet people who are willing to examine how they and the world interact with one another.
What usually happens instead is that people have some vague idea of both who they are and what life consists in. They might have gone through their school years as being an "introvert" and then define themselves over the rest of their life as an introvert, never considering that maybe they never found the people to be open around and be energized by. And they might have hated school so much that they start believing that work is always boring, coercive and meaningless, without considering that this is not a function of work itself, or even putting effort into something, but the type of bullshit "work" which has become the default option in our times.
This willingness to drop stories about your life and instead sit with your own direct experience is such a simple ability, and yet it is very rare. My explanation for why that is the case is because school, perhaps the institution which works during the most formative years of a human being, is all about disconnecting you from your personal experience. Instead of learning from your own experiences and directing your life, in school you are forced to engage with the curriculum and please the teachers. You are also forced to sit down for 8 hours a day at an age where you want to explore and explore what your body can do. This leads to all of your energy and motivation being boxed inside, channeled into some absurd mini-game of pleasing a teacher, instead of exploring the world and learning about it directly. If you are not doing well in school, the conclusion is not that there is a lack of fit between the environment and the child, which needs to be impartially examined, instead the blame is automatically put on the child. 2 I believe this is the main reason why people do not listen to their own experience, because school and society at large have no use for those. They are just concerned with producing cogs in a machine, not sovereign individuals.
If you couple this ability to listen to your own experience with the willingness to try specific experiments, then you get a feedback loop which goes roughly as such: 1) listening to your direct experience, which we could summarize as observing 2) making specific distinctions about it 3) take decisions about where to go and 4) follow up on those through specific actions 1) these actions lead to new experiences, which you can observe, and the loop repeats
One example of experiments you can run draws inspiration from scientific crucial experiments, the ones which allow you to establish which hypothesis is more probable than another. Ideally we would want such experiments to completely rule a certain theory or hypothesis, but in practice it's not as simple. So for instance, if you have struggled with sleep for most of your life, you could settle with some fixed idea that this is just who you are, that some people are just born in a way that they cannot sleep well.
Or you could experiment a bit for a month, and see if factors such as your screen time and how much you engage in thinking before going to sleep influence your sleep. (Unsurprisingly they influence it a lot) And then you might want to dig deeper and wonder why you spend so much time in front of a screen or thinking to yourself to begin with. Do those bring you joy? Are they aligned with your higher self? If not, what do they provide?
You can imagine how powerful this simple feedback loop is. In essence it's simply introspection done right, there is nothing hugely innovating or magical about it, but usually what happens is that people fail for very simple reasons, but then patch on the cognitive dissonance with some vague excuse, because they are not willing to look at their failures or lack of progress, because it is too painful.
Thus we get into a more existential aspect of this introspection, something a bit too deep for this piece which is already fairly long. Which is that the resistance towards change is not arbitrary, it has structure and even an intelligence, and more specifically, your intelligence. It calls itself "you", but we could call it for the sake of clarity the ego, as opposed to your conscious I. The ego thrives on vague examination and ways to dismiss what is going on to not look at reality. This is because the ego is illusory, it does not want to be examined because in an important way, that would be its death.
This is the deeper resistance to change, the one which can co-opt anything, including techniques aimed at self-change such as meditation, and which harbors many "intrusive" thoughts which "distract" you from doing what you would prefer to be doing. The ego is intelligent and resists introspection, and will provide you with tons of excuses so that you may stop paying attention to what is actually going on.
1 Some people try more than that, sometimes a lot more, but then again, are they trying consciously or are they just trying while they subconsciously do not want to solve their problem, so that they can complain to someone about it?
2 In the past we would say that the child is lazy or too energetic about the wrong things. Nowadays we say that they have ADHD or "Oppositional defiant disorder" (I am not making this term up, this strikes me as the new form of "Drapetomania"). In neither cases do we care about what the child actually experiences, we just want to label them as functional or not, and if they fall in the second category, provide them with "treatment". The insane environment they find themselves in however is never examined or questioned, it's taken as being without any fault whatsoever.
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Observation Learning Consciousness Skills Selfhelp Expandable
2025-10-07