Bad Ways to Respond to Problems

The world has a lot of problems, and it sometimes seems that the way people respond to problems only makes things worse. We see this readily in arguments, which seem to be occurring with increasing frequency. People disagree in a public setting, then they disagree strongly, and the conversation might begin to involve insults and/or raised voices, until everyone gets angry and become convinced that the other side of the argument is immoral and unreasonable. We should try to be better than that. We should try to resolve things peacefully and logically. To do otherwise runs the risk of turning people, including ourselves, even further away from empathy and reason.

I also saw a reminder of bad solutions in an Extra Credits video on "Unpleasant Design." Extra Credits usually focuses on video games and video game design, but they sometimes touch on more important issues, like the unnecessary armrests on benches that make it impossible for homeless people to lay down on them. Rather than addressing the problem of homelessness, our cities regularly invest money in making life even worse for homeless people to drive them out of the public eye.

Even vegetarianism and veganism can be bad solutions to the problem of animal cruelty, because many of the animals we eat have, over time with both natural and selective engineering, become entirely dependent on humans. Without humans continuing to raise them for food, their species would face certain extinction in the wild. So, even the most well-meant and seemingly logical responses to problems can cause bigger problems if we don't consider the bigger picture.

My eyes have been opened today. I've learned about a few problems that I hadn't considered before in the form of solutions that only make things worse. It makes me want to do something, but I'm not sure what. I'm certain that I shouldn't overreact. I shouldn't lose my head or get angry at anyone. That won't help. But it also won't help to simply cover up the problems or to try to forget that I ever learned about them. Solutions require action. Yet, that action must be considered carefully, from a variety of perspectives, and over a long timescale. It's unwise to let small, short-term solutions cause large, long-term problems. There are good responses to problems, and there are bad responses to problems. We can learn from each of them, but what we should learn from the latter is how to find and practice the former.