Upstream Problem Generation
A lot of times people with very specific complaints about the world believe that the negatives they see are universal truths. Perhaps they see that other people are consistently unreliable, or that others don't work hard enough, or that there's never enough money to go around.
And often, the person is dead right. All of their experiences should it to be, seemingly, empirically true.
But often, the person doesn't realize something crucial -- they're causing the problem upstream.
So when things unravel at their 13th month on the job, they might have failed to realize that they set this dynamic up in month 1 and month 2. And once a course has been charted, small frictions wind up grinding the gears to a halt, and then whatever they see as ill with the world -- happens.
The way out of it? You have to ask other people if the problem is indeed universal, and crucially -- the people you ask must have very different backgrounds, views, ethics, and action patterns than you.
But people don't do this. If they see people around them as late all the time, they don't ask people from different environments and cultures if that's a common universal feature. At best, they ask their friends who have similar backgrounds and cultures as them.
Most people don't even ask their friends. They just assume it to be true. Hence, thinking all bosses are bad, or all employees, or all men, or all women, or all companies, or...
You get the picture. Those negatives you see with the world? You might be setting those up by your choices far upstream. Indeed, when you chop a tree at Time 1, it's inevitable that it falls at Time 3. But that doesn't mean trees are constantly falling...
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