Problem categories

“The only real emergency is a medical emergency.”

I read this quote on a list of “100 Rules of Effective Living” by Mitch Horowitz that somebody shared with me. It got me thinking about .. what is, then, an unreal (or fake) emergency?

And so I want to talk about how I think about problem categories, and the different kinds of “hard” things.

Adjective overloading

In English and many other languages, we make use of euphemisms, or just play with different words, to distance ourselves from the original meaning of a word.

For example, we say someone passed away, or that a military operation had collateral damage, as ways to mitigate the original effect of saying someone died or was killed.

As a small tangent, funnily enough, we do this with animal food too. Pigs become porks, cows become beef, and in Spanish, pez (fish) becomes pescado (literally “fished”).

But there’s something we do with words too that happens the other way around: we use the same word to tie their meanings together even if they’re different, to make them sound more critical.

So we say we have a deadline at work even when nobody is about to die if they cross it, unlike the suggested origin of the word which apparently is that Civil War prisoners would be shot on sight if they crossed a line drawn on the ground.

Of course, a prison camp deadline and a software engineering deadline are completely different, but something else is shared between them when we use the same word for both.

I call this phenomenon overloading, and I want to explore adjective overloading – using the same word when referring to different qualities as a tool to add gravity to them.

Particularly, I’d like to spend today’s post on the adjective “Hard” and how we use it to qualify distinct problems.

Different types of a “hard time”

Let’s see this brief dialogue between Alice and Bob:

Alice: “Hey Bob, how are ya?”
Bob: “Good, it’s going. How about you?”
Alice: “Uh, you know, I’m having a hard time keeping food down with the chemo and all.”
Bob: “Damn, that sucks. I’m also having a hard time hitting a new PB on my squat.”

Now, besides Bob being an asshole, the interesting thing here is that when Alice says she’s having a hard time, and Bob says he’s also having a hard time, those are very different types of “hard.” There’s no “also” that should apply here.

To clarify what we mean when we say something is “hard,” I’ll break it down into five types of challenges we face in life.

I hope this categorization will help you put “hard” in perspective, as many of us do when we run into a health issue.

Life-hard

Life-hard problems are problems that are existential and life-threatening:

• Being diagnosed with a terminal disease
• Losing a loved one
• Life-threatening accidents

Most people with a few decades under their belt have run into these types of problems. These are big, .. and I mean big, problems.

A common effect of going through these problems is that they “put things into perspective” and you notice “how small my other problems were.”

If you have life-hard problems right now, I’m sorry. That’s really rough.

These are, in a way, the “real emergencies” that the list of 100 things mentions. Life-hard is its own category of hard.

After life-hard problems, there are these types of systemic problems I call world-hard.

World-hard

World-hard problems are problems that are systemic and either existential but long-term enough that they aren’t life-hard yet, while being contextual enough that you can’t easily fix them:

• Living in a country at war
• Living in deep poverty (e.g. <$2/day, like 700M people do)
• Surviving natural catastrophes like earthquakes and tsunamis

Each is global, systemic, and beyond individual control.

While we often encounter life-hard problems, most world-hard problems are typically problems “others” face, which I’m glad is the case.

If you have world-hard problems right now, I’m sorry. That’s really tough too.

World-hard problems are great candidates for problems we should try and solve for others.

After world-hard problems, there are systemic problems that affect specific individuals, which I call self-hard.

Self-hard

Self-hard problems are systemic or contextual problems that affect you due to one of your characteristics, often ones you can’t change:

• Discrimination against jews
• Exclusion of women from politics
• Being harmed because of skin color or nationality

These problems are rooted in what we often call identity, the traits we associate with who we are.

If you have self-hard problems right now, I’m sorry. That sucks.

Self-hard problems can sometimes be solved by changing context: social circle, community, neighborhood, city, country. Sometimes, they can also be changed through education and conversations.

Self-hard problems are great problems to help solve for others, but you can also sometimes make progress on them for yourself. Self-hard problems are sometimes not as crippling as world-hard problems.

But while sometimes we’re subject to systemic problems and challenges, oftentimes we’re just subject to problems that are created, or manifest, by other people.

People-hard

People-hard problems are typically specific to certain people in our lives.

• A family member who is constantly getting you in trouble
• A boss or coworker who is hard to work with
• People in a position of power who abuse it

People-hard problems are typically hard to solve in the short term, but easy to solve in the long term.

Most people in our lives, even friends and family, and certainly coworkers, are only around us for a while – unless we don’t do anything to get away from them.

Because you often can’t change people, you have to change the people.

Naval Ravikant has great advice on people that I often quote:

The first rule of handling conflict is: Don’t hang around people who constantly engage in conflict. I’m not interested in anything unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships.

Jorgenson, Eric. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness (pp. 147-148). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Again, bad relationships are hard to get out of in the short term but easy over the long term. So you need resilience and patience.

People problems suck. Eventually, when you can solve or manage all the problems above, you’ll be left with the good problems to have: task-hard problems.

Task-hard

Task-hard problems are just things that are difficult to solve or master.

• A software system that’s hard to design
• Writing a book
• Becoming good at chess

Task-hard problems are the ones you want to have. A life without hard problems is typically much worse than one with plenty of task-hard problems.

Often, task-hard problems can align with harder problems for others: self-hard, world-hard and life-hard. You can get a lot of good and meaning from working on those.

Likewise, be on the lookout for task-hard problems that you’re solving but that create harder problems for others: If you solve an interesting task-hard problem for you and create a massive world-hard problem, you’re definitely a part of the problem.

Ideally, more of our lives would be about building competence and solving task-hard problems that fulfill us and help address other harder problems for the people we care about.

Summary

The only real emergency is a medical emergency.

• Life-hard problems are existential and urgent – illness, death, survival. These are the ones that stop everything else and give us perspective.
• World-hard problems are systemic and oppressive – poverty, war, catastrophe. They’re hard to escape and even harder to fix.
• Self-hard problems are personal but not chosen – traits or conditions that expose you to unfair treatment, constraints, and exclusion for being who you are.
• People-hard problems come from relationships – conflict, hostility, and control. Hard in the short term, solvable in the long run.
• Task-hard problems are the good kind – challenging but fulfilling. They build skill, meaning, and can help us solve harder problems for others.

Understanding what type of hard problem we and others are facing is the first step toward giving it the weight it deserves, and the clarity needed to solve it.