Quoting Adam Mastroianni:

Being stuck is the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog, bog in every direction, bog as far as the eye can see. You go wading in search of dry land and only find more bog. Nothing works, no options seem good, it’s all bleh and meh and ho hum and no thanks and more bog. This is the kind of dire situation that drives people to do crazy things like ask a blogger for advice.

People will sometimes approach me with projects I don’t really want to do. But if I do them, those people will smile and shake my hand and go, “We feel positive emotions, and it’s because of you!” and that will feel good. So I often end up signing on to these projects, feeling resentful the whole time, cursing myself for choosing—freely!—to work hard on things I don’t care about.
This is gutterballing: excelling, but in slightly the wrong direction. For most of its journey, after all, the gutterball is getting closer to the pins. It’s only at the end that it barely, but dramatically, misses.

Sometimes when I’m stuck, someone will be like, “Why don’t you do [reasonable option]?” and I’ll go, “Hold on there, buddy! Don’t you see this option has downsides? Find me one with only upsides, and then we’ll talk!”
I’m waiting for jackpot, refusing to do anything until an option arises that dominates all other options on all dimensions. Strangely, this never seems to happen.

Often, I’m waiting for the biggest jackpot of all: the spontaneous remission of all my problems without any effort required on my part. Someone suggests a way out of my predicament and I go, “Hmm, I dunno, do you have any solutions that involve me doing everything 100% exactly like I’m doing it right now, and getting better outcomes?”

Sometimes I’ll know exactly what I need to do in order to leave the bog, but I’m too afraid to do it. I’m afraid to tell the truth, or make someone mad, or take a risk. And so I dither, hoping that the future will not require me to be brave.
Everybody thinks this is a bad strategy because it merely prolongs my suffering, but that’s not why it’s a dumb thing to do. Yes, every moment I dither is a moment I suffer. But when I finally do the brave thing, that’s not the climax of my suffering—that moment is the opposite of suffering. Being brave feels good.

When I put off doing the brave thing, I am declining the dragon: missing an opportunity to do something that might be scary in the moment but would ultimately make me feel great.

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they’re moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap: situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.
The mediocrity trap is a nasty way to end up in the bog. Terrible situations, once exited, often become funny stories or proud memories. Mediocre situations, long languished in, simply become Lost Years—boring to both live through and talk about, like you’re sitting in a waiting room with no cell reception, no wifi, and no good magazines, waiting for someone to come in and tell you it’s time to start living.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my problems, but it usually looks like this:
“Oh boy, what a problem! A real whopper, I’d say. Massive, even. Get a load of this problem, would ya! Wowzers!” I can spend days doing this. “How big would you say that problem is? Large? Huge? And that’s just its size! Don’t get me started on its depth.”
This isn’t solving the problem; this is stroking the problem. It looks like a good use of time, but it’s just a form of socially acceptable anxiety, a way to continue your suffering indefinitely by becoming obsessed with it.

I played a lot of Call of Duty in high school, and I used to roll with a gang of bad boys who would battle other gangs online.2
We weren’t very good. Whenever we lost the first round, which was almost always, we would regroup in the pregame lobby—basically the online locker room—and decide what we really need to do in the next round is “try harder.” As if the reason we had all just been shot in the head 25 times in a row was that we were not sufficiently dedicated to avoiding getting shot in the head. Armed with the most dimwit plan of all time, we would march into battle once more and lose just as badly. As our virtual corpses piled up, we’d yell at each other, “Guys, stop dying!”
This is the try harder fallacy. I behold my situation and conclude that, somehow, I will improve it in the future by just sort of wishing it to be different, and then I get indignant that nothing happens. Like, “Um, excuse me! I’ve been doing all of this very diligent desiring for things to be different, and yet they remain the same, could someone please look into this?”

the infinite effort illusion, which is the idea that you have this secret unused stock of effort that you can deploy in the future to get yourself unstuck. I’m always a week late responding to emails? No problem, I’ll simply uncork my Strategic Effort Reserve and clear my correspondence debt.
This never works because there is no Strategic Effort Reserve. All of my effort is currently accounted for somewhere. If I want to spend more of it on something, I have to spend less of it on something else. If I’m consistently not getting something done, it’s probably because I don’t want to—at least, not enough to cannibalize that time from something else—and I haven’t admitted that to myself yet.

This is blaming God: pinning the responsibility for my current predicament on something utterly unchangeable. And while many religions teach that God intervenes in human affairs, none of them, as far as I know, believe that he responds to whining. (Would you worship a god who does miracles if you just annoy him enough?)

Some problems are like getting a diploma: you work at it for a while, and then you’re done forever. Learning how to ride a bike is a classic diploma problem.
But most problems aren’t like that. They’re more like toothbrushing problems: you have to work at them forever until you die.

Here’s one of my favorite bad escape plans: I’ll just be a different person in the future. Like, “I know I hate working out, but in the future I will overcome this by not being such a baby about it.” Or, “I find quantum physics boring, so I’ll just learn about it later, when I find it more interesting.”
These are fantastical metamorphoses. I have not, so far, woken up one day and found myself different in all the ways that would make my life easier. I do hope this happens, but I’ve stopped betting on it.

People are always causing me problems by doing foolish things like trying to drive on highways while I’m also trying to drive on them, or expecting me to pay rent every month, or not realizing my genius and putting me in charge of things. In these cases, it feels like the only solution is to get other people to act differently. I’m only stuck because other people are unreasonable!
A good word for this is puppeteering: trying to solve your problems by controlling the actions of other humans.

Every kid learns to play the “floor is lava” game, where you pretend that you’ll get incinerated if you touch the carpet. Even toddlers can pick it up, which reveals something profound: very early on, we acquire the ability to pretend that fake problems are real. We then spend the rest of our lives doing exactly that.

Often, when I’m stuck, it’s because I’ve made up a game for myself and decided that I’m losing at it. I haven’t achieved enough. I am not working hard enough and I am also, somehow, not having enough fun. These games have elaborate rules, like “I have to be as successful as my most successful friend, but everything I’ve done so far doesn’t count,” and I’m supposed to feel very bad if I break them. It’s like playing the absolute dumbest version of the floor is lava.

Did I create these games by thinking really hard about how to live a good life? No! I pulled them out of my butt. Or someone else pulled them out of their butt, and I said, “Ooh, can I have some of that?”

During the Trump administration, I took on a part time job: keeping up with all the outrages. Every twenty minutes or so I would have to check my phone in case any new outrages had occurred, so that I could…collect them? Make them into a scrapbook? I’m not sure.
I now think of this as super surveillance, tracking every problem in the world as if they were all somehow, ultimately, my problems. Super surveillance is an express ticket to the bog, because the world is full of problems and you’d be lucky to solve even a single one.

Sometimes I get this feeling like, “Nothing will ever work out for me, I will always be unhappy, the rest of my life will be a sort of wandering twilight punctuated with periods of misery.”
And my wife will go, “You’re hungry.”
And I’ll go, “No, no, this is true unhappiness, it comes to me unadulterated from hell itself, it lives inside my bones, I am persecuted by God, you could not possibly know what it’s like to be me.”
And then I’ll eat a burrito and be like, “Never mind I’m fine!”
This is hedgehogging: refusing to be influenced by others, even when you should.

the personal problems growth ray, which makes all of your own problems seem larger than life, while other people’s stay actual size. This makes reasonable solutions look unreasonable—the actions that solved your human-sized problems could never solve my giganto-problems; they can only be addressed with either a lifetime of cowering or a tactical nuke.

Some people thought bolding your name helps time-pressed hiring committees quickly assess your academic output. Other people objected that bolding your name looks presumptuous. A debate ensued. I forget who won—oh yes, it was none of us because this is a stupid thing to care about.
This is obsessing over tiny predictors. It’s scary to admit that you can’t control the future; it’s a lot easier to distract yourself by trying to optimize every decision, no matter how insignificant.

That’s why having goofy names for them matters so much, because it reminds me not to believe the biggest bog lie of all: that I’m stuck in a situation unlike any I, or anyone else, has ever seen before. If you believe that, it’s no wonder you’d suffer from insufficient activation energy, or bad escape plans, or self-bogging: you have no idea what to do, because you don’t think anything you’ve learned, or anything anyone else has learned, can help you at all. Whenever I feel that way, whenever I think I’m in a bespoke bog, created just for me by a universe that hates me, if I can think to myself, “Oh, I’m gutterballing right now,” I can feel my foot hit solid ground, and I can start hoisting myself onto dry land.

Sometimes people will be like, “Well, whatcha gonna do, life is suffering,” and I’ll be like, “Haha sure is,” waiting for them to laugh too, but they won’t laugh, and I’ll realize, to my horror, that they’re not joking. Some people think the bog is life!
I get why you might think this if you’ve experienced lots of misfortune. If you, say, survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then took the train to Nagasaki just in time for the atomic bombing of that city, too, you’d probably have a gloomy outlook on life.4
But most of the people I know who feel this way haven’t survived any atomic bombings at all. They’re usually people with lots of education and high-paying jobs and supportive relationships and a normal amount of tragedies, people who have all the raw materials for a good life but can’t seem to make one for themselves. Their problem is they believe that satisfaction is impossible. Like they’re standing in a kitchen full of eggs, flour, oil, sugar, butter, baking powder, a mixer, and an oven, and they throw their hands up and say, “I can’t make a cake! Cakes don’t even exist!”