The Problem is There is No Problem 

EPISODE DESCRIPTION:

What happens when your brain is really good at solving problems... and then, for once, there isn't one to solve?

This week's Nudge episode started with a throwaway line from a novel — "What am I supposed to seek justice for now?" — and a much bigger question from a conversation with my coach: what if the actual problem is that there isn't a problem? Turns out my nervous system finds "everything is fine" more than a little suspicious.

We get into hovering above our own lives with a clipboard, dragons we may have already finished slaying, and whether joy and ease ask something of us that achievement never had to.

No seven-step plan here. Just some out-loud wondering about who we are when there's nothing left to fix.

SHOW NOTES:

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TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to I Used to Be Fun, the podcast for women who've looked up from their wildly competent lives and asked, "Where did all the fun go?" Hi, I'm Annmarie Boyle, author, lover of deep conversations, and chronic overthinker, and each week, we get curious about what lights us up and what happens if we stop putting those things last on our to-do list.

But this isn't a design-a-plan life hack kinda show. Here, expect laughter, honest questions, and the reminder that life isn't something to manage, it's something to enjoy. So grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and let's see what we can figure out together.

Subscribers to my newsletter know that I believe we can learn as much about ourselves and what we want from life from reading fiction as we can from nonfiction personal [00:01:00] development books. And one of the recurring features in my newsletter is what I call a dispatch, where I pull out a sentence or a paragraph from a fiction book that I've read and noodle on why that particular sentence spoke to me.

And recently, while attempting to finally make a dent in my truly embarrassing TBR, I highlighted a passage from So Not My Thing by Melanie Jacobson. Side note, I discovered I have unread books in there that I downloaded five or more years ago. Five. So apparently I've been less to be read and more to be stored indefinitely.

But books have staying power, so I'm choosing not to feel too bad about it. Anyway, the passage I highlighted is a conversation between the main character and her best friend. It goes like this. The main character, Elle, says, "What am I supposed to use as an outlet for my rage?" [00:02:00] Her bestie follows up with, "Do you have anything left to be rageful about?"

And Elle answers, "No. It's confusing. This is the worst superhero backstory ever. What am I supposed to seek justice for now?" I laughed out loud when I read it, probably because it reminded me of something I've been known to joke about myself, which is, "If I let go of my anger, will I still be funny?" But also because it crashed headlong into something I'd written in my podcast journal as a possible Nudge episode. A while back, I was talking with my coach, the lovely Sarah Raad, play date number five if you wanna go back and listen, and we were working through some business strategy when she asked me, "What's the problem here?"

And the answer that bubbled up inside me surprised me. I told her, "I think the problem is that there isn't a problem." And when she asked [00:03:00] me to clarify, I told her that I'd begun to realize that I have a brain that loves to solve problems, whether it's a puzzle or a knot to untangle or 12 unseemingly unrelated pieces of information that need to be connected all together, and you want those things solved, then I'm your person.

My brain loves that stuff. But I've also started to suspect that when there isn't a problem to solve, my brain doesn't always know what to do with itself, so sometimes it simply goes out and manufactures a problem so it has something to do. And that made me wonder, how many of us actually do this? How many of us look for problems where they don't actually exist?

And maybe even more importantly, why do we do that? Well, obviously, problem-solving gives our brains something to do, and when we solve the problem, we get to feel capable, useful, competent. [00:04:00] And for those of us who have spent a lot of our lives being the person who figures things out, it's familiar territory. If we perceive a problem, we spring into action.

We develop a plan, and then we get that feeling of momentum. We know who we are in that space. We are the women who handle all the things But what if problem-solving doesn't just feel satisfying? What if for some of us it actually feels safer than ease? Because ease can feel uncomfortable when you're used to managing all the things.

I mean, without a problem or a puzzle, there's nothing to fix, nothing to anticipate, nothing to optimize. Everything is just fine. And apparently my nervous system's response to that is, "Wait a minute. This feels suspicious. What are we missing? What haven't we thought of?

Surely there is something around here that requires our immediate attention." And I think that [00:05:00] suspicion arises because solving and striving gives me something to do, and enjoying our lives asks us to simply be. Ugh. I know. Deep breaths, everyone. Because if you're anything like me, simply being sounds lovely in theory, but actually doing it, that can be surprisingly difficult.

I have spent a lot of my life thinking about what comes next, what needs to happen, what needs fixing. And I wonder, can you relate to that too? I'm starting to suspect that there is a point at which all of that management keeps us slightly outside our own lives. Sure. Yes, we're living our lives, but we're also hovering somewhere above the scene, brandishing our clipboard.

I bet you can picture it. We're pacing around asking how everyone is doing. Do they have what they need? Is what we're doing productive? And we're looking for ways to improve the [00:06:00] situation. Basically, instead of living inside the moments, we're outside orchestrating them. And for someone who has always struggled with being present, this is an uncomfortable realization, because admitting this means I need to start simply inhabiting my life rather than continually managing it.

And I have to release a little control and go more with the flow and accept that not every moment needs to become something. Not every unanswered question requires immediate resolution. Not every part of me needs improvement. Which brings me to the question, when nothing is wrong, can I actually let nothing be wrong?

Can I resist the impulse to go searching under the furniture for something to worry about? Can I learn to tolerate the deeply unfamiliar experience of things simply being okay?

If you've spent decades building an [00:07:00] identity around being capable, dependable, productive, useful, resilient, all those things, then not having something to overcome can leave us feeling a little lost, like someone just erased our to-do list and left us with a big blank whiteboard. Which brings me back to one of the sentences from the book, quote, "What am I supposed to seek justice for now?"

Sure, it's funny, but underneath the humor is something hinting at an identity crisis. If we have always been the ones fighting the dragon, who are we when there's no dragon to slay? And that leads to yet another big question. Who are we when we're not fixing something? Do we know that person? Have we even met her?

I actually don't have a tidy answer, and maybe that's part of the point because my immediate instinct is to turn even that into a problem to solve. Step one, devise a seven-part plan to [00:08:00] stop doing that. Get a new notebook, color-coded pens. Open a spreadsheet. My problem-solving brain is delighted. So if we're not doing that, then where do we start? Maybe it's simply about noticing.

Like noticing when we've jumped three months into the future and invented a scenario to worry about. Or realizing that instead of letting ourselves have a lovely afternoon, we're mentally reorganizing our lives.

And that kind of noticing can make us see that joy requires something very different from achievement. Achievement asks us to move, and joy generally asks us to stay. And ease?

Ease might simply ask us to stop looking for the emergency exit long enough to realize there isn't actually an emergency. So that's the nudge I'm taking with me this week. Not, how do I stop being a problem solver? I like that [00:09:00] part of me. She's useful. She's gotten me through a lot, and frankly, she is damn good in a crisis.

But maybe she doesn't need to be on duty all the time. Maybe sometimes she can actually set down that clipboard and sit in the sun or drink the coffee while it's still hot and just let things be okay. Maybe we can all do that.

So if the idea of my dispatches perked up your ears and you'd like a little more noodling like this to land in your inbox, I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter, Firefly and Fable at annmarieboyle.com, or you can follow the link in the show notes. Inside my newsletter, there are no dragons to slay or seven-step plans, just a little news, a whole lot of curiosity, and the occasional thoughts I can't keep to myself.

So until next time, I hope you keep uncovering a little more beauty, [00:10:00] a little more creativity, and yes, a little more fun.

I Used to Be Fun is hosted by Annmarie Boyle. New episodes drop weekly.

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