Shattering Zero-Sum
Learning to see the world as greater than the sum of its parts, even in the tiniest of ways, is a daunting task.
A few weeks ago, during the second to last session of therapy I was going to have for a long while, I realized that I was forcing myself to suffer something. I didn’t have to, anyways, and the issue was pervasive and insidious enough to difficult to detect as a pattern.
I’ve heard people claim that as humans we suffer from a “zero-sum mindset”.
I first want to share a little bit about why I hate the term “mindset”. The implication there seems to be that we use the word “mindset” in particular because it is a sort of monolithic mental state that anyone could theoretically find themselves in. That seams like a crap idea. Secondly, the “set” part of mindset seems to hint at the idea that like any “set”, it can be exchanged for another, more useful one on a whim, or at least after watching enough Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, or Jordan Peterson.
My therapist talked with me about my “critical coach” and my “compassionate coach”, I think he was referring to the “2 Coaches Metaphor”. He asked me to name and describe them for his and my benefit.
My critical coach, I named “Safety Steve”. He is a construction site safety officer. People hate him when he is out of line, he impedes work and makes life hell for the construction workers.
I named my compassionate coach “Carter”. He’s an architect. He focuses on creating magnificent designs for usable and interesting spaces, frequently butting heads with Safety Steve. He has long “cut your hair hippy” locks and wears a Hawaiian styled camp shirt to the jobsite, much to the chagrin of Safety Steve, who dresses OSHA compliant, even on Sundays.
They get into it all the time with each other. Steve slaps Carter with site safety violations, and Carter ties up the safety team with his harebrained schemes and desire to create and be seen.
Its hard to shift from a mental mindset of scarcity, hardwired into nearly every human being, to one that sees that there is enough for everyone, regardless of how it may seem.
Steve sees risk. Danger. Damage. His successes keep fathers going home to their families.
Carter sees upside, creativity, and understands safety as a more secondary thing. Carter’s successes come in the form of taking risks and being rewarded for payoff.
Steve sees zero-sum. Carter sees “Abundance”.
Abundance is a stupid and cliche thing to call this, as it reeks of “Joel Osteen” and “The Secret” and all that other baseless la-de-dah codswallop.
I don’t want to preach prosperity gospel, or claim that you riches are just a daydream away, as the kitschy “law of attraction” might suggest. I want to present the idea that thinking in terms of abundance is understanding that there is enough for everyone, including yourself, come what may.
This might manifest for many here when they think of the new hire that is a rising star, outperforming them even at their best. A threat to their security. Safety Steve at attention.
Others might see the new hire in his successes as “contributing to something greater than the sum of our parts”.
Another example: your partner brings home “bedroom toys” and you spend the next 6 months wondering if you have just been taken out of the loop. You might say “how would I ever compete with that?”
The abundance “mindset” (ughh…) would be much more inclined to say “This is like a force amplifier for my already dangerous bedroom skills”.
Mentality shifts like this might come easy to some, but I’ll say shifting from scarcity to abundance is extremely difficult. Successfully achieving it boosts security, peace, and even improves your relationships with others, but the promise of payout is not a freaking instruction manual.
Kids seem not to be worried about the future the same as adults are. I wonder how badly a scarcity mindset would impact my own childrearing, had I had any. If I raised them to always see and make room for others, their needs, and the world around them, and to understand that that doesn’t mean they have to sacrifice their own, I think they will be a lot better off.
But kids can spot a faker like nobody else, sometimes. If I can’t practice it, how can I teach it?
I live in a near constant fear of failure. I am risk averse more than almost anyone I know. So much more threatens me than it should because I can’t see past the immediate pangs of the moment to see that addressing the issues thoughtfully doesn’t have to cost me anything.
Carter, my compassionate coach, has been fired by management. Probably because of his loose hair and even looser respect for deadlines. Given that, he would be screaming in my ear right now “let her speak. She needs to be heard too, man, and waiting won’t cost you.”
He would be flagging semaphore in the background trying to steer me towards respect and admiration for my coworkers over fear and knowledge hoarding as my manager lauds them.
Drawing this out to larger scales beyond myself, I can see whispers of this in society. Fear, anger, and hatred on the basis of misunderstanding would be at an all time high in these conditions. People would draw intellectual battle lines long before they had a rational grip on the issues that they were pissed off about. In my condition, I can’t even begin to blame them. Its a threat. It has to be neutralized. There’s no way that new and seemingly dangerous things can coexist in the world I have created for myself.
Zero-sum. Tribalism is Dumb.
The person over there disagreeing with me must be the opposite of me, and because of that, their ideas will cancel and destroy mine. I don’t want my ideas destroyed, so I have to act first.
If that were the truth, Safety Steve would need a new pair of Safety Briefs.
Carter’s ideas of sharing and making space for people and concepts that Safety Steve would issue workplace violations to is foreign to me. Something in my history baked that defensive nature into the kernel at the center of my source code, and its gonna take a lot of work to get it debugged.
Props to my therapist for dealing with all that. If it were me, I’d want my Friday afternoons back.