The Problem of Gravity
I've been thinking about agency recently, the freedom kind, and it reminded me of something I came across in Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Gravity problems. Life design talks about design as problem-solving, and solving a problem requires finding the right problem and then solving it through action. Here's how they describe it:
“I need a better job” is not the solution to the problem of “I’m not that happy working, and I’d rather be home with my kids.” Beware of working on a really good problem that’s not actually the right problem, not actually your problem. You don’t solve a marriage problem at the office, or a work problem with a new diet. It seems obvious, but, like Dave, we can lose a lot of time working on the wrong problem.
We also tend to get mired in what we call gravity problems.
“I’ve got this big problem and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Oh, wow, Jane, what’s the problem?”
“It’s gravity.”
“Gravity?”
“Yeah—it’s making me crazy! I’m feeling heavier and heavier. I can’t get my bike up hills easily. It never leaves me. I don’t know what to do about it. Can you help me?”
This example may sound silly, but we hear versions of this sort of “gravity problem” all the time.
“Poets just don’t make enough money in our culture. They’re not respected enough. What do I do about it?”
“The company I work for has been family-owned for five generations. There is no way that, as an outsider, I’m ever going to be an executive. What do I do about it?”
These are all gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.
In real life, anti-gravity remains theoretical, despite there being a buzz about it every so often and a prize of a million euros being offered to anyone who can overcome it, given by those who assume, and this is a direct quote from their participation T&Cs, "that the "riddle of gravity" will not be solved in the foreseeable future". I don't know what they expected their timeline to be but this prize has existed since 2004 and so far, unclaimed. So if you do happen to be working on the problem of gravity and manage to solve it, there's plenty of money for you.
As for what exists at the moment in real life, astronauts do train what it's like to be without gravity right here on earth. You can experience what it's like to be in zero gravity with 467-foot-long steel vacuum chambers that NASA has. Or, if you have the funds and don't want to be an astronaut, you can even book a flight that starts at $8,900 (without tax). Gravity wasn't a problem for whoever invented those, right? Well, it does come with the understanding that even in the limited time you can experience what it's like to be without gravity while still remaining in the bounds of our planet, gravity is always going to exist.
Also, you have to learn what gravity is before you go and try to solve it. There are big technological developments and progress in the world that's been made, but you have to know where you are going to put your attention, years of it potentially and a lot of hard work and study and training, to solve a part of it.
So if you are that biker in that example trying to bike up a hill wishing gravity didn't exist when you take that route, you're still shit out of luck. Gravity isn't going anywhere, buddy. It's not your problem. It's a condition you work with, or go around and find a problem you can solve. Ride a bike some more until that exertion feels not as difficult or find another way to work out that doesn't make you want to fight the literal physics of the universe.
And we all have our version of gravity problems that we'd like to see solved. But it's a matter of focusing on the wrong problem.
Some more from the book:
You’ve heard the expression “You can’t fight City Hall.” That’s an old idiom about gravity problems. Everybody knows you can’t fight City Hall. “Hey!” you retort. “You can so fight City Hall! Martin Luther King fought City Hall. My friend Phil fought City Hall. We need more City Hall fighters—not fewer! Are you telling us to give up on the hard problems?”
You raise an important question, so it’s important to make clear exactly how to address what we’re calling gravity problems. Remember that the key thing we’re after here is to free you from getting stuck on something that’s not actionable. When you get stuck in a gravity problem, you’re stuck permanently, because there’s nothing you can do , and designers are first and foremost doers.
We recognize that there are two variations of gravity problems—totally inactionable ones (such as gravity itself) and functionally unactionable ones (such as the average income of a full-time poet). Some of you are trying to decide if the thing you’re stuck on is a gravity problem that isn’t actionable, or just a really, really hard problem that will require effort and sacrifice and runs a high risk of failure but is worth trying.
The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at. We are all for aggressive and world-changing goals. Please do fight City Hall. Oppose injustice. Work for women’s rights. Pursue food justice. End homelessness. Combat global warming. But do it smart. If you become open-minded enough to accept reality, you’ll be freed to reframe an actionable problem and design a way to participate in the world on things that matter to you and might even work. That’s all we’re after here—we want to give you the best shot possible at living the life you want, enjoying the living of it, and maybe even making a difference while you’re at it. We are going to help you create the best-designed life available to you in reality—not in some fictional world with less gravity and rich poets.
It's also the same with larger systemic issues. You can't wish your way into a different economic reality, where social structures are more equitable, the climate is not changing, and we all live long, healthy, happy lives.
So, what do you do with gravity? Accept it as a condition of the environment, and please find the zero-gravity simulator you can work on.
More on the book:
Designing Your Life has some interesting approaches to finding the problems you can design solutions for, and, your life. The authors are Stanford educators and have spent quite a lot of time developing their framework. Like most frameworks of its kind, I think you can find something in there that works for you and discard what doesn't, even though all of these say you have to follow it completely.