There’s a related concept that I call “surrogate problems.”

A surrogate problem is a problem that you manufacture to distract yourself from your real problems. https://twitter.com/Pragmatictakes/status/1384484653948669957

Surrogate problems are often easier to solve, more interesting to work on, or more clearly measurable than real problems.

They satisfy your need to take action without actually addressing core issues.

In Thinking: Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes the tendency of the mind to substitute easier questions for harder ones and argues that this tendency is the root of many cognitive biases.

Surrogate problems work in roughly this way, but they concern concrete things.

The most benign forms of surrogate problems take the form of hobbies. Rewarding hobbies will present minor challenges, and the process of overcoming them distracts you from more pressing matters for an hour or a day.

There’s obviously a continuum. It’s ok to play a video game in moderation even if you haven’t decided where you want to be 10 years from now. But playing video games all day while unemployed is generally bad. Your real problem isn’t passing a mission; it’s getting a job.

There are more subtle instantiations of the surrogate problem phenomenon. There’s a certain type of person who’s always in conflict with someone else but has little that’s worth fighting over.

Conflicts becomes a surrogate problems because feeling indignant is more rewarding than doing the things you typically have to do to accomplish anything worthwhile.

Another example: working on things that don’t matter that much to outcomes. If you plan to start a landscaping business, for instance, you should probably buy a mower before you obsess over the typeface on your company website. It’s shocking how non-obvious this is to people.

At the level of policy, you’ll constantly see institutions doing feel-good things that really don’t address the core problems they should be addressing.

As I said, there is a continuum. Surrogate problems can be great sources of meaning, and we all need them to some degree or another. But consult Maslow’s Hierarchy to determine how much energy you should be devoting to them.

This may sound similar to Ted Kaczynski’s notion of ”surrogate goals,” but it’s actually more extreme.

A surrogate goal is wanting to write the great American novel because all your needs are met.

A surrogate problem is feeling the need to write it while the rent is overdue.

One upside to surrogate problems:

Happiness is defined less by the presence of pleasure than by the absence of pain, but one only notices the absence of pain once one has been relieved of pain. Once a surrogate problem disappears, it's an incredibly liberating experience.