Whenever people bring up the core issue, its typically, “that doesnt matter because the event or action happened already.” Maybe this problem keeps occurring because people refuse to address the foundational issue. For example in a relationship, a person does the action, instead of focusing on the why the person did the action, the focus is always on the action itself. Same thing with work, instead of focusing on people being gossipy or causing some drama at a job, the focus should be why it occurring. Why matters more than the action a lot of the times for future prevention
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Right, but getting to the why takes a lot more time and resources then you may be willing to expend. Suppose you’re the manager of a store. You have fifty employees. There’s a group of gossipers that are causing drama and starting fights. You know it’s mostly isolated to these three. As a manager, you’ve got a lot else to do. Hiring, inventory, dealing with your own bosses, etc. You’re not interested in why the gossiper gossip. You most likely tell them that they have two options: one, stop gossiping and remain employed. Two, don’t stop and seek other employment.
1.) Core problems are hard to recognize
2.) Often the core problem is an issue that is ultimately out of your control to fix
3.) The symptom is the only thing affecting me and it’s easier to deal with
Most people never identify what the problem is.
It depends on the situation and what the action is.
If someone you didn’t know come up to you in the street and physically attacked you. Would you really care more about their excuse for why they did it and not focus on the fact they attacked you?
a lot of people were not raised to be emotionally intelligent
Dysfunctional people often go through life looking only at interactions as a zero sum game. They’re trying to one-up other people, and they think all the people around them are doing the same.
So if you notice an underlying reason why things keep going wrong, you have to outrank the dysfunctional person to fix the underlying problem. Otherwise dysfunctional people assume you’ve just invented a weird excuse to challenge their status, and they’ll either ignore you or else they’ll retaliate.
In other words, if you’re stuck at the bottom of a bucket and surrounded by crabs, the crabs will punish you for trying to build a ladder.
We treat substance abuse and addiction the same way. Focussing on the symptom is easy and offers temporary relief while avoiding the difficulty and pain dealing with the core issue.
Because people like to be comfortable and have things easy.
Focusing on the symptom is easy and trying to find the core of the problem might make them uncomfortable.
IMO consideration is warranted for both.
Let’s say you catch a cold. It’s very unhelpful for someone to say the solution is to avoid catching a cold and to take preventative measures, when you ask for their advice. Yes, that’s helpful for the future but not the best thing for NOW, when the problem is already staring you in the face. Obviously you should do something about the existing symptoms and also take the preventative measures to reduce the likelihood of it happening again in the future so you don’t have to deal with it.
Agreed. This is especially true when people address the symptoms in a way that exacerbates the cause.
Because it’s easier to mitigate symptoms than cure
People can dig in their heels hard, especially when they were a root cause:
A really great example of this is how the U.S. government used to send out new infant guides to parents and in the versions I’ve seen from the 1920s and 40s they actually advocating for retracting the foreskin to clean with often irritating soaps from birth (note that the foreskin may stay attached naturally for years and this is fine and should never be forcefully retracted). The guide even said if it couldn’t be retracted a circumcision was necessary !!!
This almost certainly lead to many infections and incorrect diagnosis’s of phimosis leading to a perception that the foreskin was problematic, instead of the root cause that parents and doctors were actively harming the children. Amazingly no one seemed to question why circumcisions were supposedly needed so often in the U.S. but not Europe and instead American doctors just pushed for more circumcisions. Sadly parents of intact boys still have to be aggressive in telling caregivers the correct care:
“Never retract, clean from base to tip, only what can be seen”
Basically the core of how we treat criminals and why punitive prisons are useless and cruel.
The simple truth is in most cases the root cause is something that grants people privilege in life, and removal of that would remove privilege, thus they declare the solution to the root cause to be too hard/too expensive to implement.
Homelessness is a perfect example. We know unconditional housing first policies with aggressive social worker interventions and support make great outcomes, returning people to being productive members of society by first restoring their dignity.
However, this strips people away of their privilege – having an undesirable underclass to point to and use as a threat to motivate people is important for them. They may not be consciously thinking about it, it’ll come out couched as “that’s expensive” or “that’s impossible” or even “We shouldn’t be rewarding bums”, but it comes from a deep seated need to have that underclass of people. If we solved homelessness, they wouldn’t be able to use it as a threat.
This is true when it comes to their own health, a lot of the time doctors do so as well, people do this with relationships, people do this with society, it’s one of the most common and infuriating things people do. Address symptoms, not causes.
Have pain? Take painkillers, don’t change your lifestyle.
Dead bedroom? Try to force it and don’t worry about your other issues.
Housing crisis? Focus on the housing itself and not the economic factors surrounding it.
It’s really annoying, but it makes sense. When you see a problem, your instincts are to fix it, but when the problem is a symptom of a greater cause, investigation is boring and feels like a waste of time because this other thing is so urgent, so it ends up getting worse and worse until it’s so bad it can’t be ignored anymore.
My job. Whenever there’s an issue it’s who did it rather than solve the actual issue
The why is usually because people are assholes.
Actually what I believe matters more is to just forget when and why and set a boundary. Debating the rest gets you no where. By boundary setting I mean these steps:
It upsets me when you do/did x because (very brief explanation).
In the future, please (insert desired behaviour).
If you can’t respect this then I’m going to have to (insert logical consequence here).
Be prepared to defend the boundary and follow through with consequence.
Discussing and hashing the past whether it’s what or why will just get you mired in the muck.
That’s similar to people who blame AI for suicidal people only confiding in it, without wondering why they only feel comfortable talking to a chatbot rather than other humans about their problems. Trouble taking accountability; society abandons people.