Sometimes, my partner tells me about her day. About how she tried to do something, and someone was uncooperative. About how the professors at the university are unorganized (http://liljumperaroundtheworld.thr3.de/?p=471). In these times, what that person wants to do, is communicate with me, talk to me. What should my role be? To listen. Obviously.
If only I would do that, I’m sure I would lead a happier life. Instead I start suggesting what could have been done to avoid this problem or minimize that risk. My initial response is to try my best to make sure problems don’t persist. To solve them.
While I certainly don’t mean any harm, I have to face the consequence of what I am essentially doing. Instead of taking part in someone’s problems, showing understanding and sympathy, I immediately critique actions, critique choices. I also have the advantage of doing so from a safe position. I know what the outcome of the choices was, that were made on that day. I know what happened as a result. Of course it is extremely easy for me to suggest something else, but we will not very likely go back in time as a result of it and fix it, trying my version of things. This means any suggestion I make can in fact be seen as blaming anything that went wrong on whoever I would be talking to. Easy. From my point of view, it was obvious that things had to happen the way they did, which is trivial, because of course that’s what happened.
The same problem solving approach seems to appear drastically in the pharma industry. Headache? There’s a pill for that (or rather a whole variety). Sleep deprived? Pill. Nauseous? Pill. Apart from some truly gruesome occurrences, almost anything can be fixed by paying a little price for a handful of pills, drops, you name it. Fix my sleeping schedule? Why not just buy sleeping pills, set alarms and drink coffee?
As someone that doesn’t reside most inside the USA, it seems rather stunning to watch the tremendous advertisement of pharmaceuticals in the states. Directly marketing to customers? That seems rather unsafe. And is a billion-dollar industry. According to Kantar Media, it will have been over 4.5 billion USD in 2014. It seems like “customers” will go to their doctors and ask them for the medication they saw on TV ads. That alone sounds dangerous but even worse is probably that doctors are bound to fulfill patients wishes, since they are interested in keeping both their patients as well as their pharma representatives happy. The marketing to customers? Only a fraction of the advertisement pharmaceuticals spends. The rest goes to free samples or other endorsements.
Our way of trying to find the easiest solution leads us to pay lots of money for products which sometimes only barely outperform simple sugar tablets. As my father always told me: current always takes the path of least resistance. We just rather buy our way out of a situation than really have to put in effort to fix it. After all, this makes us much more productive right? What if we had to build all our furniture ourselves? What about our cars? And when something brakes? Well you used to be able to fix it yourself, but with the complexity nowadays? Good luck to even find what’s broken.
I know that its cheaper to replace a complete transmission of a modern middle class saloon, than to higher a technician capable of diagnosing and fixing the problem of a clutch that keeps falling out of gear. We do what is cheap, not what is right. The process of tackling a problem and fixing it is overrated in most opinions it seems.
A software for a large company recently started running into trouble. The software must compute data for the company to work with each day. The allocated computation time for a process was no longer sufficient to calculate all the required data for a day and this triggered a warning, that employees were working with out-of-date data. When the technicians got word of this, they removed the error message. It took several days for someone to notice something was wrong. In the mean time the developers were praised for the fast and successful efforts.
This theme of taking the easy way, the quick way seems to be recurring way too much for my liking. I think problem solving is important, and we need to get better at it. Nonetheless we also need to understand that sometimes we need to listen to someone and sympathize, without our ever present suggestions and improvements.