The Perfect Problem to all Your Solutions

The joy of success is short-lived. Everyone looks forward to the day they will graduate college. Four years of long nights spent in the library, and in my case, early mornings on the football field and late nights studying, all culminating in the celebration of commencement. 17 years of schooling all comes to an end in the matter of a single day. You’re handed your diploma, pause for your picture, and then thrust your cap in the air to signify FREEDOM. Nothing can upset you on that day. All seems great in the world for a moment and you tell yourself that hard work really does pay off, that you just accomplished an immense feat, something to be proud of.

It isn’t long before the dread and anxiety of having to find a new job and transition into a new life, outweighs the joy of having graduated. Every achievement is followed by the formulation of a new problem to solve. That is the unfortunate truth of human nature. I am convinced that we can never be content with what we have. When we are pursuing a goal we consider worthwhile, we want nothing more than to attain that success. We envision what it would look like the very moment we walk across that stage or run through the finish line. We imagine the feeling of euphoria that will come with having actually completed what was once just an idea in our minds.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to enjoy graduation ceremonies because schools closed in March and everyone was sent home for the remainder of the celebration. I didn’t care much for festivities anyway, but having to continue the rest of the semester from my bedroom diluted the accomplishment of graduation and brought the problem of “what to do next?” to the forefront.

When I finished classes in May I was still training for a tryout with an NFL team. I was working out like I had something to prove, because I did. I lifted for at least two hours a day and topped that off with either a run or a long bike ride. The pandemic threw a wrench in the typical NFL offseason, so my agent was telling me there was still a good chance I could get invited to a private workout from the teams that were showing me interest before the draft. I trained harder than I ever had before, knowing the chances of actually getting a workout were slimmer than I was being led to believe. I don’t think I was trying to prove anything to anyone except myself at the time. I guess I was trying to show myself that even though hope was slim and even though there was no one telling me when to wake, when to lift, when to bike until exhaustion, and when to eat my meals, that I could find it in me to motivate myself to get these things done. It was easy to train hard at BC when I knew my opportunities at playing were guaranteed. Every offseason promised 12 upcoming regular-season games that I knew i needed to be ready for. But this time, I was just training with no guarantees that I would ever get another chance to play football. I wanted to prove that I was capable of holding myself accountable to no one but ME. At school I was accountable to my teammates, my coaches, and the university. Last summer, no one was relying on me but myself.

You’d think that wanting to do something for ourselves would be a good enough motivator to accomplishing that goal. That’s about as naive a thought as anyone could have. As the great Jordan Peterson points out, people are more likely to fill a prescription for their dog and follow it in accordance with the veterinarian’s orders, than they are willing to do so for themselves. Just think about it, for after a day or two I know that I’ve forgotten I even had a prescription for myself.

Here I am almost a year later. I’m in my second semester of graduate school, working part-time on weekends and a couple of weekdays. I enjoy the material I’m learning in school and I sometimes enjoy my work. But, I like staying occupied. I like having to get up and check a couple of things off my to-do list every day. During these past couple weeks I was in between semesters and I also got COVID. I wasn’t taking classes, I couldn’t work, and I couldn’t leave the house. There wasn’t much to do except read. I was able to get back into the habit of reading and found that I enjoyed it a lot more when I did it consistently. I’m glad to have cemented that habit into my daily routine now. During that quarantine though, I was forced to ask myself some difficult questions. Here I was, sitting at home with no responsibilities and all the free time in the world. I was limited to the house, but I knew there was plenty I could do from home. I mean I have all the technology in the world at my disposal for God’s sake. What would I do if money wasn’t an issue? What would I do if I had all the free time I could ask for? The answers to my question didn’t come to me at the moment, but I hoped it wasn’t just reading.

I began taking classes again last week and that got me back into the swing of things. I was motivated to write an article. The article got me more motivated to want to do MORE. Because I’m still testing positive on my Covid tests, I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to return to work for at least a couple of weeks. Also, because I have classes on Mondays and the following Monday would be MLK day, I wouldn’t have class that week or any assignments to do for them. The additional classes I would be taking outside of Fordham’s program wouldn’t start for at least three weeks either, so I had a lot of free time on my hands.

I thought of trying to find some freelance work so I could make money in the meantime. Maybe I could do manual labor? It would be hard to find random jobs within the span of just a couple of weeks. Maybe I could drive Uber? I’ve applied to be a driver a couple of times already and always had trouble getting some of the documents submitted through the app. Their service department was never any help. Then I got an email saying that the order to renew my website’s domain name had automatically gone through and my account had been charged. I wasn’t planning on renewing the domain this year because I figured I barely wrote on my blog anymore and I couldn’t justify paying the hefty price for the domain just so I could publish an article every couple of months. But, the order had gone through.

I stopped writing as much because I didn’t get the urge to anymore. I just wasn’t motivated. I only wrote when I got the burning desire to put pen to paper and express myself. Then I thought back to some of my accomplishments and wondered how things would have gone for me if I had approached them that way. What if I only went to practice when I was excited about it? I might have gone once a week and it would’ve been on Thursdays, when we didn’t wear pads. What if I had only studied for a test when I was interested in the material? I don’t know that I would have studied for the majority of my classes.

I realized at that moment that that unexpected email was the problem to all my solutions. You’re paying for it, you might as well write. Well, if you have all this free time and you’re going to be researching topics to write about, why don’t you maximize the time spent researching by putting out what you learned on as many different platforms as possible? Yes, you can write an article, but how many people are going to actually read it? Tik Tok is all the buzz right now and simple 30-second videos are getting millions of views. Why not make short videos explaining popular psychology concepts to expand your audience? Okay I’m on to something here. You’ve also been wanting to start a podcast for some time now. You enjoy listening to them, talking about them, and have even filmed a few episodes. Why don’t you fucking continue what you started and maybe you’ll enjoy it more? You found out during quarantine that you liked reading more when you did it consistently. Who’s to say that doesn’t apply to content creation?

For the first time since I stopped training for the NFL, I look forward to waking up early in the morning because I have new problems to solve. What will the next article be out? How will I research it? How do I make this sentence easy to digest? How the fuck does Tik Tok work? Why am I doing this? Because it’ll reach more people Korab. Do you think 12-year-olds give a shit about what cognitive dissonance is? They just want to see Addison Rae do the next Tik Tok “challenge” which is just really a dance. The problems need solutions and I wake up excited to attack them. I want to be a psychologist one day and I want to help dismiss the stigma behind mental illness. I also want to help educate people on concepts in psychology because it will help facilitate a better general understanding of our own nature as human beings.

This information is important. It won’t change the world but it’ll make a difference, one worth the effort of a lifetime of devotion. I believe that. I have faith in that. I see the overall goal, and the enormity of it allows me to focus on the day to day tasks of achieving it. It excites me. I’m going to do my part and I wake up eager to do so. I have new problems to solve now. I’ve outlined the larger problem I observe and have distilled it into micro-problems I need to solve in order to move forward with my goal. Just a few years ago my biggest problem was figuring out how to gain ground on my first step when I was trying to block the stretch play on Saturday night against Clemson. That problem kept me up at night and woke me up early in the morning. We couldn’t beat Clemson if I couldn’t gain ground. In my last article the problem I aiming at was a combination of facilitating a deeper understanding of how our pasts impact our futures, how parents can severely affect the trajectory of their children’s development, and in general, how to improve behavior based on newfound knowledge. I believed helping a few people learn about attachment theory would help us move one step closer to realizing those goals.

I found my new problem. I don’t think this problem has a simple solution. I don’t expect there to be a finish line on this journey. I expect this problem to encompass the better part of my life, but I know there will be successes along the way, as long as I have problems to solve. You may be stressed about what you should be doing with your time. Pay attention to the way you feel about going to work. Pay attention to the way you feel after you have that fleeting thought about starting your own business or maybe going back to school. You can’t lie to yourself, not for long. You may have already found all the “solutions” to your problems. Maybe you’re employed and have great friends and live in a really nice place. Those seem to be the solutions to all the world’s problems, at least that’s what other people tell you. But, what’s your problem. Everyone needs some type of meaning in their lives. Meaning is found in trying to solve a problem that grips you.

Don’t look for solutions to your problems, look for the problem important enough to become your solution.