Funny, my read was that the author is on the side of the catastrophisor, 'this is what your unsolicited advice looks like - you don't understand what a catastrophe the recipients in'.
Nobody ever gets a chance to give advice to someone falling off a cliff or getting hit by a truck. Isn't it the comic itself (at least) that's doing the catastrophising?
People have been thinking about approaches to the same everyday problems for thousands of years.
> unless you’re literally falling off a cliff [...] it’s straight catastrophizing.
This is nonsense. There are plenty of examples of things that are horrible to experience and outside of the person's control and for them this kind of advice is absurd. For example, depression and mental illness. This goes for many kinds of physical illnesses as well. I suspect that may be where the author is coming from too. The implication of the comics is that the grave situation is actually real and actually uncontrollable which the sufferer actually knows as a fact.
> Why shouldn’t you focus on what you can control? Why not think warm thoughts about the people you love before you die?
The question is not whether they should but whether they can. There's no indication in the comics that the situations are not literally uncontrollable, only that the adviser is unaware of this fact.
Let's say e.g. someone's father gets dementia, and they've got to take care of them. They talk about how painful it is, and you feel like you've been thrown off of a cliff. Seeing that they're in a lot of pain, I try to help by saying "Look, you just need to focus on the things that you can control. Using metaphors like that is disempowering."
We both agree that this would be a terrible way to help. Watching someone you love die of dementia is a horrible experience. If someone is expressing dismay at the prospect of watching a loved one uncontrollably disintegrate, the only good responses are in the vein of "wow, that sounds incredibly painful. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help."
Nevertheless! The person whose father is dying has a choice about where they put their attention. Do they spend time thinking about how unfair it is for him to work his whole life and lose his mind the moment he's poised to retire? How unfair it is that they have to take care of this person, who never took care of them when they were younger? Or instead, do they focus on the things that they can influence?
I'm not saying it's easy to do - personally I find it incredibly difficult. But making the effort to calmly accept things as they are without labeling things as catastrophes has been and continues to be incredibly freeing.
You've made the same mistake again. The comics are about situations where the people have no such choices to make. To make your example fit, the person would have to be having compulsive thoughts about the unfairness of the situation or something. This is a real possibility. People with certain mental illnesses do not have choices over where they put their attention. Telling them to put it anywhere specific is a misunderstanding of the situation and unhelpful.
Perhaps where our models differ is that I think most suffering is second order. The first order bad thing happens, and it hurts. Then we think about it, and think about it in unhelpful ways, and continue to hurt ourselves further.
Except many mental illnesses, the example I'm pointing out for the third time now.
Moreover, you're advice is utterly useless to the person suffering in these situations. Again, we need yet another panel with someone being beaten to death with a pipe and you standing there saying "just direct your attention to..." (scream of "AHHHHHH"! overlaps the end of your thought bubble)
- Her: You know, maybe let's start doing X to improve Y?
- Me: Yeah, that's a good idea! But let's also talk about handling Z because without it, X will lead to less Y.
- Her: [confused] Why do you hate my ideas?
- Me: [confused] What? I just said I think the idea is great, it just needs a bit more consideration.
And then she's sad, and I'm confused, and X never happens. Despite trying to phrase my counterexamples in a very constructive way (instead of how we do it in industry: "but Z!"), they're being perceived as a rejection.
After couple of such I've finally learned to keep track of the corner cases in my head, accept the idea without the mentioning it, and only then, over time, bring up the counterexamples so that it's clear these are new problems to be solved, and not a rejection.
I do think many people attach emotional value to their ideas, and any perceived imperfections invalidate the idea as a whole. I don't have any evidence of this that might generalize, but personally I feel like I (and potentially many programmers) never attach _any_ emotional value to my ideas, because if I did then every single bug I face in my code would be a defeat rather than an opportunity to learn and grow.
I do attach _some_ value to my ideas, but I do my best to wait with that until I've thought about it a bit and scoped out its feasibility. Bugs I don't mind at all - they're either mistakes (which just happen due to complexity) or indications of insufficient understanding. What I find a bit discouraging is discovering, after starting to work on an idea, that it's bad, infeasible or requires an order of magnitude more work than initially assumed. But I try to see it as gaining knowledge about problem domain, not defeat.
I suppose I could frame it slightly differently: it's not about not having emotional attachment, but about not making an idea part of your identity. When someone points out a flaw in a cool idea you had, you're sad because the cool thing won't happen. When they point a flaw in your idea, it feels as if they're pointing a flaw in you.
Even more so to people that you don't know well.
You are overthinking the metaphors in the comic. They are just there to emphasize that the advice isn't doing the person receiving it any good (or is your premise that the person about to get hit by the semi will suddenly act differently having been encouraged to focus on the things they can control?).
Even though telling an individual who is catastrophizing to stop catastrophizing usually won't help them stop (and will often damage relationships), it is nevertheless the case that they'll be better off if they stop catastrophizing.
I took the time to write this here because it struck me that the people who would identify with this comic might benefit from the concept, and in a small way, hope that they can apply it to their lives to suffer a little bit less.
Better than giving unsolicited advice is gently sharing mental models that you think might serve a person better, and letting them make the choice to adopt them (or not).
At the same time, I sm tickled by the irony of you giving unsolicited advice about not giving unsolicited. :-)
This comic seems aimed at tone-deaf people trying to get others to stop catastrophizing, and there’s a whole lot to be said for validating others’ experience (life is inescapably and terribly painful) and not trying to cram zen shit down people’s throats when they’re suffering. It’s not helpful.
In addition to that, unless you’re literally falling off a cliff, falling off of a cliff is a disempowering metaphor - it’s straight catastrophizing. If you’re literally and inescapably about to get hit by a semi truck, well. Why shouldn’t you focus on what you can control? Why not think warm thoughts about the people you love before you die?
Our brains generate lots of crazy, irrational things when we’re in pain. That’s inescapable - we don’t really control our thoughts. We do get to reality test them and choose whether or not to believe those thoughts, though.