"Informed helplessness" probably isn't the best frame for the concept, but maybe more like a cost-benefit analysis for giving a shit (CBAGAS), or the Gaullic shrug ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). My brother and I both lived in DC once upon a time. We both got parking tickets, some of which were legitimate and some of which were made up by the meter maids because the DC government is banking that you'd rather just pay $20 than go through the hassle of an appeal (which they usually just ignore). I would get enraged; my brother would just shrug and say "cost of living in the city--you want to walk home from your favorite bar or to your favorite restaurant, this is what you put up with." It wasn't that he thought it was okay, he just decided it wasn't worth the mental energy to get mad about it.

I still get mad about them, but I can see that his perspective is far preferable.

> if you sit down and figure out "what you cannot change" -- you're effectively teaching yourself to be "helpless" about those things.

The research doesn’t back this up. This is one of the reasons why I’m reluctant to be prescriptive about these things, our intuition about what we ought to believe and how we ought to think sometimes does not produce the results we want.

For example, people walk around saying it’s important to “take responsibility” for the things that happen to us. And many successful people say, anecdotally, that this is what they do. And yet, many people try this and fail.

Seligman’s book explains why successful people say they take responsibility for what happens to them, but also explains why that doesn’t work for everyone. His research was that successful people have this “optimism” trait where they are asymmetric: They personalize the good things that happen to them, and depersonalize the bad things.

Meaning, they think they are responsible for their success.

But if you ask them, they perceive they were taking responsibility for everything that happened to them. But statistically, this is not the case.

So what I will say to you is, don’t argue with whatever I am writing or saying, go to the original sources and understand what Covey and Seligman are actually saying, and what research they did to arrive that their conclusions and prescriptions for changing your life.

Isn't the only difference between your venn-diagram example and "learned helplessness" that in the former case the subject is aware of the decision-making, rather than passively giving up?