This post’s hypothesis is simple enough. Short-term solutions, however beguiling and near-at-hand, can just as easily interfere with your resolving a problem than facilitate it.
Various examples can validate this contention, but a fairly obvious one revolves around the subject of revenge. For history has repeatedly shown that avenging yourself against the person who betrayed you is typically counterproductive. As the popular expression points out: “Revenge begets revenge.”
Yet, for virtually everyone, the first thought that enters consciousness in a blatantly inequitable scenario is that you’re well within your rights to retaliate against someone who’s taken abusive advantage of you.
Yet regardless of whether that payback is warranted, if finally getting back at someone only leads them “righteously” to retaliate against you, your vengeful behavior will only exacerbate your original hurt.
That’s an interpersonal instance of the hazards associated with short-term (in most cases, read “impulsive”) solutions, which in the longer term may prove not to have solved much of anything at all.
Here’s a common intrapersonal example of the hazards related to short-term thinking. Experts in nutrition routinely recommend that effective weight management necessitates taking weight off gradually.
But if you’re desperate to lose weight and want to achieve this goal as quickly as possible, you’re likely to try a diet so detrimental to your health or incompatible with your lifestyle that it’s impossible to sustain.
This is why, however much weight you may lose initially, you’ll eventually put it back on. And all too frequently, you’ll end up putting on more pounds than when your diet began. That is, slow and steady regularly beats fast and (well) fickle.
Reality has a way of catching up with you when, despite your level of motivation, you seek to do something not in your nature.
Several caveats are in order here. For there are times when the situation is—or seems—so urgent that you must act in the moment. In these harried circumstances, you’re forced to suspend your better judgment, for it’s a luxury you feel you can’t afford. Besides, your anxiety may have become so extreme that you’re compelled to alleviate it as soon as possible.
At the most primitive level, it’s as though your very survival is at stake. And, frankly, anyone’s instincts will take over (or take them over) whenever their existence is experienced as in peril.
Ironically, if a situation feels overwhelming, you may defensively shift into a stopgap dissociative mode—and to retrieve your lost stability, distance yourself from its threat. That’s one reason why procrastination is so common and why it’s frequently referred to as “kicking the can down the road.”
Again, we don’t really experience ourselves as having a choice. For in the moment, we self-protectively feel we have to do something.
Overall, short-term solutions, or, in many cases, pseudo-solutions, are more visible to us. And they’re almost tangible in a way that longer-term solutions—more abstract and less certain, and, so, less palatable—can’t be.
Moreover, when we’re actively handling something, even if we’ve decided to do so through procrastination, we see ourselves as moving concretely toward a goal. On the contrary, such a desirable dopamine reward generally eludes us when we pause to contemplate the longer-term ramifications of the behavior.
Finally, for all the reasons I’ve delineated, most people gravitate toward short-term solutions. And when we act similarly, it might be said that following the herd alone comforts us.
It’s in our nature to experience pleasure or solace when we feel harmoniously connected to others. Having faith that our actions, reactions, or inactions are congruent with those of the populace offers us a reassurance that, in turn, gives us some closure on what we’ve been worrying about.
Consider the saying, “There’s safety in numbers,” which—though often makeshift and defeatist in the long run—may, in the present, expedite a state of inner peace and security. It may not involve much creativity or ingenuity on our part, but it can still offer us relief from what upset us.
Temporary? Probably, yes. But such an immediate remedy may yet be gratifying to us.
Might you be able to think of instances in which your short-term solution actually made the problem worse, because your decision-making process failed to consider enough relevant factors?
At the time, your (short-sighted) thinking made sense to you. But, upon later reflection, you recognized the action you felt pressed to take was brash, ill-advised, or imprudent. It didn’t, and couldn’t, address the fundamentals of what was wrong or inequitable—or, for that matter, how most logically to repair it.
Broadly considered, focusing attention on what could prevent the problem from recurring and actually resolve troubling issues is preferable to limiting one’s concentration on right-away fixes.
© 2024 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
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