Never Complain, Never Explain
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Anything you put your attention on, grows. So keep your attention on what you're hoping for, not on what you wish would go away. Don't give negative things oxygen.
(Of course this is all well and fine for someone of generally good character doing productive work; but can also be the formula for monsters to use that are "hoping for" things that most would find repugnant).
Related, which I always loved: Winston Churchill "You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks."
Cognitively I know it's better to just focus on the future and what I'm doing but I really struggle to walk by stuff without engaging. It's a flaw I'm aware of and am trying to work on, but it feels impossible to get where I want to be
It does not help that I am nearing 40 and the past "things I am hoping for" have never really worked out how I wanted. I think it becomes harder and harder to hope when your hopes have been squashed frequently in your life
It's a real privilege to have a life where things actually work out close to how you want them. Hard work alone does not get you there
I think this is part of the problem. You think it’s a temperament, but it’s actually a skill, and skills can be developed.
Like all skills, developing it will be often difficult, frustrating, and uncomfortable, so when it’s like that you have to recognise that as part of the process. You’ll think you’re going against your nature when, in reality, you’re simply experiencing the tribulations of learning a new skill.
Source: 50 year old man who used to throw many stones at dogs on a much more regular basis.
That doesn't mean I don't try, but I'm just aware that certain things get under my skin and set me from 0 to 100 faster than I can take a deep breath and keep my cool
Even if this was a mantra for royalty, I am positive that amongst peers and private lessers they will lose their cool and demeanor.
Presenting a demeanor to a subset of humanity is much easier than the whole; on account of the loneliness acting 100% of the time presents. Code switching is pretty inate to humans, it would seem.
This is almost nobody, by the way. It's another one of the illusions that has gotten worse with social media.
If I'm sitting pretty on more income than I need with very few obligations, sure, I can just "focus on the path" and "ignore the distractions". But how many people have that luxury?
I think you should challenge that assumption first. In my opinion, there is a lot of merit to the "Live in the now" philosophy, instead of always ruminating (or contemplating) about the past and the future. Even with goals, I have been often advised to focus more on the tasks / steps to achieve them, rather than the end results.
words to live by, if you can.
There is such thing as negativity that will ruin your mental health, but the other side is just embracing delusion. We can see examples of successful people that keep embracing the delusion and succeed. But there are many that end up in unrecoverable positions after they burn themselves to the ground in said delusion. Around me, there's far more of the latter than the former.
That's not a typical definition of negative things. I'm not disagreeing with your ultimate point but it already feels like a mental stretch to include that in the set of negative things.
It could be that your boss is a negative entity, but the act of disclosure isn't in my world view.
- Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism
Unless you literally mean "don't give oxygen", then yes, people generally die off that so the problem would be solved.
Even logically, most likely these societal issues are coming for everybody and what you can do is to be best prepared for them which inevitably means to focus on yourself (which is a good advice as ever at any point of time).
So why worry about societal issues and instead not just focus on what matters personally and something which you can take an action on and improve upon (Similar to Stoic philosophy maybe)
(I struggle to live by these words, Hopefully I improve, I am trying to watch negative news less nowadays and would like to focus more on hope and personal growth)
I've seen businesses, especially software, do this where 99% of the company's effort was in "doing the right thing" by supporting their last product so much they were never able to put any effort into a better product. Getting out of this is where the right CEO earns their pay.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, but I think of it often to remind myself not to focus on the outcome I desperately want to avoid.
> but can also be the formula for monsters to use that are "hoping for" things that most would find repugnant
The problem is they are explicitly saying to do things in the shadows.
| Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it... Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic
And we've seen what these people do in the shadows. The disgraced Andrew was far from the only Royal in the Epstein files. We saw what they did to Diana, who tried to shed some light. We've seen it over and over.
I'll take the light, because I'd rather live in a world where we make things better than live in a world with the appearance of magic. The only magic is what we create
This seems to be a rewording of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_dogs_bark,_but_the_carava...
For positive things, for future hope and dreams, one has to be careful. We know that visualizing a positive outcome can be counter-productive...
Those who daydream about the perfect fitness routine don't go to the gym.
Those who daydream about building anything are less likely to take the step necessary to actually build it.
It's as though strong visualization of a positive outcome becomes a satiating reward in itself. Without any changes to reality, we become attached to the mere idea of possible future. Just as those dwelling on the past are dissociating from reality, those hoping for the future are willfully disengaging engaging with primary reality.
All that is to say, it IS all about attention. So pay attention to the present.
There should be made a distinction between daydream and visualization. Visualization in sports psychology is a very common technique that is widely used by athletes (amateur to top tier). I had also read about visualization/imagery having positive effects on motor recovery and performance.
Basically the idea is that your brain has a hard time telling the difference between the fantasy and reality and so you experience the reward which then sucks out the energy and drive needed to actually do the hard work.
When it's "fantasy" the experience of reward "sucks out the energy and drive".
I'm referring to there being a difference between fantasy/daydream and mental visualization as the deliberate construction of detailed mental imagery of a desired performance or outcome [0] When you do it while lost in fantasy it's not deliberate, but when it's an intentional process it becomes beneficial.
The brain having a hard time telling the difference between real and imagined is neutral, the how and intention behind that imagined activation tells if the outcome is positive or depleting
[0] https://www.simplypsychology.com/articles/visualization-tech...
Any objective merit his efficiency argument had, the sentiment against him was overwhelming for complaining from such a privileged position.
This makes it evident how this strategy exists to maintain the "magic" and fool the masses. It has no place in a progressive society where being duped with propaganda into believing falsehoods should not be something to look up to.
The royal family has obviously fallen apart entirely as its human foibles have become evident, and in modern society it is almost impossible to hide.
I agree, but believe we’re now in a regressive society, moving as fast as we can to repeat history, investing vast resources into effortless propaganda machines.
I think this really misses the nuance of all of this. To put it bluntly: there's too many dumb people who need to believe in this kind of "magic" to be able to reasonably ignore it on a political strategy level. Just trying to treat everyone as intellectually-capable of being presented facts and making a logical choice clearly doesn't work, and the opposition is perfectly willing to exploit this dynamic.
( especially when the truth is being intentionally hidden behind a wall of propaganda ).
Also is a strategy of being part of the crowd ( even if it's an astroturfed one ) a dumb or smart survival strategy?
And generally other wrongdoing by powerful.
During the peak of his popularity you would find Huberman protocols or Huberman factoids repeated everywhere on the internet, including HN. There was a sharp drop off after the revelations. I can’t recall the last time I saw someone someone repeat a Huberman podcast factoid here, which is remarkable after he was so popular.
In the Huberman case it was compounded by how much he was embracing and repeating non-scientific ideas that sounded good on social media, like reducing everything to being about dopamine or making crazy claims about how you could do things to “raise your dopamine” that were not actually supported by research. When his personal dramas were exposed it became an opening to discuss how bad his podcast had become and I think many listeners woke up to that fact when shaken by the realization that not everything about Huberman was as it seemed.
He has been able to continue podcasting to an audience of die-hard fans, though. These people never totally disappear because a core audience worships them and will ignore everything inconvenient to their worship.
Peter Attia went through a similar downfall after several increasingly bad scandals were revealed, culminating in him getting caught associating deeply with Epstein. He tried to make a public statement about distancing himself from Epstein after discovering Epstein’s crimes, but there are public emails between Attia and Epstein where Attia asks Epstein about how he’s doing after Epstein became national news. That backfired everywhere except the core audience of Attia worshippers who now just get angry whenever anyone brings up the Attia-Epstein connection. It’s wild that Attia was one of the few Epstein associates who continued contacting Epstein so much (which went into court records and became public) after he became publicly known as a trafficker. And yet there are hardcore Attia fans to this day.
I’m not aware of such revelations, maybe I haven’t kept up on all, I recall a piece where women he was dating would get together and talk about dating him while continuing to choose to date him. But I don’t remember any story that revealed something negative about him.
The bigger revelations in the story were that the “Huberman Lab” existed largely in name only and he wasn't living or working near the University. His career had pivoted to influencer celebrity long ago but he’s been capitalizing on the neuroscientist title and claiming lab associations anyway. They also interviewed associates who revealed his history of leading people on, manipulating them, and being dishonest wherever it might help his career. Then they found that he was cheating on multiple women at the same time, including someone he led to believe he wanted a long term relationship and children with. He was injecting one partner with fertility drugs while cheating.
What’s fascinating is how his fanbase stripped the story of all of the important details (chronic pattern of misleading everyone in his life where it can help his popularity, which extends into his podcast reporting where he misleads listeners) and instead tried to transform it into personal dating drama that was overblown.
Then the second pass of rationalizing it away was to take the relationship drama and transform that into something that could be blamed on the women involved while letting Huberman off the hook. After that final transformation they were free to ignore anything negative about him because the story had been rewritten, in the retelling, to be completely the fault of women. There were even efforts to make it look like a good thing that he was dating multiple women.
In case it wasn’t clear: In the reporting the women did not “continue to choose to date him” as you heard. The reported group discussion was about former partners had been lied to who were discovering each other because the number of them had grown so high that he couldn’t escape it.
I do think there's value in saying things that are bothering you early on, so I'm not going to say that complaining is inherently "bad", but I will acknowledge that frequent complaining (especially to the wrong people) can lead to a lot of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with your life.
I don't think over-explaining everything has negatively affected my life though.
> With a less deferential and increasingly aggressive media landscape, the strategy of "Never complain, never explain" was abandoned by Prince Charles (the future King Charles III) and his wife Diana, Princess of Wales, in the 1990s.
"No comment"
Naive me joined other commoners to express aghast surprise at how stupid and clueless our leaders were (are!), completely clueless to the idea that perhaps we were (are!) being managed and that our rage burns off energy in a mostly harmless manner.
Only org's truly confident in their handling of an incident can afford to be open.
Obviously key stakeholders get the full details, but Joe Public doesn't get to know.
This maxim doesn't work for government, because they have to justify what they do because they are the ones trying to steer a country though very slack and unconnected reins.
The odd bit about the royals is that they are meant to be largely apolitical. They are supposed to be focused on charitable works, opening infrastructure and generally promoting togetherness.
This kinda worked because it meant that we don't have to pretend to like politicians. Great Britain (yes, not UK because its complex) gets to detach the pomp and circumstance from a political movement, allowing honours, events and occasions to largely be free of politics (despite honours being entirely political) This is why flag shaggers are so weird, its fine to like your country, but getting dressed up in a flag for anything other than sports or getting shitfaced is not the done thing. If you're gonna have a fight, at least do it over something tangible, like which ever football club your dad grew up near.
The bit that worked about the royals is that they were a mystery. We don't know who they really are (you rarely want to know everything about a person, because people are generally messy and ugly close up)
Frankly I don't want to know that harry and william fell out. I have no opinions on kate and megan. I am sure they are nice people, and moreover I couldnt give a fuck about what race one of them is, I'm not american, so why do I fucking care?
I just want posh grandad to say nice words to me at state occasions.
I also want that nonce andrew in jail.
ANYWAY
don't complain don't explain only works if you are only ever trying to bring people together. as soon as you trying to divide and conquer you have to explain.