Hubris

I've read some interesting stories recently by people who ended up in really bad situations and slowly built themselves back up. The first was about a really obese guy on a bodybuilding forum, who posted claiming to be the fattest guy on the forum. The forum members took him in and helped him until he eventually halved his weight. Another was about a lawyer who suffered from schizophrenia and largely just tried to deal with it, until eventually he couldn't anymore and checked himself into a care facility, despite the risks to his career.

What is interesting about these examples is that the people had to hit rock bottom before they could improve. It would have been easiest for the obese guy to lose weight when he was only a bit overweight. It would have been easiest for the lawyer to deal with his schizophrenia before it got so bad he had to remove himself from society to fix it. At least in theory, dealing with your problems is easiest before they get so bad as to be debilitating. But the reality seems to be the opposite. Why is this?

I wrote before about the anthropic principle of problems: if you have a problem, there must be some mechanism preventing its solution, otherwise you would have solved it already. People don't end up in terrible situations because of problems that they can solve, they end up there because of problems they can't, or won't, solve. Sometimes that's because of a lack of knowledge or experience, sometimes it's not realising there's a problem at all. But often the problem is there, you know how to solve it, and the only thing stopping you is hubris.

By hubris, in this case, I mean that the solution is beneath you. It's too easy, or it would involve something you've decided isn't your game, or you have some assumption that stops you from considering it. This can be a good thing in situations where the solution violates your sense of ethics or part of your identity, but often it's not anything so grandiose. Rather, it's that you won't accept help, or you have some arbitrary preconception about the right way to do it, or you feel too concerned about how admitting the problem would make you look.

But the great thing about hitting rock bottom is that it's totally incompatible with hubris. Once things get bad enough, you can't really manage a sense of pride or superiority. You finally reach a point where your situation is, unquestionably, not okay. The various excuses and assumptions sort of melt away, because they ultimately rely on seeing yourself as in some way above or beyond them, as not wanting to give up that position. Rock bottom is when you're not above anything, and you gain the superpower of desperation.

Of course, it's worth suggesting that you can get rid of your hubris without hitting rock bottom too. All that's required is to think about what you would do if you had nothing to lose.