Charlie Munger – Feeling Like a Victim Is Perfectly Disastrous

This seems overly strong? To me "victimhood" just implies that you are the recipient of the negative consequences of someone else's actions, it has nothing to do with your response to those actions. You can be a helpless victim and you can be a resistant victim. You can recognize that something is not your fault, and still act to fix it. But simply eating the blame for everything that happens to you will just make you miserable. Healthy self-regard comes from understanding both what is and is not your fault, and what is and is not within your control.

You can't always try to make everything better that you become aware of. You can't fix everything. Not everything is your problem to solve. In fact, some (important) people may not like it if you try to solve said problem.

I very much have to make myself stay out of solving everything and just let others take care of it. Especially since I very much don't like other people I see that encounter the slightest problem and they just throw up their hands screaming "I don't know what to do so I'll just stand here and do nothing while someone else solves it". So it's quite the balancing act. Those people need to do more "my fault, I'll solve it" and I need to do more "not my business, let them solve it but secretly keep an eye on it to ensure that it does get done in the end coz it's actually important".

This is, to me, insane. Grief, sadness, anger, etc are not truly within our conscious control. I can't say that I have a study in hand which shows this or anything, but in my own personal experience with them it definitely doesn't seem like a "choice" to feel something. Feeling and actions have mutual influence, but neither fully determines the other. Choosing to be "over it", IMO, is simply denial masquerading as self-control.

To be clear: recognizing the persistence of, say, grief is not at all the same as letting yourself be consumed by it. I think it's appropriate and healthy to set boundaries on the amount of time that you will give energy and attention to an emotion like grief, and making the decision to "move on" is absolutely possible. But to me this must take the form of "I am still feeling X, but choosing not to let my actions be dominated by it", or at the very least the simple "I am still feeling X and that's okay". In my experience people who you instead say "I am no longer allowing myself to feel X" eventually [ex|im]plode. A quote I heard a long time ago that really resonated with me is (something like) "you are not a machine, you are a garden"; my mind doesn't take orders and trying to force it to adopt one state or another will either result in frustration (bad) or deluding myself about my internal emotional state (worse). All I can productively do is provide my mind with the circumstances it needs to develop in a healthy way, and then be patient. In the meantime I can put my best effort into taking healthy and self-caring actions (doesn't have to be sleeping all day, could be taking a class or learning a new skill), without punishing myself for failing these.

The non-technical manager isn't able to do more to prevent it. Nor is the busy technical manager. The poor performer either isn't able or willing. There's no Superman coming to rescue you. You are the person on the planet who cares the most about the poor performer's effect on your life, and you know the quote about "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". The utility of "blame" is questionable, but the choice is only do you consider yourself a victim of the poor performer with nothing you can do and have the same situation happen again and again, or do you recognise that you are in a position to act and prevent it? (If you want, you can then blame your choice not to act, when the situation predictably recurs, I guess).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4AUY-v1nsE - "We are going to have to act, if we want to live in a different world"