There Are No Problems, Only Facts

Problems don’t exist in the objective reality — only in your subjective reality.

About four months ago, I got diagnosed with Lyme disease. As I found out, a moment of panic mixed with a strange subtle sense of relief washed over me. If it’s Lyme, then at least it’s not something worse. My hands had been trembling for about two years and in the past couple of months, brain fog, loss of muscle strength, and low energy levels came to join the party. I was feeling so lethargic that I needed to sit down anytime I brushed my teeth — standing up for 2 minutes was way too much effort.

As a result of this news, I was forced to change my entire lifestyle: no gluten, no dairy, no eggs, minimal alcohol, and over a thousand euros worth of supplements to fight the bacteria for the foreseeable future.

Ol’ bread-and-beer-loving-me wasn’t exactly excited about this forecast. Pretty much all foods that made me happy dance during breakfast, lunch, and dinner now had to be completely eliminated from my life. In the first few days, I had some trouble adjusting to this news. While it’s easy to victimize ourselves when life gets tough, there’s one philosophy that has kept me from spiraling into this type of problem-thinking.

I have Lyme disease and as a result of that, I need to change my lifestyle — this is not a problem; it’s merely a fact.

It’s easy to complain about this fact. People are hardwired to love overreacting and complaining. I could easily say, ‘’I hate that I can’t have a beer in the sun anymore!’’ or ‘’So annoying that I have to carry a sh*t ton of supplements around when traveling’’, but what’s the point?

Minor inconveniences become huge problems in our minds and after time, it adds up. It’s a simple sequence: problems cause stress, and stress causes health issues. I’m not pointing this out to have you stress out over all the stress you have — quite the opposite actually.

In the whirlwind of all the challenges, obstacles, and problems in your life, it’s difficult to stay rational. But are you sure your problems are really problems?

Problems Don’t Exist

Let’s have a look at the definitions of facts and problems.

Fact: something that has actual existence; a piece of information presented as having objective reality

Problem: a source of perplexity, distress, or vexation

As you can see, they are two completely different things. Still, we tend to mix the two up quite a lot. That’s because while we blindly put them in the same category, they come from a completely different type of reality.

Essentially, there are two different types of reality:

• Objective reality is the reality that makes us aware that a chair is a chair and that the sky is blue. These are all agreement-based. Because of the objective reality that we’ve established throughout millions of years, we know what an elephant is. It’s fact-based.
• Subjective reality is the reality that comes from our perception of the objective reality. This is not agreement-based and this reality can be completely different for different cultures, societies and individuals. It’s opinion, mental framework and perception-based.

Example: An elephant is an elephant, and that elephant exists independent of any conscious entity to observe it. It’s just there, and we know it’s an elephant (objective reality and fact-based). You might say it’s an ugly elephant. I will strongly disagree and think that it’s a beautiful elephant (and give you an icy look for being mean to an elephant). Those are our different subjective realities (perception-based).

This elephant scenario would likely not happen in real life and if it did, it wouldn’t affect your life as much. But think about this:

It’s 7:48 AM. After just having spent way too much time making your hair look fancy, you’re rushing out the door for an appointment at 8. Just as you’re about to head out, it starts pouring. You let out a groan. ‘’Why does this always happen to me?!’’

Instantly, you’re 1) making it all about you, and 2) twisting the fact to a problem. The fact is that it’s raining. That’s not good or bad. It’s just what it is: water falling from the sky.

Your subjective reality is making it a problem. Sure, you just spent half an hour on your hair and rain would ruin it, but why make it a problem? You know it’s raining, so you embrace that fact and you grab an umbrella. This situation might not be that big of a deal, but this is what’s at the core of taking ownership of your life.

Problems don’t exist in the objective reality — only in your subjective reality.

Let’s look at a bigger example.

The year is 2020. There’s a global pandemic, and new COVID-measures and restrictions are arising around the world at breakneck speed. You’re angry, sad, and frustrated because you feel like you have no freedom anymore — you can’t go out, you can’t visit your parents and your job is firing employees left and right. Of course, life seems clouded with problems right now. For the record; probably everyone on earth was feeling this way at first.

But what are the facts for a person who hasn’t been directly affected by Covid aside from having restrictions? There is a virus and to keep it from spreading, we need to have restrictive measures to deal with it. That’s really all there is to it.

You could derive about a million problems from these facts into your subjective reality. You are completely in charge of doing that. But why would you?

Taking Ownership of Your Life

When you embrace that everything is just facts and you choose how you respond, everything becomes lighter. You can be moody about traffic but you can also take it as it is: there is traffic. That’s not good or bad. That’s just the circumstance, and now you can decide how you respond. You can 1) get moody or 2) just sit in traffic, jam out to the music and not assign intrinsic value to it.

That’s what I’ve been doing with my whole Lyme situation. I acknowledge the facts: I have Lyme disease and I need to change my lifestyle. I could derive a million tiny problems from that into my subjective reality but there is absolutely no point in doing that. I just embrace the facts, make the lifestyle changes and focus my energy on healing, rather than complaining.

Once you take full ownership of your life and realize that all the ‘problems’ you have are only problems because you assigned that tag to facts, it becomes much easier to handle situations in which normally you may have tended to overreact. You decide whether something is a problem in your mind or not.

That means there’s good news: you can significantly bring down the current number of ‘problems’ in your life.

How to Solve Most of Your ‘Problems’

How many problems do you have right now? What do you consider a ‘problem’ currently? Is it any minor inconvenience or do you only keep the term ‘problem’ for major events like losing a loved one or getting fired?

A good way to assess how you usually treat problems is to write up a quick and dirty inventory of all the problems you currently have. Maybe you’ll have 5. Maybe 30. Maybe only 1. If writing up this list makes you uncomfortable and anxious, power through it. It’s about to get better.

When you have your list of current problems in your life, look at each individual item through the framework of these questions:

#1. What are the hard facts of this situation? (What is the objective reality of this ‘’problem’’?)

#2. How am I perceiving those facts? (What subjective reality am I adopting here?) This will give you insight into whether your reaction to the facts might be exaggerated. Some problems will possibly already evaporate at this question as you realize that your perception is much worse than the actual facts.

#3. Can I influence the hard facts? If you can change the facts, it is not a problem, because you can do something about it. If you can’t change the facts, you can still embrace them, change your reaction to the facts and make the most of the situation.

Chances are that your list of problems shrinks dramatically after pulling them through this funnel, because it forces you to stay objective.

Remember This

Of course, there’s nuance to every self-help article and I’m definitely not trying to invalidate your challenges and worries. I’m merely pointing out that a lot of the negativity that’s occupying our headspace is absolutely unnecessary if you just look at the facts, embrace them, take ownership of how you respond, and learn to make the most of any situation.