I’ve been thinking a lot about an idea from a post of Adam Mastroianni’s excellent substack Experimental History. He introduces the difference between diploma problems, which you can finish after enough work, and tooth-brushing problems, which require a little bit of work every day.

His description of tooth-brushing problems with mental health resonated with me:

” When I had a skull full of poison, I assumed feeling good again was a diploma problem. I just had to find the right lever to pull and—yoink!—back to the good times forever. People warned me it wasn’t going to be like this and I didn’t believe them; I assumed they had simply failed to earn their diplomas.

I only started making progress when I realized I was facing a toothbrushing problem: feeling normal again would probably require me to do stuff every day for the rest of my life. I might get better at doing that stuff, just like when you first start brushing your teeth as a kid you get toothpaste everywhere and end up swallowing half of it, and eventually you learn not to do that. But even when you’re a toothbrushing expert, it still takes you a couple minutes every day. You could be mad about that, but it won’t make your teeth any cleaner.”

It feels like I’m surrounded by tooth-brushing problems that I assumed were diploma problems. Like, I’ll do PT for my back and it’ll be Better. Forever.

The arrival fallacy that lives in diploma problems is demotivating, because you feel you haven’t arrived yet. This framing has helped me identify a lot of areas where there was nowhere to arrive and has given me more spaciousness in those areas. Pema Chödrön captures this idea well: “Cutting our expectation for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves.”