也许你并没有真的在尝试

# 也许你并没有真的在尝试

# Maybe you’re not Actually Trying

> 论有能力之人的选择性能动性
>
> On selective agency in capable people

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Two things happened for me over the holidays five years ago: I went to rehab, and I acquired a cyberstalker. These were not entirely independent events. The stalker was someone in India who’d started following me when I was playing poker, who came to believe we had a close personal relationship and that my tweets were coded messages to him. When I stopped tweeting for two months, he became convinced something had happened to me, so he tracked down my email and phone number and started spamming me with messages demanding to know where I was.

五年前的假期，我身上发生了两件事：我去了康复中心，以及我招来了一个网络跟踪狂。这两件事并非完全独立。那个跟踪狂在印度，从我玩扑克时就开始关注我，后来他开始相信我们之间有亲密关系，并认为我的推文是发给他的加密信息。当我停止发推两个月后，他坚信我出了事，于是他找到了我的电子邮件和电话号码，开始用信息轰炸我，追问我身在何处。

By the time I realized this was happening, he’d already escalated to the point that I was clearly never going to respond. I started blocking him on different platforms, but he’d just create another account or phone number, or find some other way in. He messaged me dozens of times a day, alternating between threats and pleas. When he reached out to my company six months later to apply for a job, I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself. I decided that there was nothing I could do from the other side of the world, and resigned myself to waiting him out.

当我意识到这一切时，他的行为已经升级到我绝不可能回应的地步。我开始在不同平台上拉黑他，但他总能创建新账号、换新号码，或找到其他方式联系我。他每天给我发几十条信息，时而威胁，时而哀求。六个月后，当他联系我的公司申请工作时，我得知了他的真实姓名，并借此找到了他的一个旧友请求帮助——但那位朋友告诉我，他害怕介入，因为不想让自己也成为目标。我断定，隔着半个地球，我无能为力，只能听天由命，等他自己放弃。

Only he never tired. Years went by and I never responded, and still he messaged me multiple times a day. The messages became more disturbing, more pornographic, more violent. He told me he would come find me in Berkeley and hurt me. Finally, last November, in the span of a few days, he sent me an image of his brand new passport and a visa application, which he said he planned to use to travel here, and successfully extorted money from my brother by spoofing my phone number and pretending to have kidnapped me.

但他从未疲倦。几年过去了，我从未回复，他仍然每天给我发多条信息。信息变得越来越令人不安，越来越色情，越来越暴力。他说他会来伯克利找到我并伤害我。终于，在去年十一月，几天之内，他给我发来了他崭新护照和签证申请的照片，说计划用这些来这里，并且通过伪造我的电话号码，假装绑架了我，成功地从我哥哥那里敲诈了钱。

*Enough!* I thought, and snapped into action. Except that I didn’t. Instead, I curled up in a ball and cried, and told friends who suggested contacting the police that there was no point, that no one would be able to help as long as I was here and he was in India.

*够了！* 我心想，然后立刻行动起来。然而事实并非如此。我蜷缩成一团哭泣，并告诉那些建议我报警的朋友们，这根本没用，只要我在这里而他在印度，就没人能帮上忙。

But my husband was insistent that there had to be a better answer, and asked me to let him intervene on my behalf. In short order, he was in contact with the FBI, the US consulate in India, and, with the help of his friend Govind, who has family there, the local police where the stalker lived. Within months, the situation had resolved, and he will never set foot on American soil.

但我的丈夫坚信一定有更好的解决办法，并请求我让他代为介入。很快，他联系上了 FBI、美国驻印度领事馆，并在他有家人在那里的朋友 Govind 的帮助下，联系到了跟踪狂居住地的当地警察。几个月内，情况得到了解决，他将永远无法踏上美国的土地。

One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed. They were more or less exactly the strategies I would have come up with if I’d been put in charge of a similar situation in someone else’s life. Why did it take another person getting involved for me to realize I wasn’t Actually Trying?

这件事有趣的一点是，我丈夫采取的策略并没有什么特别的创新之处。如果让我去处理别人生活中类似的情况，我想出的策略也大致如此。为什么需要另一个人介入，我才意识到自己并没有在“真的在尝试”？

I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity — broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.

我想事情是这样的：当那个跟踪狂闯入我的生活时，我正处于个人能力（personal capacity）的低谷——身无分文、孤身一人、思绪混乱等等。我当时对他采取的方法（忽略他，希望他能停下来）是基于我当时精神和心理资源下唯一看似可行的选择。但是我对这个问题的处理方式，在我处于低能动性（low agency）的那一刻被固定了下来，即使后来我的行动能力增强了，我也从未想过要重新审视它。

I think we are all like this. **People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.**

我想我们都是这样。**从全局来看，人并不仅仅是高能动性或低能动性的，这种状态不会贯穿其一生。相反，人的能动性是选择性的。**

Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.

我们可以把生活分为三个舞台：工作、与他人的关系（各种关系），以及与自我的关系（身体健康、内省、情感发展等所有方面）。我认为，人们至少在其中一个领域停留在早期发展阶段，这是常态而非例外。在生活的某个舞台上，他们并没有“真的在尝试”——尽管他们现在是能力出众的成年人，却用青少年的智谋去处理严肃的问题。

In my particular corner of the world, there are tons of high-achievers in work. These are ingenious people shaping the world through innovations in science, technology, and policy. But many of them haven’t applied the same ingenuity to their interior experience or relationships. These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps.

在我所处的世界里，有大量工作上的高成就者。他们是富有创造力的人，通过在科学、技术和政策领域的创新来塑造世界。但他们中的许多人并没有将同样的创造力应用于自己的内在体验或人际关系上。这些人可以在几乎没有指导的情况下，在异国他乡成功推出一款产品，却会抱怨在交友软件上遇不到任何有趣的人。

**It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.**

**似乎在默认情况下，当你第一次遇到某个问题并未能解决它时，你当时所展现的智谋水平，就会一直束缚着你。**

Let’s say you tried therapy when you were 20, and it didn’t help with your high levels of anxiety. When you think about your anxiety, as the years go by, you think, “hard problem, tried the main solution, didn’t work out.” Perhaps you just accept anxiety as a fixed trait, and your friends playfully rib you about it, which is nice but makes it seem even more like a static part of your identity. But you’re not 20 anymore. You’re, say, a 32-year-old CTO, and when a vital project at your startup doesn’t respond to your first approach, you vigorously try another, and another, trying to learn from every failure. That same persistence and curiosity don’t get applied to the anxiety that makes you suffer at work, though.

假设你 20 岁时尝试过心理治疗，但它对你高度的焦虑没有帮助。随着岁月流逝，当你想到你的焦虑时，你会想：“这是个难题，我试过主流方法了，但没用。” 也许你干脆接受焦虑是一种固定特质，朋友们也会善意地拿这个开你玩笑，这虽然不错，但更让它看起来像是你身份中一个不可改变的部分。但你已经不是 20 岁了。比如说，你现在是一位 32 岁的首席技术官，当你创业公司的一个重要项目对你的第一种方法没有反应时，你会积极地尝试另一种，再另一种，并试图从每一次失败中学习。然而，那种同样的坚持和好奇心，却没有被应用到那个让你在工作中备受折磨的焦虑问题上。

You don’t think, *oh, I could probably*:

你不会去想，*哦，我也许可以*：

-   Check on my nutrition and sleep, in a serious way
-   Look into supplements and medication
-   Throw some resources at improving my rest and recovery
-   Ask all of my friends about the best anxiety treatments they’ve ever heard of, or the best coaches/therapists they’ve ever worked with
-   Research any emerging therapies designed for people like me

-   认真地检查我的营养和睡眠状况
-   研究一下补充剂和药物
-   投入一些资源来改善我的休息和恢复
-   问遍我所有的朋友，他们听说过的最好的焦虑疗法，或者合作过的最好的教练/治疗师
-   研究任何为我这样的人设计的新兴疗法

Instead of doing those things, you just put up with it. Or, worse, you fight through your anxiety using an earlier solution that required willpower, and the exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. **But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.**

你没有做这些事，只是默默忍受。或者更糟的是，你用一种需要意志力的早期解决方案来对抗你的焦虑，而动用意志力的过程让你感觉自己正在努力。**但付出了努力的感觉，并不意味着你在“真的在尝试”。**

There is a relevant concept from Alexander Technique that I love, “faulty sensory appreciation,” which I learned about from Michael Ashcroft. The concept is that habitual tension distorts your sensory impressions—rigid stillness via bodily tension starts to feel like “good posture,” whereas relaxed uprightness feels strange, to the extent you might feel like your back is at a weird angle when you’re actually standing up tall. The right way feels like the wrong way. Apparently, this is demonstrated by having Alexander students lie in a position where your legs tell you that you shouldn’t be able to stand up — and then the instructor says, “by the way, you can stand up from here,” and you do.

我从 Michael Ashcroft 那里学到了一个亚历山大技巧（Alexander Technique）中的相关概念，我非常喜欢，叫做“错误的感官知觉”（faulty sensory appreciation）。这个概念指的是，习惯性的紧张会扭曲你的感官印象——通过身体紧张实现的僵硬静止开始感觉像是“良好姿势”，而放松的直立感却觉得奇怪，甚至当你其实站得笔直时，你可能会觉得自己的背部处在一个奇怪的角度。正确的方式感觉像是错误的方式。据说，有一个演示可以证明这一点：让亚历山大技巧的学生躺在一个你双腿感觉无法站起来的姿势——然后教练说，“顺便说一下，你可以从这里站起来”，然后你就真的站起来了。

Similarly, people who are being selectively agentic often have a kind of faulty sensory appreciation. Perhaps relationships *feel hard* for you, they take willpower, so it’s tempting to believe that you’re Actually Trying, that you’ve brought the full weight of your genius to bear on the problem. You might even take some pride in the struggle. Like rigid posture, the strain feels like correctness. But struggling is not evidence that you’ve tried everything. To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.

同样地，那些表现出选择性能动性的人，也常常有一种“错误的感官知觉”。也许人际关系对你来说*感觉很难*，需要动用意志力，所以你很容易相信你正在“真的在尝试”，已经将你全部的才智都投入到了这个问题上。你甚至可能对这种挣扎感到一丝自豪。就像僵硬的姿势一样，这种紧绷感让人觉得是正确的。但挣扎并不能证明你已经尝试了所有方法。恰恰相反，持续需要意志力，可能是一个设计拙劣的人生的标志。

I’d recommend assuming there’s some area of your life where you are, without realizing it, frozen in time, and that locating it matters quite a bit. Look across the three theaters of your life: work, relationships, and self-relationship, and take note of the biggest issues you face. Know that you might be looking for something that doesn’t feel like an *issue* — it might just feel like sadness or anger, like the sadness of not being seen, or the frustration of not feeling like your work is meaningful. Once you’ve surfaced something, ask yourself: Have I done my best to come up with a set of potential solutions, using all the resources I have? Am I doing as well by myself as I would by any friend who came to me with the same problem? How do I know I’m Actually Trying?

我建议你假设，在你生活的某个领域，你不知不觉地被凝固在了时间里，而找到这个领域非常重要。审视你人生的三个舞台：工作、人际关系和自我关系，并记下你面临的最大问题。要知道，你寻找的可能不感觉像一个*问题*——它可能只是感觉像悲伤或愤怒，比如不被看见的悲伤，或者感觉工作没有意义的挫败感。一旦你发现了某个问题，问问自己：我是否已经用尽我所有的资源，尽我所能地提出了一系列可能的解决方案？我对自己，是否像对待任何一个带着同样问题来找我的朋友一样尽心尽力？我如何知道我是在“真的在尝试”？