Nice problems to have

Back in the before times, I wrote a notebook post entitled “Nice problems to have”. It’s an important piece that I end up referencing in conversation over and over again, so here’s a lightly updated version of it for broader consumption.

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There’s a common label of things as “nice problems to have” - problems that you run into only if you’ve succeeded in some way. I have a feeling they’re widely misunderstood, and that the label is misleading. Nice problems to have are actually rarely at all nice to have.

What we mean when we say “nice problem to have” is that the preconditions for having this problem are nice to have. i.e. you cannot have this problem unless some other nice thing happens first. This is not at all a reliable predictor of the amount of suffering involved.

Consider, for example, having all your friends and family constantly making demands on you, far beyond your capacity to satisfy, to the point where it would be emotionally exhausting even if you could say yes to everyone but also you have to say no to most of them and they will resent you for it. This is obviously an intensely painful problem, right?

Now suppose it’s because you come from poverty and have landed a well paid job. Suddenly it’s a “nice problem to have” - you have it because you’re being well paid! Being well paid is good - but that doesn’t change how miserable it is.

The thing is, by definition, “nice problems to have” are ones that are not going to be shared by a lot of people (otherwise the preconditions would just be normal behaviour and it wouldn’t be a nice problem to have).

As a result:

1. Most people you know probably won’t be able to relate to it, because their lived experiences will be so different.

2. People will be envious of you for the nice thing, so when you try to communicate about your deeply felt personal problems, people react badly.

Thus the defining characteristic about nice problems to have is not that they are nice, but that you will be afforded no sympathy for having them. Nice problems to have are the opposite of nice: They isolate you from the ability to complain about them, which removes a major bonding activity with people who have not been successful in the same way as you, and also causes you to feel worse about the problems with those who do not share your burden.

This goes doubly true because the label of “nice problem to have” is very local to your peer group - it is applied because you succeed in some way that those you know have not.

There is a phenomenon of people succeeding and leaving their former friends behind, and there are many reasons why people do this, but I suspect the nice problems associated with their success are one of them: None of their former friends are able to be remotely sympathetic to things that are very real sources of their suffering (and indeed that unrelatability of it is probably part of their suffering). Nice problems to have alienate you from people who you care about but who don’t share them.

I think this has a couple of partial solutions:

1. We need communities of people like us who share our nice problems to have. If we lack that, it’s almost impossible to have relationships with people who don’t share them, because it creates an unfulfilled need that will tend to leak out in our relationships with people who can’t meet it.

2. …but also when our friends have problems that, to us, are nice to have, we need to be more understanding. That doesn’t mean we have to be able to talk to them about it - sometimes that’s just going to be too hard, particularly if their nice problems to have are ones that arise from having solved problems we have and experience as acutely painful - but it does mean we have to accept that yes, these are real problems for them.

But I’m not honestly that optimistic about it being fully solvable, and I think it might just be part of the human condition that it’s impossible to maintain most close personal relationships across sufficiently large gaps in privileges, and attempting to do so will just result in heartache.

This is part of why I care so much about heterogeneity. People are different, and we need to be able to form communities around those differences so that we can talk about our problems with others who understand them, but we also need to be able to maintain positive and mutually respectful relationships across those gulfs of understanding. Acknowledging the reality of each other’s problems, even when we envy their preconditions, has to be part of that.