I once worked at a place where the standing policy was that I couldn't bring a problem to my manager without thinking of at least one possible solution. I couldn't say, "There are eight pallets of stock, nowhere to put it and my guys are all out sick!" Instead, I had to say, "There are eight pallets of stock. I think I can fit them in overstock but I'll have to do some rearranging. Is it possible to borrow someone from a different department to help me out?"
This got annoying when I just wanted to vent, but it turned out to be very empowering and has changed my behavior to this day. Complaining or introducing problems to people creates chaos. Identifying positive solutions alleviates chaos and sets a path towards eliminating it. At that job, thinking about all the things I couldn't do made me want to throw in the towel and go home, but when the option to feel sorry for myself was gone I felt energized because I was thinking about all the things I could do. And even if my manager thought my idea sucked, at least we had a starting point.
We don't have enough starting points, and there are too many people creating chaos. It is an epidemic. People call me to complain about problems when they have no intention of telling me how I can fix them. Citizens who are concerned about our country and our politics react by saying, "Democracy is bunk", not by empowering themselves to learn how to leverage democracy to make a positive change. Every day, I see more complaints and protests and I hear angry voices lamenting how bad things are, but never praising how good the alternatives might be.
It is my belief that all of this festering grouchiness and peoples' unwillingness to offer solutions are building all this chaos around us. And the chaos begets sheer apathy peppered with irrational outbursts.
When problems of violence and politics and pollution and everything bad in the world begin to overwhelm us and there's no possible starting point for solutions, it is just too much to take. If there's nothing we can do about it, why not just drown out the chaos by sedating yourself with a nice brew and kicking back to enjoy the latest round of "reality" programming?
But when the unmitigated chaos causes some kid to bring a gun to school and shoot his classmates we look into his troubled lives and say "poor kid. it must have been rough". We
enable him to feel sorry for himself by agreeing that his problems were
valid and not suggesting from day 1 that there were more appropriate solutions.
I don't know what to do, except try to live by the philosophy of discussing problems only in conjunction with possible solutions. There's enough in the world to make me feel helpless but I rarely, if ever, am helpless.