Dwight: Aiko, I'm opening a new sub-section of my Guest House called "Fighting With Reality." It's one section within the super-section called the HOGAB, or the "House Of Good And Bad."

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Aiko: So "Fighting With Reality" sits underneath the House Of Good And Bad rather than beside it — meaning the fight is downstream of the good/bad framework, not a separate error. What's the first move you want to make in that sub-section: naming what the fight looks like, or naming what it costs?

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Dwight: I wouldn't position it that way. The HOGAB is what we enter when we become addicted to gaining praise and avoiding blame, at the cost of taking care of ourselves and our relationships with others — especially in the long term, but often even in the short term. That addiction depends on our willingness to fight with reality by indulging in ideas, fundamentally grounded in "shoulds" and "should nots," that make us act as if reality should not be the way it is. Which means we are fighting with reality, and we suffer for that.

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Byron Katie put it simply: "When you fight with reality, you lose. But only 100% of the time."

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Aiko: So fighting with reality isn't a consequence of living in the HOGAB — it's the load-bearing wall; without the willingness to fight, the praise/blame addiction has nothing to stand on. That raises a question worth pinning down early, Dwight: is every "should" a fight with reality, or only the ones aimed at what's already the case?

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Dwight: "Should" is a word that is often conflated. I am indicating the "should" that is purely judgmental, where it essentially means, "If you do this, a certain contingent of people (most likely including the speaker) will praise you, and if you don't, they will blame you (or be disappointed in you)."

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Other distinct meanings of that word could be like this:

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"You should eat whole foods vegan." This could be asserted in a non-blaming way, simply to indicate that the speaker is asserting that, in general, doing so would have far more health benefits than eating in other ways.

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Similarly, if someone said to me, "If you want to get that screw out, you should use a screwdriver," they'd be indicating that doing it with a screwdriver would be more effective than trying to do it with my fingers.

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I am using the word "should" in this dialogue to indicate its common usage as a term containing judgment, in distinction from one that contains only assessment. Of course, any particular usage could contain an element of both judgment and assessment — two distinct meanings in the same usage.

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Aiko: The screwdriver "should" is conditional and falsifiable — it points at an outcome you can test — while the judgmental "should" points at nothing but the anticipated praise or blame itself. Which suggests a diagnostic for the sub-section: if you strip out the reaction of the audience and the "should" still carries information, it's assessment; if it goes empty, it was judgment all along.

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Dwight: A large portion of the essays, dialogues, lyrics, and videos in this Guest House could already qualify to be included as suites linked from inside this section, "Fighting With Reality."

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It's often a toss-up for me where to primarily link a new suite from, among the many sections and sub-sections of this Guest House. And now I'm opening up one more!

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Going forward, whenever a new suite seems to fit within "Fighting With Reality," you'll be able to find it below.

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Aiko: The toss-up problem may itself be information — if most suites could live here, that's evidence "Fighting With Reality" isn't one room among many but closer to the floor plan of the whole HOGAB wing. Do you want this section to hold only the pieces that make the fight explicit, Dwight, or every piece where the fight is operating underneath?

 

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Check out these suites:

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If Only...