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For two decades, I’ve studied the ins and outs of choosing, everything from its origins at the origin of life to everyday informal decision making. I can distil everything I’ve learned in those 20 years just by unpacking the serenity prayer (with a couple of modifications since I have the “courage to change it.”)
Here goes:
God: Whether you believe in God or not (I don’t) the prayer applies for all of us. Seeking the wisdom to know the difference is a quest we’d all want to be on if we care about sustained well-being. So just drop that 25th word:
Grant me the serenity to accept what I can’t change, the courage to change what I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
ACID’s (Ambiguous Clues, Incompatible Do’s): The Serenity Prayer illustrates what I call an ACID, the kind of quandary that, like acid, eats at us. Acids arise when we have trouble knowing whether to do X or Y because the clues are ambiguous, and we can’t do both (hedging) because X and Y are incompatible things to do. You can motivate yourself to change something or demotivate yourself so you can accept it as is, but you can’t do both at once. You can oscillate (“It’s OK, no it’s not, yes it is, no it’s not.”) but it will drive you crazy and be ineffective. The serenity prayer represents a fundamental generic ACID, one that even the first organisms ever had to manage in order to survive (“what can and can’t I transform into energy to keep the going?”). There are others. Here’s a list of variations on the serenity prayer addressing a range of generic quandaries you’ll encounter every day and all lifelong.
Consciousness: We make gazillions of decisions daily automatically, intuitively, through habits accumulated through our past (evolved and learned) questing for the wisdom to know differences. What rise to conscious attention are the yet-unresolved ACIDS, the quandaries that habit doesn’t handle for us unconsciously. While they’re a tiny fraction of the decisions we make, they’re the most interesting which is why I’ve focused on them these past 20 years.
Differences that make a difference to you: Can you change the belt buckle on a guy in Ghana? Can you change the exact position of a pebble in your backyard? Who knows but more to the point, who cares? We don’t wonder about such things, only about whether we can improve something (or keep something from getting worse). Read “change” as “improve.”
Err on both sides now: “Should I try to improve this?” is a yes/no question that can be wrong in two ways. A wrong (or regretted) yes would be having the courage to try to improve what it turns out you can’t improve. A wrong (or regretted) no would be having the serenity to accept as un-improveable what it turns out you could improve. We quest for the wisdom to know the difference as a way to avoid both, not just one of those errors.
Spin: Serenity and courage sound like universally grand things. Always be serene; always be courageous, right? But if they’re always the right way to be, why would you need the wisdom to know the difference between situations that call for one and not the other? Because they’re not always right, something easy to miss in the serenity prayer, given words used to describe the two moves. Both have positive connotations. There are equivalent terms with negative connotations. Try this variation:
Grant me the spinelessness to accept the things I can’t improve, the pigheadedness to try to improve things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
Apples and oranges?: What’s the difference between serenity and spinelessness, courage and pigheadedness? Many would say, “They’re apples and oranges, not the same thing at all!” I disagree. I think the only real difference between them is in whether we predict that they’ll turn out well. If your friend’s partner is a jerk, your friend just accepts it, and you think it won’t end well, you’ll say, “Don’t be spineless.” If you think it will turn out well you’ll say, “I admire your serenity.” Likewise, if you think a die-hard trump fan is out of his mind, you’ll say, “You’re pigheaded,” But if you’re a die-hard trump fan too, you’ll say, “We have courage!” Same thing; different spin. Here’s an article on how to tell whether a distinction is really apples and oranges or just positive vs. negative spin on the same thing.
The Spin-Doctor’s Hippocratic Oath: We hate spin like we hate “game-playing.” We do both as much as other people do but we think we would never stoop to it because we hate it when other people do it to us. There’s no escaping spin. No one just pays flat, neutral attention to the facts. You can’t. For example, there are no facts about the future. In guessing what will happen, we all put our thumbs on the scale. Hope is spin.
If we’re all spin doctors we might as well get good at it which means getting really good at translating our hopes and fears into spin, but also good at turning off the spin, and knowing when to do which. For that I suggest this Spin-Doctor’s Hippocratic Oath:
When deciding, use the power of neutral thinking. When decided, spin positive the decision you’ve made, and negative the alternatives.
And get this – it’s a serenity prayer too:
Grant me the neutrality to make good decisions, the spin to motivate the decisions I’ve made and the wisdom to know the difference.
ACIDs are best addressed neutrally. Don’t spin a quandary as “should I be pig-headed?," because the spin will spin you toward “no!” Rephrase it neutrally. “Should I persist here?” Once you’ve decided what to do, spin as much as needed to convince yourself and others to embrace to your decision. “Should we be pig-headed? Of course not! One must remain serene and accepting!” or “Should we be spineless? Of course not! One must remain courageous!” Just know that you’re spinning it and don’t wholly believe your spin or else you’ll lose the capacity to revise your decision at a later date. There’s not a spun argument I make that I can’t counter with an opposing argument. I still embrace my decision, but as my bet, which could prove wrong, just the choice I’ve made (and spin) in the situation at hand.
Who changes you or I?: You’re frustrated with someone. They don’t meet your standards and you want to improve their behavior. You wonder if you can. Notice this: If you try to improve their behavior you’re accepting your standards as un-lowerable. And if instead, you decide to accept them, you’re basically employing the courage to change (lower) your standards. In conflict, the question becomes which of us will change so the other doesn’t have to? And there’s a third option between the lines in the serenity prayer.
You can’t have universal serenity or courage any more than you can always keep both your bicep and triceps contracted. They’re “antagonistic,” or “reflexive. If you ever wondered why alcoholics trying to change themselves would recite the serenity prayer at AA meetings, there’s your answer. They’re trying to change some things and not others. They’re accepting their alcoholism but not their behavior. They’re holding their standards for living right as unchangeable, not to be lowered into the alcoholic gutter.
Youmeus points: Is the problem you, me, or us and what are we going to do about it? The question comes up often, and is often slipped right over as we move to “there’s a problem so you better change.” The Youmeus point is the moment when the question comes up and there are three possibilities: You change, I change, or we change the distance between us, taking space or psychic space so the problem goes away. “Us” is what we mean when we agree to disagree or say, “Yeah, we stopped hanging out. We were incompatible.”
Wisdom to know??: The last part of the serenity prayer has had me wondering for years. “Wisdom to know the difference” makes it sound like wisdom is just knowing. I don’t think it is. If anything wisdom is the quest overall, to keep wanting to improve one’s ability to know the difference to continue reducing wrong yeses and nos. And while I’m at it, I’d change know to notice, because it’s only in the noticing that there are differences that we get curious enough to start questing for more wisdom than we’ve already got. To be wise is to have been at the questing long enough to know the differences that make a difference and to still be questing because you’re never done.
Lifelong quandaries; lifelong questing.
