Contribution is your task. Judgement is others'

What a tribe in the Amazon and Adlerian Psychology teaches us about being scared of our work.

I became fascinated with the Pirahã people ever since my brother told me about what he read in linguist Daniel Everett’s book Don’t sleep, there are snakes. Dan Everett first went to work with the Pirahã in 1977 as a missionary with the intention to translate the New Testament into their language. Over a span of three decades, he spent about 10 total years with them.

Dan quickly realized that they had a dramatically different way of viewing life and along the way he became a linguist to study the peculiarities of the Pirahã language.

Dan noticed that they did not have numbers- they only had words like “one,” “some” and “a lot.” They don’t have words for colors- they’ll say something like “it’s like the grass” for green or “it’s like blood” for red. They also have significant difficulty drawing straight lines, probably because there are no perfectly straight lines in the jungle.

This isn’t an issue of lacking intelligence- Dan was astounded that the Pirahã have a near encyclopedic knowledge of all the flora and fauna of the Jungle, how they interact with each other, their feeding patterns, how they are affected by the seasons and so on and so on.

Dan in his discussions on the Pirahã often highlights what he calls their “immediacy of experience principle.” That is, “they don’t talk about the distant future… They don’t talk about the distant past.”

What happened before your grandfather’s time? Who cares.

What happens after we die? Not a topic that they’re too interested in.

In line with this is the fact that their language highly emphasizes the level of evidence or confidence behind each statement. Every verb has to have on it the source of the evidence- did you see it, hear it, or infer it? For example, you wouldn’t say “there’s a jaguar over there,” you would say something like “I saw a jaguar over there” or “So and so told me there was a jaguar over there” or “The smell of Jaguar piss makes me think there’s a jaguar over there.” Sure, we obviously can and do add these qualifiers when speaking English, but imagine adding that nuance to every single statement you made.

If baked into all utterances is the level of evidence supporting it, then it’s really hard to get very far with any sort of spiritual discussion or even say long discussions about how childhood traumas are affecting you now.

A Freudian psychoanalysis session would probably feel like a confusing and pointless exercise for the average Pirahã.

A: Thus, your life long fear of jaguars is the result of that incident with your mother.
B: You saw this?
A: I didn’t, I inferred it. That’s just how the mind works.
B: You know how everyone’s mind works? The mind cannot be seen. How did you see their minds?
A: That’s not what I meant.
B: So then, someone told you? I would like to meet the man who can see others’ minds.
A: No, I mean-

Not only does their culture and values shift their focus to what is happening in the now, but their language itself does as well.

Dan Everett thought this immediacy of experience principle might be behind why the Pirahã seemed to be so damn happy.

In 2007, one of the professors from a team of visiting cognitive scientists from MIT said the Pirahã “seem like the happiest people I’ve ever seen in my life.” Dan, having spent so much time around the constantly laughing and smiling Pirahã said he thought so too. He then asked “how would you measure that?” The team from MIT said they would just simply measure the time they spend smiling and laughing and compare that to other peoples. One of them said, “I haven’t looked at these people at any one time and not seen the majority of them looking happy.”

You need to focus on the past and future to focus on regrets and worries. I don’t think I need to invoke Eckhart Tolle or Buddhism to explain why their focus on the now would be really good for their happiness.

There’s a documentary on Dan Everett and the Pirahã. It’s titled it The Grammar of Happiness.

By the way, in 2019, I interviewed Everett for a video I was making about his book How Language Began.

In a 2017 TED Talk, Daniel Everett said “the most important commandment among the Pirahã is ‘don’t tell anybody else what to do.’ Life’s hard enough, just live your life the best you can.”

Enter Adler: You procrastinate because you’re doing other people’s tasks.

The Adlerian concept of “separation of tasks” is a good one for procrastinators to keep in mind.

In 2022, Cassie Phillips’s poem titled “Let Them” went viral on Facebook.

In 2024, Mel Robbins published a book titled The Let Them Theory. The core concept and even the way it is presented is unmistakably similar to Cassie Phillip’s poem. Cassie Phillips isn’t mentioned in Mel Robbins’ book.

Robbins even attempted to trademark the phrase “let them.”

The idea in the 336 page book is this: Don’t try and control other people because you can’t, just focus on what you can control. The other half of “let them” is “let me.”

For example: ‘if someone doesn’t invite you to the party, let them. Let me figure out how to enjoy my Friday night.’

The concept seems to be a watered-down version of Alfred Adler’s concept of “separation of tasks”* (not mentioned in the Robbins’ book) which arguably comes from Adler’s 1912 book The Neurotic Constitution.

I should say the ‘Adlerian’ concept- the phrase “separation of tasks” doesn’t appear in Adler’s own works but Adlerian interpreters like Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga came up with this phrasing for the concept.

Many difficulties and worries in life come from misunderstanding whose task something is.

Let me simplify the discussion of the Adlerian tasks of life by just giving some examples:

・Employee’s task: Doing the work listed in a job description.
・Employer’s task: Evaluating the work. Paying the employee.

・Parents’ task: Being a role model. Giving guidance.
・Child’s task: Living their own life.
・Not Parent’s task: The child’s happiness.

・Your task: Giving advice when requested.
・Your friend’s task: Choosing to follow the advice or not.

・Your task: Your behavior.
・Their task: How they interpret it.

In the event of (mutually agreed) wrongdoing,
・Their task: Pointing out the wrongdoing. Expressing their anger or disapproval.
・Your task: Mending the wrongdoing. Apologizing.
・Their task: Forgive or not.

What tasks are you avoiding? Whose tasks are you stealing?

Adler says in Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (originally published in German in 1933) that:

“It is impossible to form a right estimate of an individual without knowledge of the structure of his life problems and the task they impose upon him. His essential nature is revealed to us only by his attitude towards them and by what takes place within him as the result of that attitude. We have to find out whether he plays his part, or hesitates, comes to a standstill, tries to evade his task, and seeks and invents excuses for this evasion; whether he finds a partial solution of his problem and outgrows it, or leaves it unsolved and follows courses that are injurious to the community in order to win the glory of a personal superiority.”

Sounds a lot like a big part of his question about what kind of person you are includes: What are you procrastinating on?

Adler also emphasizes the importance of “social interest” or “community feeling” (in German: gemeinschaftsgefühl). For Adler, a core human issue is feeling inferior. The phrase “inferiority complex” came from Adler, not Freud.

People often try to resolve this feeling of inferiority by compensating with an attempt to feel superior.

This is not the ideal approach.

Is your perfectionism actually you just trying to maintain a feeling of superiority?
Do you procrastinate on tasks because putting out something “good enough” and not “better than everyone else’s work” doesn’t help you feel superior?

Adler says we should be striving to enhance the “community feeling” by aiming to cooperate with and contribute to the community, rather than trying to rise above it.

He emphasizes that the trait most necessary for developing community feeling is courage.

“…the simple truth taught by Individual Psychology-that courage is an aspect of social feeling…”

Your attempt to contribute invites judgement.

It takes courage to try to contribute something to the community when there is the risk that the group will not accept your contribution as valuable. You may fail publicly. Some members of the group may kindly let you know that a different type of contribution might be better.

Others will jump at the chance to criticize your “inferior” work so they can feel superior and temporarily alleviate their own lingering feelings of inferiority.

“From the eternally fixed standpoint of ideal social feeling, every divergence from it appears as a cunning attempt aiming at the goal of a personal superiority. The escape from a defeat at the hands of society is linked for the majority of people like these with a sense of superiority. And when the fear of a defeat keeps them constantly at a distance from the body of fellow workers, they experience and enjoy their detachment from the tasks of life as an alleviation and a privilege which give them an advantage over other people.”

-Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind, Alfred Adler

So how does this help us procrastinate less?

While writing an article on procrastination, I had this great realization that often, the self-rejection aspect of procrastinating on creative work (i.e. ‘no, everyone is going to think that idea is stupid, I better stop writing this and waste time looking at dot impact receipt printers on Amazon until a less hate-able idea comes to mind’) is an example of trying to do someone else’s task.

Going back through the book The Courage to be Disliked, an overview of Adlerian Psychology by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga that I had read several years back, I realized I likely got my bright idea from this section of their book:

“You are not the one who decides if your contributions are of use. That is the task of other people, and is not an issue in which you can intervene.”

(I think I’ll trademark the phrase “you are not the one who decides if your contributions are of use” anyways.)

The point is:

Procrastinating on your creative work whenever the thought that people aren’t going to like the work arrives is an example of trying to steal other people’s task.

Even worse is doing this when you don’t even have a first draft.

Preemptive rejection of your work is not your task.

Your task: Do the work.
Their task: Give positive, neutral or negative feedback.
Your task: Decide how much of that feedback to take on board.
Your task: Do the work again.