Use ‘Solomon’s Paradox’ to Make Better Life Decisions

The second king of Israel, Solomon is sometimes called the“wisest man who ever lived.” Those who sought his counsel left with perfect answers to even the stickiest problems, even if he had to threatened to cut a baby in half. But Solomon’s own life was a shit show. He had hundreds of wives and concubines (which sounds sexy at first, but imagine trying to navigate that amount polyamory, or having hundreds of people telling you to take out the garbage). He gave in to his most base desires, worshipped false idols even though he was on speaking terms with God himself, and generally cocked everything up so badly it lead to the downfall of his entire nation. In other words, Solomon could advise everyone but himself.

What is Solomon’s Paradox?

Our ability to reason about other people’s lives and problems while not being able to do so for ourselves has been dubbed the “Solomon’s Paradox,” and the phenomenon has been studied extensively by social scientists. Research supports the idea: We really are better at understanding and solving other people’s problems than we are at tackling our own. We are able to take a look at someone in a toxic relationship and see that they would be better off if they left and make a realistic plan for their graceful exit. We yell at the characters in horror movies for splitting up instead of sticking together. We are able to envision how a person’s life should be, and the steps it would take to get there.

But when it comes to our own lives, things get more complicated. We stay in dead-end jobs, make foolish financial decisions, and stick around in dead-end relationships until the bitter end. If we were characters in a horror movie, we’d be yelling at ourselves until we were hoarse. But, luckily, I know exactly how you can exit this existential escape room. I can’t tell myself how to escape it, but that’s the paradox.

Start by separating you from yourself

Research conducted by Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross lays out a possible solution to Solomon’s Paradox clearly: Step outside yourself. Study subjects who were instructed to “self-distance” as opposed to “self-immerse” saw the asymmetry typical of the Solomon paradox all but disappear, so it’s not an inescapable trap (at least within the framework of this social science experiment) as long as you can view yourself in the third-person instead of the first-person. This is, of course, not an easy thing to do. It reminds me of a barber trying to cut his own hair, but there are techniques you can try that might help you get a little closer to stepping outside yourself.

Talk to yourself about yourself

There are a ton of “tricks” or techniques you can employ to give yourself the illusion of distance and the more objective wisdom that might bring. Some recommend talking to yourself. Wait until everyone is out of the house, look at yourself in the mirror, and discuss your problems. Or, more realistically, picture yourself in a therapist’s office, bending the ear of sympathetic bartender, or in the elaborate throne room of King Solomon himself, but try not to embody the “role” of yourself in this scenario. Try to think like the listener instead of the speaker and imagine what your problems would sound like to another, wiser person. Don’t attach any emotions to your descriptions — we’re only looking for solutions here, not emotional venting. Then picture what this other person would advise you to do.

Will talking into a mirror help you come up with a plan worthy of Solomon? Probably not. But I suspect you’ll have, at the very least, something new to think about.

Yes, I’m going to suggest “journaling”

Another tool toward personal Solomonic wisdom is journaling. Write things down, but just the facts. Remember, you’re not trying to entertain someone else, no one is going to read this but future-you, so just keep an accurate record of your experiences. Then, let it sit for a few weeks. When your journal has had time to mellow, clear your mind of distractions and read it as if you were reading a novel written from a first-person perspective. Ask yourself what you would advise the main character to do. It might even help you put things in a third-person perspective to use a text-to-speech program to narrate your experiences back to you.

Use the “strangers on a train” approach

This technique is not backed up by science and is a terrible idea, but consider the “strangers on a train” approach — it’s the kind of out-of-the-box thinking King “just cut the baby in half” Solomon might have liked. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train, two men who don’t know each other each agree to commit the other one’s murder so that each has an alibi. I’m not suggesting homicide, but I am suggesting handing your life’s decisions to an acquaintance or a stranger (it wouldn’t work as well if it was someone you were close to) and for you to do the same thing for them. That way each of you could make rational, sensible decisions free from the subjective mess of emotions and trauma that usually guide our decision making.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of!” you might be thinking, and you’re right. It’s a ridiculous scenario that could result in any number of bad outcomes, plus the chances of finding anyone else to go along with this cockamamie scheme are exceedingly slim. But I brought it up so you could imagine what a thoughtful stranger might say about your problems, and imagine how much better off you’d be if you actually followed through on their suggestions. If you were to text this hypothetical stranger on a train a brief description of whatever dilemma you’re facing, like say, “Should I go to the gym or watch another three episodes of Unsolved Mysteries,” I think you know the response you’d get. So go with that. I bet it’ll beat what you’ve been doing.