Every several months, I come across an article, a LinkedIn post, or a talk that gets me annoyed, seemingly for no reason. I found this interesting, so several years ago, I started collecting these statements to which my brain responds with rejection into a single Google Doc. Whenever I’d hear or see someone repeat one of these statements, I’d drop them into this doc along with my thoughts at the moment, and go about my day.

Last weekend, when I opened this document and went over a few pages of links and my chaotic notes, it finally hit me that all the things I disagree with have a single root cause, and they are all the result of the same phenomenon - learned helplessness. In this piece, I’ll discuss this phenomenon in depth, explaining what it is, why I find it frustrating, and why I think that to mature as an industry, we have to move past it.

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The concept of learned helplessness

Here’s how Psychology Today, the world’s largest mental health and behavioral science destination online, explains the concept of learned helplessness: “Learned helplessness occurs when an individual continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to change their circumstances, even when they have the ability to do so. For example, a smoker may repeatedly try and fail to quit. He may grow frustrated and come to believe that nothing he does will help, and therefore, he stops trying altogether. The perception that one cannot control the situation essentially elicits a passive response to the harm that is occurring.”

This is surely many smart words in a single paragraph, so ...