The Steven Universe Theory of Problems

What boils down to feelings?

The Guy’s Indifference

There’s a video game called I Wanna Be the Guy, that’s famously difficult. One of the first screens is a field of trees, on which hang little red fruits. As you walk under one of the trees, a fruit falls down and, if you don’t dodge it, kills you instantly. A few tries later, having dodged several fruits, you are now jumping on clouds above the trees. At which point one of the same fruits falls upward, and also kills you instantly. The game is deliberately built to be frustrating - you never know how it’s going to subvert your expectations next, but you always know the gist: something very stupid that you couldn’t see coming is going to make you explode.

I played I Wanna Be the Guy as a teenager. It was free, and beating it felt a worthy goal, something not just anyone could do. It took me months, but I eventually did succeed. At the time, I felt like the game was just straightforwardly hard. In fact, that feeling of its hardness (phrasing), the notion of “wow this part is so difficult,” was the core experience on offer. Some of the fun was when someone else saw me playing, and I got to show them what a deranged activity I was attempting. But it didn’t occur to me, at the time, that that feeling, the sense of “this is really hard” and the attendant heart-racing when I made it halfway through an obstacle, was itself a vehicle for the hardness. That if it felt more like just another day at the office, the lion’s share of difficulty (and fun) would simply ebb away.

After beating I Wanna Be the Guy on Hard mode (the default mode - if you play on “Normal” your character wears a little pink bow to make fun of you), I let a few years pass and then attempted it on Very Hard, which was more punishing. The game was still fun, but now I knew I could do it, and, to my surprise, the experience was far easier. Some of that was muscle memory, sure, but I think more of it was that I didn’t have doubt that I’d eventually succeed.

Then, once I’d beaten the game on Very Hard, I took up speedrunning it. The very act of speedrunning entails racing against the clock, so now I Wanna Be the Guy wasn’t even the adversary anymore. Time was. And with that context shift, suddenly the game itself wasn’t hard anymore. At all. I went from beating the game in six months to beating it in about half an hour.

Speedrunning I Wanna Be the Guy was never a serious pursuit for me. I didn’t sink in hundreds of hours. It’s probably not even in the top 10 video games I’ve spent the most time on. So it’s not like I played so much that my skill increased by orders of magnitude. Rather, the emotional tenor went from “wow this is so hard… can I do it?” to “pretty fun to stream this for my friends… wonder if I’ll shave a minute off my personal best.” And the latter emotional tenor boosted my performance more than, when I was playing for the first time, I would have thought was possible.¹

Steven Universe

Steven Universe is a TV show about feelings. The eponymous protagonist is a budding youth with lots of emotional baggage, and throughout the show must grapple with that baggage to solve problems. And it’s not just him. The show has an ensemble cast tackling problems on both extremely local and literally galactic scale, and almost every one of these problems is solved, first and foremost, by processing feelings. External obstacles exist, but these reliably melt once the right person enters the right emotional space. This fact has led to Steven Universe being made fun of plenty, but it works well in the show. TV shows, especially ones for children, have to ground out in human experience somehow, and “take common emotional problems and run them through metaphor and a healthy veneer of sci fi/fantasy” is a winning formula as far as it goes.

But how far does it go? Steven Universe’s problems are solved by getting in touch with feelings, but this is basically by fiat - the show just happens to throw obstacles at him that require emotional development. But do many problems faced by actual people boil down, overwhelmingly, to handling the attendant feelings? How many challenges in life are like the challenge of playing I Wanna Be the Guy for the first time: genuine on some level, but massively inflated by an emotional attachment?

It would be incorrect to say “most problems are 99% solved when you feel the correct way about them.” But it’s an interesting hypothesis, isn’t it?

Suffering and Striving

It’s old news that many problems arise in the mind, especially the problem of suffering. Marcus Aurelius said thousands of years ago that suffering doesn’t come from external things, but rather our impressions of them, and that we are free to change those impressions at will. I think that difficulty is similar. Something feeling hard isn’t a property of the thing, but a property of the mind. And that feeling, like when I played I Wanna Be the Guy for the first time, can be self-reinforcing.

Of course, pain is not a useless soap bubble of ephemera - we learn not to step on fire ant piles for a reason, and likewise we feel the sting of social rejection because it really does harm our prospects in life, and did much worse for our ancestors. An internal locus of control is great for mental wellbeing, and “I control my reactions to stimuli” is among the better mantras. But a person stung by a wasp can only choose their reaction to a point, and, similarly, I can’t lift a semitruck no matter how confident I am. There’s something to the feeling “this task is hard,” and, indeed, that feeling can be useful. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in local video game tournament scenes, and there’s always one or two people who cannot accept the fact that their effort, no matter what, may not be sufficient to be the best. I’m happy that isn’t me!

But also, I wonder how many other I Wanna Be the Guys are out there in my life, things that I assume are hard in and of themselves, but are really Steven Universe problems. When is it best to push through the sensation that something is supposed to be difficult?²

Scylla and Charybdis

Sometimes, especially in games, the feeling that something is deliciously hard is part of the fun. But when actually succeeding is important, it’s bad to get carried away in that feeling. Fair enough. But there (at least) two failure modes the other way, too:

1. Deciding everything is very easy, that nothing should be out of reach, and that mental signals of “maybe I can’t do this” are to be ignored at all costs.

2. Deciding that the Steven Universe theory of problems is fully true, and thus that the only work really worth doing is figuring out the self and ironing out emotional baggage, after which life will be easy and perfect.

The first option, the “grindset” approach, is bad for obvious reasons. You end up stuck either only attempting actually easy things to avoid a contradiction, or trying things you can’t do and falling flat on your face. Some stuff is hard, and deciding that every task should be easy is a recipe for burnout.

The second can seem alluring, but the trouble with “inner work” is that the self contains multitudes, and solving emotional baggage can be addictive. You can just pursue the right feeling forever, and never actually get anywhere, quite easily.

So if you blindly trust your feeling that some things are a big challenge for you, you’ll fool yourself and fall short of what you might achieve (sometimes called low agency). But if you try to overcome that feeling, either by decree or by emotional introspection, you run the risk of burning out or falling into your own navel.

My go-to approach, lately, is just to try to notice. To sit with whatever challenge and wonder “is this actually hard?” Then to look out the window, hear birdsong, and break free. Maybe it’s hard. Who cares? I can do a little more.

1. Max Delsohn’s “Thinking Like The Knight” is the best expression of this kind of vibe shift I’ve read, but it’s only available in this anthology, so I can’t link it directly.

2. Is this just one of the major benefits of a challenging peer group? That you don’t get the soothing social salve of saying “this thing is hard” and not losing face? Maybe!