Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

Recently I’ve been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I’ve labeled in my head as “staring into the abyss.”¹
最近我一直在想，我最喜欢的人都很擅长一种技能，我在脑子里给它贴上了 "凝视深渊 "的标签。 ¹

Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. It’s common to procrastinate on thinking hard about these things because it might require you to acknowledge that you were very wrong about something in the past, and perhaps wasted a bunch of time based on that (e.g. dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god). However, in most cases you have to either admit this eventually or, if you never admit it, lock yourself into a sub-optimal future life trajectory, so it’s best to be impatient and stare directly into the uncomfortable topic until you’ve figured out what to do.
凝视深渊意味着合理地思考那些让人不舒服的事情，比如反对你的宗教信仰的论点，或者赞成与伴侣分手的论点。拖延认真思考这些事情是很常见的，因为这可能需要你承认自己过去在某些事情上是大错特错的，也许还因此浪费了很多时间（比如和错误的人约会或向错误的神祈祷）。然而，在大多数情况下，你要么最终不得不承认这一点，要么，如果你永远不承认，就会把自己锁在一个次优的未来生活轨迹中，所以，最好的办法就是不耐烦，直接盯着这个让人不舒服的话题，直到你想出该怎么做。

The first time I learned what really exceptional abyss-staring looks like, it was by watching Drew, the CEO of Wave. Starting a company requires a lot of staring into the abyss, because it involves making lots of serious mistakes (building the wrong thing, hiring the wrong person, etc.); to move quickly, you need to be fast at acknowledging and fixing them. Drew was extremely willing to tackle uncomfortable decisions head-on—“should we not have hired this person?” “Should we pivot away from this business that is pretty good but not great?”—and every time, it was immediately obvious that the decision he made was a big improvement.
我第一次了解到什么是真正非凡的深渊凝视，是通过观察 Wave 公司的首席执行官德鲁。创办一家公司需要经常凝视深渊，因为这涉及到犯很多严重的错误（建错东西、雇错人等）；要想快速发展，就必须快速承认并纠正错误。德鲁非常愿意直面令人不舒服的决定--"我们是否不应该雇用这个人？"我们是否应该放弃这个还算不错但并不出色的业务？"每次，他做出的决定都会立即带来巨大的进步。

Since then, I’ve become fascinated by the role that abyss-staring plays in people’s lives. I noticed that it wasn’t just Drew who is great at this, but many the people whose work I respect the most, or who have had the most impact on how I think. Conversely, I also noticed that for many of the people I know who have struggled to make good high-level life decisions, they were at least partly blocked by having an abyss that they needed to stare into, but flinched away from.
从那时起，我开始对深渊凝视在人们生活中扮演的角色着迷。我注意到，不只是德鲁在这方面做得很好，很多人的作品都是我最尊敬的，或者说他们对我的思维方式影响最大。反过来，我也注意到，在我认识的人中，很多人在做出正确的高层次人生决定时都会遇到困难，至少部分原因是他们需要凝视深渊，但却退缩了。

So I’ve come to believe that becoming more willing to stare into the abyss is one of the most important things you can do to become a better thinker and make better decisions about how to spend your life.
因此，我相信，要想成为一个更好的思考者，并在如何度过一生的问题上做出更好的决定，最重要的事情之一就是让自己更愿意凝视深渊。

To try to recreate the flavor of watching Drew stare into the abyss for seven years, here are some examples.
为了重现德鲁七年来凝视深渊的感觉，这里有一些例子。

• When he and his cofounder Lincoln first started a company together (well before my time), they built about 10 different social mobile apps in succession, pivoting from each one when it didn’t get traction. The decision to pivot away from a product you’ve invested a lot of effort into designing, building and distributing is painful enough that many people procrastinate on it and keep working on ideas that clearly aren’t working. In fact, Drew and Lincoln had a third cofounder who left partway through this phase in part because doing so many things that failed made him too stressed and anxious. (To be clear, this is a reasonable reaction that I probably also would have had if I’d been working with them at the time.)
  当他和他的联合创始人林肯（Lincoln）一起创办公司之初（远早于我的时代），他们陆续开发了大约 10 款不同的社交移动应用，当每款应用都没有获得成功时，他们就放弃了。决定放弃一款投入了大量精力去设计、构建和发布的产品是一件非常痛苦的事情，以至于很多人都会拖延时间，继续研究那些显然行不通的想法。事实上，德鲁和林肯的第三位联合创始人在这一阶段中途离开，部分原因就是做了太多失败的事情，让他压力过大、焦虑不安。(说白了，这是一种合理的反应，如果当时我和他们一起工作，我可能也会有这种反应）。

• Once they pivoted the 11th time and launched Sendwave—building money transfer from the US to Kenya by delivering to the M-Pesa mobile money system—the product grew incredibly quickly and within less than a year, a majority of the total possible users were using Wave. (I joined toward the tail end of that year.) When we tried to expand to other countries, we realized that their mobile money systems weren’t nearly as good as M-Pesa, which meant that the user experience was worse and the potential market was smaller than expected.
  当他们第 11 次转向并推出 Sendwave，通过向 M-Pesa 移动支付系统提供从美国到肯尼亚的汇款服务时，产品的发展速度令人难以置信，不到一年的时间里，可能的用户总数中就有大部分在使用 Wave。(当我们试图将业务扩展到其他国家时，我们发现这些国家的移动支付系统远不如 M-Pesa 系统，这意味着用户体验比预期的要差，潜在市场也比预期的要小。

  The default response would have been to ignore this info and continue trying to expand Sendwave to integrate with progressively worse mobile money systems in other countries, thus implicitly accepting the constraint of smaller market size while refusing to actually acknowledge it. Instead, Drew and Lincoln realized that, if mobile money was so bad in other countries, we had the opportunity to launch a better one ourselves. In late 2015, they delegated running Sendwave to other employees, went almost completely hands-off, and moved to Africa to work on what was effectively their 12th completely different startup. It’s now really obvious that this was the right move, since Wave (the mobile money company) was recently valued at over 3x what Sendwave sold for. But that wasn’t obvious even within Wave until maybe 2019. Back in 2015 when they made the original decision to pivot, it required an absurd amount of conviction.
  我们的默认反应是忽略这一信息，继续尝试扩展 Sendwave，以便与其他国家越来越差的移动支付系统集成，从而默默接受市场规模较小这一制约因素，却拒绝真正承认这一点。相反，德鲁和林肯意识到，如果其他国家的移动支付系统如此糟糕，那么我们自己就有机会推出更好的移动支付系统。2015 年末，他们将 Sendwave 的运营权交给了其他员工，几乎完全放手，并搬到了非洲，从事实际上是他们第 12 家完全不同的初创公司的工作。现在看来，这一举动显然是正确的，因为 Wave（移动支付公司）最近的估值是 Sendwave 售价的 3 倍多。但在 2019 年之前，即使在 Wave 内部，这一点也并不明显。早在 2015 年，当他们做出转向的最初决定时，就需要极大的信念。

• After our mobile money pilot started to take off in one country, we tried expanding to a second. Drew, I and a coworker moved there in mid-2016 and launched a pilot. But in the second country, unlike the first, one of the telecoms that we relied on for USSD ran a competing mobile money system, and we started worrying that if we got big enough, they would block us. Even though everything seemed like it was going well at the time, Drew did the research and came to the conclusion that, if that telecom decided to sabotage us, we wouldn’t be able to get the regulator to intercede, and the telecom would be able to effectively shut us down. Since the first country was still growing quickly, we decided that adding a second would be a distraction, and after a few weeks we halted the launch and went back to focusing on scaling our original country.
  我们的移动支付试点在一个国家开始起步后，我们尝试将其扩展到第二个国家。2016年年中，德鲁、我和一位同事搬到了那里，并启动了试点。但在第二个国家，与第一个国家不同的是，我们依赖的一家电信公司运营着一个与我们竞争的 USSD 移动支付系统，我们开始担心，如果我们的规模足够大，他们就会封杀我们。尽管当时一切看起来都很顺利，但德鲁还是做了调查，得出的结论是，如果那家电信公司决定破坏我们的系统，我们就无法让监管机构介入，而那家电信公司就能有效地关闭我们的系统。由于第一个国家仍在快速发展，我们认为增加第二个国家会分散我们的精力，几周后，我们停止了启动，继续专注于扩大原有国家的规模。

• We eventually had to leave country #1 as well. After that, we tried launching in a third country, where, like the first, the telecoms didn’t compete with us. But there we had a different problem: the country had a system that allowed every bank to make instant transfers to any other, meaning that banks fulfilled much of the role of mobile money elsewhere, just with fewer cash-out points (bank branches instead of agents). So people ended up using Wave as a glorified ATM—users would go to our agents to deposit or withdraw cash from a linked bank account, but they wouldn’t use Wave to transact. We saw reasonable growth with this model, but it didn’t solve as big of a problem or have the same network effects as mobile money, and so we ultimately decided to pull out of the third country as well.
  我们最终也不得不离开 1 号国家。之后，我们尝试在第三个国家开展业务，和第一个国家一样，那里的电信公司并不与我们竞争。但在那里，我们遇到了一个不同的问题：该国的系统允许每家银行向任何其他银行进行即时转账，这意味着银行在其他地方扮演了移动支付的大部分角色，只是减少了取款点（银行网点而不是代理）。因此，人们最终把 Wave 当成了一个美化了的自动取款机--用户可以到我们的代理商处从链接的银行账户中存款或取款，但他们不会使用 Wave 进行交易。我们通过这种模式看到了合理的增长，但它并没有像移动支付那样解决大问题或产生同样的网络效应，因此我们最终决定退出第三国市场。

• The next country we tried to launch in was Senegal, where we eventually found product-market fit, grew to the point where a majority of adults use Wave every month, and are now able to launch in other countries and use our network effect in Senegal to launch new products I’m really excited about.
  我们尝试在塞内加尔推出的下一个国家，最终找到了产品与市场的契合点，发展到每个月都有大多数成年人使用 Wave，现在我们能够在其他国家推出产品，并利用我们在塞内加尔的网络效应推出新产品，我对此感到非常兴奋。

Overall, I’d say Drew “wasted” about five years of his own time on things we later pivoted away from, and over 40 employee-years total. But without the decision to declare that time wasted, we’d probably be on a much less exciting trajectory today.
总的来说，我认为德鲁 "浪费 "了自己大约五年的时间在我们后来放弃的事情上，总共浪费了 40 多名员工的时间。但是，如果没有宣布这些时间被浪费的决定，我们今天的发展轨迹可能就不会那么令人兴奋了。

When I think about the other people (whom I’ve met or followed closely) whose work I most respect and who have had the biggest influence on how I think and act, they all have a similar willingness to admit that they were previously extremely wrong about things. Some other examples:
当我回想起我最尊敬的、对我的思维和行为方式影响最大的其他人（我见过或密切关注过他们）时，他们都有一种类似的意愿，愿意承认自己以前对事情的看法大错特错。还有一些其他的例子：

• Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the biggest contributors to the development of the field of AI alignment, and whose writings on rationality helped me improve my thinking a lot, wrote a great description of how he came to stare into the abyss and realize that a powerful AI wouldn’t automatically share human goals:
  埃利泽-尤德科夫斯基（Eliezer Yudkowsky）是人工智能对齐领域发展的最大贡献者之一，他关于理性的著作帮助我提高了很多思维能力。他写了一篇很好的文章，描述了他是如何凝视深渊并意识到强大的人工智能不会自动与人类目标一致的：

  When I finally saw the magnitude of my own folly, everything fell into place at once. The dam against realization cracked; and the unspoken doubts that had been accumulating behind it, crashed through all together. There wasn’t a prolonged period, or even a single moment that I remember, of wondering how I could have been so stupid. I already knew how.
  当我终于看清自己的愚蠢程度时，一切顿时归于平静。阻挡觉悟的堤坝决堤了；在堤坝后面积聚的难以启齿的疑虑也一并崩溃了。在我的记忆中，没有一段长时间，甚至没有一个瞬间，我在想我怎么会这么愚蠢。我已经知道是怎么回事了。

  … I knew, in the same moment, what I had been carefully not-doing for the last six years. I hadn’t been updating.
  ......在同一时刻，我知道了过去六年来我一直小心翼翼地没有做的事情。我没有更新。

  And I knew I had to finally update. To actually change what I planned to do, to change what I was doing now, to do something different instead.
  我知道我必须最终更新。要切实改变我计划要做的事情，改变我现在正在做的事情，做一些不同的事情。

  … Say, “I’m not ready.” Say, “I don’t know how to do this yet.”
  说 "我还没准备好"说 "我还不知道怎么做"

  These are terribly difficult words to say…. Say, “I’m not ready to write code,” and your status drops like a depleted uranium balloon.
  这些话非常难开口....说 "我还没准备好写代码"，你的地位就会像贫铀气球一样一落千丈。

• Holden Karnofsky, currently co-CEO of the Open Philanthropy Project, started out by founding GiveWell, an organization trying to find the best possible charities to donate to. He went through the following phases, each of which probably required a big shift away from a previous worldview:
  霍尔登-卡诺夫斯基（Holden Karnofsky）目前是开放慈善项目的联席首席执行官。他经历了以下几个阶段，每一个阶段都可能需要从以前的世界观中做出重大转变：

  • GiveWell originally tried to find the best charities within various different cause areas (including e.g. US-focused charities). Eventually, they decided that they believed US-focused charities were sufficiently less effective overall than global health that trying to evaluate them was a distraction, and pivoted to focusing solely on charities that looked like they had the highest impact overall.
    GiveWell最初试图在各种不同的事业领域（包括以美国为重点的慈善机构等）中寻找最佳慈善机构。最终，他们认为以美国为重点的慈善机构在整体上远不及全球健康领域的慈善机构有效，因此试图评估这些慈善机构会分散他们的注意力，他们转而只关注那些看起来在整体上影响最大的慈善机构。

  • Originally, GiveWell focused on charities for which a robust, transparent and quantitative case could be made that they were among the highest-impact charities, which effectively required them to focus on global health where charities’ effects could be studied via randomized controlled trials. Over time, he came to think the best giving opportunities might be in causes where it was hard to make a sufficiently robust and legible case to outsiders because the evidence base was weaker. This resulted in the creation of GiveWell Labs to evaluate more speculative opportunities.
    最初，GiveWell 将重点放在那些能够以可靠、透明和量化的方式证明其属于影响力最大的慈善机构的慈善事业上，这实际上要求他们将重点放在全球健康领域，因为在这些领域可以通过随机对照试验来研究慈善机构的效果。随着时间的推移，他开始认为，最好的捐赠机会可能是在那些由于证据基础较弱而难以向外界提供足够有力和清晰案例的慈善事业中。因此，GiveWell 实验室应运而生，以评估更多的投机机会。

    Holden described GiveWell Labs as “positioning ourselves to advise seven-figure donors”; shortly after the launch they acquired a ten-figure donor, Good Ventures, and spun out into a separate org, the Open Philanthropy Project.
    Holden 将 GiveWell 实验室描述为 "为七位数的捐赠者提供建议"；启动后不久，他们就获得了一位十位数的捐赠者，Good Ventures，并分拆为一个独立的组织，即开放慈善项目。

  • Originally, Holden/Open Phil focused on a variety of different cause areas as a result of worldview diversification, which included global health, US policy, animal welfare, and global catastrophic risks, with Holden not focused on any one in particular. Over time, Holden updated in favor of personally being fully convinced by “longtermism”—the idea that it’s most important to focus on whatever causes are most likely to improve humanity’s long-term trajectory—eventually culminating in him promoting Alexander Berger to co-CEO to focus on the non-longtermist side so Holden could focus all his attention on longtermist grantmaking.
    最初，由于世界观的多元化，霍尔登/开放慈善组织专注于各种不同的事业领域，包括全球健康、美国政策、动物福利和全球灾难性风险，霍尔登并不特别专注于任何一个领域。随着时间的推移，霍尔登逐渐倾向于个人完全信奉的 "长期主义"--即最重要的是专注于任何最有可能改善人类长期发展轨迹的事业--最终，他提拔亚历山大-伯杰（Alexander Berger）为联席首席执行官，负责非长期主义方面的工作，这样霍尔登就可以把所有精力都放在长期主义的捐赠上。

It’s interesting to me that these people have both become very personally accomplished, and have produced ideas or writing that have had a big influence on how I think. This makes sense since both making effective life decisions and having novel insights require you to figure out non-obvious true things about the world, which are sometimes uncomfortable or scary, and therefore you’ll only figure them out if you’re good at staring into the abyss.
我觉得有趣的是，这些人都取得了很高的个人成就，他们的思想或著作对我的思维方式产生了很大的影响。这是有道理的，因为无论是做出有效的人生决定，还是拥有新颖的见解，都需要你去弄清这个世界非显而易见的真相，而这些真相有时会让人感到不舒服或害怕，因此，只有善于凝视深渊，你才能弄清这些真相。

The converse of this is also true: for many people who I’ve seen struggle to improve their life, part of their problem was that they avoided thinking hard about some important part of their life because it was scary to stare at directly.
反之亦然：对于我见过的许多努力改善生活的人来说，他们的部分问题在于，他们回避认真思考生活中的某些重要部分，因为直视这些部分会让他们感到害怕。

• For example, it’s common for students at elite colleges to follow the mantra of “do what you love” and choose a major that doesn’t have very good job prospects, without really grappling with that fact until their final year. (I’m not saying that they don’t think about it at all, just that they don’t work effectively on solving that problem—which is completely understandable since they mostly have way too little life experience to do a good job at that, and don’t generally get much support from their environment.)
  例如，名牌大学的学生通常会遵循 "做自己喜欢的事 "的口号，选择一个就业前景并不乐观的专业，直到最后一年才真正意识到这一事实。(我不是说他们完全不考虑这个问题，只是说他们没有有效地解决这个问题--这完全可以理解，因为他们大多生活经验太少，无法很好地解决这个问题，而且一般也得不到周围环境的支持）。

  Many of these students ultimately end up going into finance or consulting, not because they were particularly excited about that as a career path but because it’s the easiest high-status next step from their in-retrospect-poorly-chosen major. Unfortunately, those are also career paths that require long hours and where the work is often meaningless. While I’m sure that finance and consulting are the right career choice for some elite college graduates, I’d be surprised if it was the best choice for nearly 50% of them.
  这些学生中的许多人最终进入了金融或咨询行业，这并不是因为他们对这一职业道路特别感兴趣，而是因为这是在他们所选择的糟糕的专业基础上最容易迈出的高地位的下一步。不幸的是，这些职业道路也需要长时间的工作，而且工作往往毫无意义。虽然我确信金融和咨询业是一些精英大学毕业生的正确职业选择，但如果这是近50%的精英大学毕业生的最佳选择，我会感到惊讶。

• Another situation where people often procrastinate on staring into the abyss is when they take a job that turns out not to be very good. It’s common for people stay in these jobs for a surprisingly long time, even when the job market in their field is very hot and they could easily find a better position somewhere else.
  另一种人们经常拖延时间、不愿面对深渊的情况是，他们接受了一份并不理想的工作。人们通常会在这样的工作岗位上呆上很长一段时间，即使他们所在领域的就业市场非常火爆，他们可以很容易地在其他地方找到更好的职位。

  Thinking about whether to leave your job is uncomfortable in a few different ways: it involves acknowledging that you made a poor decision in the past (taking your current job) that wasted a bunch of time; it involves signing up for a bunch more difficult, stressful work to interview at new jobs; and it saps your motivation to invest in getting better at your current job if you think it’s likely that you’ll leave soon. So it’s understandable that people procrastinate on staring into that abyss. But that procrastination leads to a lot of avoidable suffering.
  考虑是否离职会让人在几个方面感到不舒服：它涉及到承认自己过去做了一个错误的决定（接受现在的工作），浪费了大量时间；它涉及到为了面试新工作而去做大量更困难、更有压力的工作；如果你认为自己很可能很快就会离职，那么它就会削弱你在现有工作中投资以获得更好发展的动力。因此，人们拖延时间，不去面对深渊是可以理解的。但这种拖延会导致许多本可避免的痛苦。

• Symmetrically, most managers are too reluctant to let go of employees who aren’t working out. When I’m interviewing people for managerial roles, one question I ask is to tell me about how they handled a time when one of their reports wasn’t performing well. People often say it took months between noticing the underperformance and having a tough talk with the employee about it, and describe investing unreasonable amounts of time trying to salvage the situation. Most memorably, one interviewee said they wished they had tried promoting the underperforming employee because the promotion would put them in a role more similar to their previous background, even though their company was small enough that they didn’t really need anyone in the promoted role.
  与此对应的是，大多数管理者都不愿意让工作不顺利的员工离职。我在面试担任管理职位的人时，会问一个问题，就是请他们告诉我，当某个下属表现不佳时，他们是如何处理的。受访者通常会说，从注意到业绩不佳到与员工进行严厉的谈话，中间要花费几个月的时间，他们还描述了为挽回局面而投入的不合理时间。最令人印象深刻的是，一位受访者说，他们希望能尝试提拔这位表现不佳的员工，因为提拔会让他们担任与之前背景更相似的职位，尽管他们的公司规模很小，并不真正需要有人担任被提拔的职位。

• It’s also common for people to avoid staring into the abyss about their relationship. Similarly to jobs, it’s a common observation that people stay in bad relationships for far too long, and I’d guess it’s often for similar reasons.
  人们通常也会避免对自己的恋情陷入深渊。与工作类似，人们在糟糕的人际关系中停留太久也是常见的现象，我想这往往也是出于类似的原因。

I’ve started thinking of staring into the abyss as the “one weird trick” of doing great work, because it seems to be upstream of so many other ways that people do well or poorly. So I’ve been thinking about how to become better at it.
我开始认为，凝视深渊是做好工作的 "一个怪招"，因为它似乎是人们做好或做不好工作的许多其他方法的上游。因此，我一直在思考如何更好地做到这一点。

As I mentioned, the thing that made the single biggest difference for me was spending five years watching Drew repeatedly confront hard decisions. I had the experience many times of personally flinching away from a scary thought, watching Drew address it head-on, and immediately realizing that he’d made an important decision correctly and Wave was in a much better position as a result. Eventually, whatever part of me originally flinched away from these uncomfortable questions switched to being drawn towards them, at least for many classes of question.
正如我提到的，对我来说最大的不同是，我花了五年时间看着德鲁反复面对艰难的决定。我曾多次亲身经历过在面对一个可怕的想法时退缩，看着德鲁直面这个问题，我立刻意识到他做出了一个正确的重要决定，而 "浪潮 "也因此处于一个更好的位置。最终，无论我最初对这些令人不舒服的问题退缩了多少次，我都会被这些问题所吸引，至少对很多类问题是这样。

I got lucky to work closely with Drew, but I expect it’s possible to seek out people who are great at this. You could evaluate this while reverse-interviewing your future manager and peers: “tell me about a time you had to make a difficult decision. How did you realize it you needed to do that?” And look for evidence that they acted quickly and didn’t dither or procrastinate. If you’re looking at early-stage startups, consider making this one of the top things you look for, since it’s so important to the eventual outcome. (This suggestion is speculative; I haven’t tried it.)
我很幸运能与德鲁密切合作，但我也希望能找到在这方面很出色的人。你可以在反向采访你未来的经理和同事时评估这一点："告诉我一次你不得不做出艰难决定的经历。你是如何意识到需要这样做的？"并寻找证据，证明他们行动迅速，没有犹豫或拖延。如果你正在寻找处于早期阶段的初创企业，考虑把这一点作为你寻找的首要因素之一，因为它对最终的结果非常重要。(这个建议只是推测，我还没有尝试过）。

Another abyss-staring strategy I’ve found useful is to talk to someone else. One reason that I sometimes procrastinate on staring into the abyss is that, when I try to think about the uncomfortable topic, I don’t do it in a productive way: instead, I’ll ruminate or think myself in circles. If I’m talking to someone else, they can help me break out of those patterns and make progress. They can also be an accountability buddy for actually spending time thinking about the thing.
我发现另一种凝视深渊的策略很有用，那就是与别人交谈。我有时会拖延凝视深渊的时间，其中一个原因是，当我试图思考这个令人不舒服的话题时，我不会以一种有成效的方式去思考：相反，我会胡思乱想，或者自己在原地打转。如果我和别人交谈，他们可以帮助我打破这些模式，取得进展。他们也可以成为一个负责任的伙伴，让我真正花时间去思考这件事。

Of course, it can be hard to find the right person to help you stare into the abyss. The ideal person is someone who is willing to ask you uncomfortable questions—which means you need a close enough relationship for them to feel comfortable doing that, and they need to be wise enough to figure out where the uncomfortable questions are—and they also need to be a good enough listener that talking to them about a tricky topic is fun rather than aversive. I’d expect a good therapist to be good for this, although I haven’t personally worked with one.
当然，要找到一个合适的人帮你凝视深渊可能很难。理想的人选是愿意向你提出让你不舒服的问题的人--这意味着你们需要有足够亲密的关系，让他们觉得这样做很舒服，而且他们需要有足够的智慧来找出让你不舒服的问题所在--他们还需要是一个足够好的倾听者，让你觉得和他们谈论棘手的话题是一件有趣的事情，而不是令人反感的事情。我希望一个好的治疗师在这方面能做得很好，虽然我本人还没有与这样的治疗师共事过。

Staring into the abyss about your job is difficult in part because it’s easier to do good work if you’re committed to your job for a long time. The same principle applies even more to romantic relationships: past some threshold of compatibility, much of your relationship’s value comes precisely from the fact that the two of you expect to being together for a long time, and can make correspondingly long-term investments in making your relationship awesome.
对工作深信不疑之所以困难，部分原因是如果你能长期投入工作，就更容易做好工作。同样的原则甚至更适用于恋爱关系：过了一定的契合度门槛后，你们关系的大部分价值恰恰来自于这样一个事实，即你们两个人都期望能长期在一起，并能做出相应的长期投资，让你们的关系变得更棒。

This suggests that a critical part of being effective at staring into the abyss is timing. If you do it too little, you’ll end up taking too long to make important life improvements; but if you do it too often, you might end up not investing enough in being great at your current job or relationship because you’re too focused on the prospect of next one.
这表明，有效地凝视深渊的关键在于时机。如果做得太少，你最终会花太长时间来改善重要的生活；但如果做得太频繁，你最终可能会因为太关注下一份工作或下一段感情的前景，而没有在做好当前工作或感情上投入足够的精力。

One solution to the timing problem is to check in about your abyss-staring on a schedule. For example, if you think it might be time for you to change jobs, rather than idly ruminating about it for weeks, block out a day or two to really seriously weigh the pros and cons and get advice, with the goal at the end of deciding either to leave, or to stay and stop thinking about quitting until you’ve gotten a bunch of new information. For romantic relationships, marriage is a formalized commitment to essentially this process. The abyss-staring process is sometimes formalized as well: for example, in the Quaker tradition (in which I was raised), couples who want to get married meet with a “clearness committee” to encourage them to stare into the abyss and make sure it’s the right decision for them. (I’ve never experienced a clearness committee, so I don’t know how well they achieve this goal.)
解决时间问题的一个办法是按计划检查你的深渊凝视。例如，如果你觉得可能是时候换工作了，与其几个星期都无所事事地胡思乱想，不如抽出一两天的时间，真正认真地权衡利弊，征求意见，最后决定是离开，还是留下来，在获得大量新信息之前停止辞职的想法。对于恋爱关系来说，婚姻就是对这一过程的正式承诺。凝视深渊的过程有时也会被正式化：例如，在贵格会的传统中（我就是在贵格会长大的），想要结婚的情侣会与一个 "清澈委员会 "会面，鼓励他们凝视深渊，确保这对他们来说是正确的决定。(我从未经历过 "清白委员会"，所以我不知道他们在多大程度上实现了这一目标）。

My hope with this essay is to convince you to stare into the abyss a bit more. To help with that, I’ll close with some uncomfortable but hopefully productive questions:
我希望这篇文章能说服你多盯着深渊看一会儿。最后，我将提出一些让人不舒服，但希望能有所收获的问题，希望对大家有所帮助：

• If you had to leave your job today, what would you do instead?
  如果您今天不得不离职，您会做什么？

• What’s the best argument in favor of doing that right now?
  现在支持这样做的最佳理由是什么？

• If you have a partner, what’s the best argument in favor of breaking up with them?
  如果你有伴侣，支持分手的最佳理由是什么？

• Are there ways you behave that you wish you didn’t? What unacknowledged desires could be driving those?
  你是否希望自己不这样做？是什么不为人知的欲望在驱使着你？

• What have you said “yes” to that you wouldn’t say “hell yes” to? (prompted by Alex Watt)
  你曾对哪些事情说过 "是"，但却不会说 "去死吧"？(由亚历克斯-瓦特提出）

• Is there something you “should” do that you’re not currently doing? Why? (prompted by Silas Strawn)
  有什么是你 "应该 "做而现在没有做的吗？为什么？

• What bad things are you afraid of happening? Imagine in detail what it would be like if they happened. (prompted by Kamilé Lukosiute)
  你害怕发生什么坏事？详细想象一下如果它们发生了会是什么样子。(提示：Kamilé Lukosiute）

• What do you need that you’re not currently getting? (—David MacIver)
  你需要什么，而你现在还没有得到？(大卫-麦基弗）

• What are you avoiding because it conflicts with some part of your identity / self-image? (—Nicholas Schiefer; more at link)
  你在回避什么，因为它与你身份/自我形象的某些部分相冲突？(尼古拉斯-谢弗；更多内容请点击链接）

• “What is the biggest thing in your life that you just kinda casually fell into and would you have made a conscious decision to do it if you’d known in advance everything you know now?” (—@GeniesLoki; hundreds more at link)
  "如果你事先知道你现在所知道的一切，你会有意识地决定去做吗？(- @GeniesLoki；链接中还有数百条)

Thanks to everyone who suggested questions (cited above) for comments/questions/discussion.
感谢提出问题（如上所述）供大家评论/提问/讨论的所有人。