What if there’s no problem?

Shifting from a problem-solving orientation to a creative orientation.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Do you ever get a question stuck in your head? It happens to me all the time.

A few months ago, my Buddhist teacher Lama Tsultrim Allione posed one that’s been reverberating ever since:

What if there’s no problem?

It sounds naive—maybe even delusional—given the state of the world. We’ve entered the polycrisis, or in the words of Al Gore, “a period of consequences.” The future has never felt more uncertain.

Then there’s our personal lives: relationships, money, work, family, health, aging, emotional struggles, inner conflicts. The stuff of being human.

I have my own list, from the garden-variety problems that come with running a business, raising a toddler, being married, and managing a home to the bigger, stickier ones. Like the problem of having way outgrown our rent-stabilized Brooklyn apartment, and trying to find a new one during a housing crisis—a time when inventory is historically low, rents are historically high, and bidding wars among dozens of applicants are the norm. It’s become a chronic situation, heavy with the language of “problem.”

And yet—what if it’s not?

I’ve found myself wondering if the way we relate to problems may itself be the only real “problem.” If the basic duality of problem and solution is itself what keeps us from accepting life as it is, in its messiness, and finding creative and adaptive ways to meet whatever challenges present themselves.

So… What if there’s no problem?

What would it look like to let go of a problem-solving mentality? And what might take its place?

After becoming thoroughly tapped-out on problems—exhausted by the mere prospect of having to attempt to fix another issue in my life or in the world—it finally dawned on me that perhaps it doesn’t have to be this way. That perhaps we are not sentenced to spending our lives playing whack-a-mole with predicaments and setbacks. Maybe there was another way of meeting challenges and working with the stuff of life—one that didn’t regard them as problems at all, but instead a part of the dynamic creative process of life.

Because if there’s no problem, then there’s also no solution. What’s left is just life unfolding, and our own choices and actions.

A Problem-Solving Orientation vs a Creative Orientation

A couple weeks ago, I found myself in San Miguel de Allende studying with Robert Fritz, the musician, composer, filmmaker and author best known for his work on the creative process. I was drawn to his work because of the idea that the creative processes utilized by artists, musicians, writers and scientists are the same processes that can allow us to create anything in our lives. As Fritz teaches, we can actually learn and master the creative process, and apply it towards whatever we wish to create: a project, a new life chapter, a relationship, a home, a way of being in the world.

But embracing this creative approach requires us to let go of fixating on problems.

“When you are solving a problem, you are taking action to have something go away: the problem,” Fritz writes in his book The Path of Least Resistance. “When you are creating, you are taking action to have something come into being: the creation.”

Fritz draws a sharp distinction between a problem-solving mentality—rooted in what he calls a “reactive-responsive orientation,” in which circumstances largely dictate our choices and actions—and a “creative orientation,” in which our choices and actions are oriented around what we want to create. In the creative orientation, we see ourselves as the causal creative force of our own lives, and we use whatever challenges are present as material for the creative process.

“Our true nature,” Fritz suggests, “is that of creators, who can bring forth new life out of any set of circumstances.”

And yet, most of us live reactively—shaped by circumstances, working to make problems go away.

Problem-solving is not inherently bad or wrong. It has its place, and in certain cases, it can be generative. But when it becomes our default, we orient our lives around what’s wrong; fixating on what’s missing, broken, or in need of fixing. We become like existential firefighters, always putting out flames but never building anything lasting.

The alternative is not passivity, denial, or spiritual bypassing. It’s choosing to live from desire rather than deficiency; from what we long to bring into being, not just what we want to eliminate.

We don’t fight or deny the problem. Instead, we replace it with something greater. In the face of a stronger, more powerful energy of desire—the mysterious life force or creative drive within us—the problem simply loses its potency.

An Existential Shift

The meaning we assign to a situation defines its nature—and, by extension, our experience of it. If we see life as a series of problems, we’ll spend our energy in resistance, tied up in knots trying to fix, control, and resolve.

The philosopher, psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who founded logotherapy, taught that meaning is not given but created. Which means we get to choose how we view any situation in our lives.

If instead we see each situation not as a problem but as a starting point for creation, all of that energy gets freed up to imagine, strategize and get creative with whatever we’re working with.

With our mortality in mind, this shift becomes especially powerful.

Death, aging, loss, pain—these aren’t problems to be solved. They’re conditions of existence. Trying to “solve” them only deepens our suffering.

Seen through a creative lens, our existential “problems” become invitations: to live more vividly, to choose what we give our lives to, and to meet reality not with resistance but with imagination.

Beyond the Duality of Problem and Solution

This invitation to embrace reality as it is—beyond our ideas of how it should be—is what Lama Tsultrim Allione is getting at when she invites her students to contemplate: What if there’s no problem?

She’s not asking us to pretend everything’s fine. She’s pointing to a deeper truth.

“In times like these,” she writes, “how can we even consider that there might be no problem? The answer lies in the vast, empty awareness that is always present, beyond time, without a center or edge.”

She encourages us to rest in whatever we feel immediately after asking this question. For me, there’s a dropping down, a restfulness. A sense of the boundaries of my mind gently dissolving. A gentle relief.

When we touch that level of awareness—even briefly—we glimpse a freedom that isn’t dependent on resolving the messiness of life. We discover an okay-ness with everything, just as it is. That freedom, that okay-ness, allows us to respond with clarity rather than reactivity. And to even engage with life with a bit of imagination and playfulness.

This doesn’t mean we stop engaging with the world or our circumstances. It means we stop letting them define us and dictate our choices and actions.

A Different Question

Instead of “How do I solve this?” try asking: What do I want to create?

This simple reframing, central to Fritz’s work, is not just psychological—it’s spiritual. It reclaims our agency from the looping logic of lack and avoidance. It honors desire—the “dynamic urge” to create—not as a sign that something is wrong, but as the underlying creative force of life.

And with our own death marching closer each day, we don’t have unlimited time. Why spend this precious life inventing problems and trying to fix what’s wrong, when we could be making something beautiful, meaningful and real?

Contemplation:

Take a moment to look at one of the “problems” in your life. You might even write it down.

Now try looking at the situation in a different way, beyond the problem or potential solutions. In this area of your life, What is it that you truly want to create? The answer might be something very specific that you want, or it could be more broad, like a feeling or state of being.

Let the answer come without forcing it. You don’t have to act on it right away. Just listen.

What you hear might not be a solution. It might be a beginning.

If this approach resonates and you’d like to explore it further, I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reply to this email or reach out to me on Substack. As a starting point, I also highly recommend Robert Fritz’s The Path of Least Resistance, which explores his unique and powerful approach to the creative process, and Lama Tsultim Allione’s Feeding Your Demons, which offers a beautiful framework for working with difficult emotions and inner conflicts, rooted in the teachings of nondual Buddhist tantra.