I'm guessing it frustrates you because you like solving problems? You hear someone stuck in a rut and you want to help them out of it?
Totally with you on this. I'm a solutions architect by day, and my entire skillset is helping people solve problems.
Do a role-play: someone comes to me complaining about how it's really frustrating having to type all this crap into Excel, so I suggest using OCR, or taking a course on getting quicker with the numpad. Unfortunately, I missed their real problem: they hate their job. Me telling them "here's how you could be better at a job you hate" doesn't really help them, it simply looks uncaring and assumes they haven't already thought of those things.
So I could just nod and say "oh that's sound terrible" every time they mention it. You're right, it might look crass and robotic.
Even better here would be saying "Wow, typing all that crap into Excel, you mentioned it last week as well. Sounds like you really don't enjoy doing that?" and encourage them to expand a bit. Is it the typing? What makes it so frustrating? Do they think it's their job in the first place?
Eventually, they admit to you (maybe they hadn't realised themselves) that they hate this bit of their job, and need to discuss with their manager not doing it any more. (Or maybe they hate the company they work for, and need to find a new job. Or it's actually the keyboard they're using they hate. Or whatever, you need to listen to find out.)
This is how you help them out of their rut. They feel that you're interested in their problem, and when they do find a solution, they'll own it because they found it.
My challenge is that to be able to usefully respond to people’s rants, I need to empathize with them and expend at least some mental effort to understand their problem.
If they go on a rant about something, that dumps emotional and mental load onto me.
If they don’t resolve, or attempt to resolve it, that means they’ll continue to dump it onto me - and even worse, it will be a boring, already heard it problem with no new information!
If they continue to do that, and I continue to listen, I’m essentially their emotional garbage dump and enabling their lack of dealing with their actual problem and frustrations.
Even worse, it is often hard for me to get my mind off an unresolved problem. So then it bugs me.
I like solving problems because then I have a lot fewer things bugging me. They almost always result in progress in other ways too, and accomplishing things, which is nice.
Even worse still if it’s the kind of problem they are making for themselves, or are intentionally not trying to solve. Of which there are many.
Eventually, I just don’t want to be around them, or get progressively more blunt with changing the subject because it makes it exhausting and unpleasant for me being around them.
Some people seem to be able to just ignore the emotional affect or load, and get whatever they want from the convo, and I can do so if I exert effort to do so.
But life is too short for this kind of BS on the regular.
Totally with you on this. I'm a solutions architect by day, and my entire skillset is helping people solve problems.
Do a role-play: someone comes to me complaining about how it's really frustrating having to type all this crap into Excel, so I suggest using OCR, or taking a course on getting quicker with the numpad. Unfortunately, I missed their real problem: they hate their job. Me telling them "here's how you could be better at a job you hate" doesn't really help them, it simply looks uncaring and assumes they haven't already thought of those things.
So I could just nod and say "oh that's sound terrible" every time they mention it. You're right, it might look crass and robotic.
Even better here would be saying "Wow, typing all that crap into Excel, you mentioned it last week as well. Sounds like you really don't enjoy doing that?" and encourage them to expand a bit. Is it the typing? What makes it so frustrating? Do they think it's their job in the first place?
Eventually, they admit to you (maybe they hadn't realised themselves) that they hate this bit of their job, and need to discuss with their manager not doing it any more. (Or maybe they hate the company they work for, and need to find a new job. Or it's actually the keyboard they're using they hate. Or whatever, you need to listen to find out.)
This is how you help them out of their rut. They feel that you're interested in their problem, and when they do find a solution, they'll own it because they found it.