Borsalino Test #29: Fucking around
I hang out around a lot of effective altruists. People that genuinely want to know how they can best help others. Many of them are motivated primarily by something like guilt for abundant resources and opportunities they have been blessed with. Others by shame, for lack of the very same means.
I'm not going to criticize guilt or shame-driven motivations. Guilt and shame have historically been fine tools for jarring people out of complacence. Besides, on a large enough scale of sufficiently motivated attempts, great things always manifest. Once that happens, nobody pays attention to the ethics of motivation.
However, I worry that guilt and shame might be fragile long-term motivators. In many of the people I am surrounded by, guilt and shame tend to slowly chip away at productivity, and drain motivation. Ultimately, leaving them profoundly unhappy. But light gets in when the cracks open.
1 in 4 people quit their job this year. People are intuitively realizing that lowering their standards of adherence to a flimsy societal script might not be the worst thing to do. Many sense an illegible toll on mental, physical, or spiritual health. A sense that the path they are on might not be quite right.
Under stress, there are those who try harder, and there are those who lower their standards. Until very recently, the first response was considered a virtue, the second was considered a vice. The ongoing wave of burnout and people quitting or cutting back on work suggests this societal norm is shifting.
Your right-leaning uncle or last boss have likely spent a lot of time conditioning your thinking of tryers as better humans than the slackers. Being a tryer is a virtue. Slackers are kind of missing the point. Why are they even there? The tryers are going to go places. Slackers “won’t ever amount to nothing”, as Notorius BIG’s teachers put it.
But working hard is way more complex than we are taught to believe. It might not seem there's much to learn about it. There are people half my age that work twice as hard as me. Yet, I’m convinced I know more about working hard than when I was in college. Mostly by function of unlearning cheap heuristics.
One thing I have been taught is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard. I didn't always have to work super hard to do well. But was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard work entirely through sheer brilliance? Well, I tried, and I can attest that no, not really.
However, motivation, discipline, and energy - all fuels for hard work - are complex personality traits. While they are not immutable functions of nature or nurture, they do form fairly entrenched equilibria. Shifting these equilibria to superficially more socially desirable ones isn’t merely a matter of consuming enough hustle-porn or fortune cookies. Life is messier than that.
Emergencies and life crises can trigger both temporary and permanent changes. Tryers might let themselves relax for a few months after a heart attack, burnout or trauma. It’s not just that the status quo isn’t working. It’s that the extent of its brokenness demands massive, holistic solutions. Some radical change.
Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work. See clearly what kind you're best suited for. Judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing. This network is too complicated, you can’t fool it more than once.
Then there is the bigger question of what to work on. There are important problems, which tend to be hard. And less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do. This is one of those historical moments where people recalibrate themselves toward the center — toward the most important problems.
Tryers feel they are pursuing lost purposes. And slackers always scoff at the tryers, who treat an artificial quality line like it's their actual preferences and waste effort over-achieving. And they might have a point now! Because many tryers are squandering motion during a Schelling point of falling standards and collective questioning.
In the book “Bowling Alone”, Putnam supported the thesis that the past few decades had seen Americans retreating en masse from public life. He argued that they had become disconnected from wider communities, as evidenced by changes such as a decline in civic engagement and dwindling membership rates for groups such as bowling leagues.
Though aspects of Bowling Alone are a little dated today (“computer-mediated communication” isn’t a phrase you’re likely to have heard recently), a quick glance at 2021’s social and professional landscape would suggest many of these trends are actually deepening across Western democracies.
Chips are down. Polarization, social distancing, declining social trust and lack of purpose have forced segments of the population to drift apart from any sense of community to a degree that can seem irresolvable.
Human collectives have a vast array of evolved strategies for dealing with cooperation under conditions of unpredictably falling standards. We are constantly negotiating other people’s shifting standards, both implicitly and explicitly with our own compensations.
A modified version of Chesterton’s Fence is a good lens on this. An entrenched equilibrium in your life is like a fence in a field whose purpose you don’t quite grok. You get part of why it’s there, but not all of it. When faced with a stressor that seems to require choosing between tearing the fence down entirely (changing the equilibrium by force) and preserving it absolutely (refusing to change at all), you don’t do either.
You kinda just partly knock down the fence, so it’s a lower quality fence. It will continue serving its functions, but perhaps not as well. It will create new freedoms to address new circumstances, but perhaps not quite as well as tearing down the whole fence. It’s a half-measure. A compromise.
Even if you don’t know quite why you’re unhappy with the current equilibrium, lowering your standards is a good idea. People quitting their jobs are lowering their standards of commitment to a social script. That is likely the best way to challenge their understanding of current events, and themselves.
If you’re unhappy with your life in ways you can’t quite figure out, lowering your standards relative to your commitments is one way to fuck around and find out what’s wrong.