Don't Use Maybe to Mean No

Ever tried to get a full pint through a crowd without spilling? That's what being human feels like to me, sometimes. The liquid in the pint in this metaphor is your overall sense of wellbeing. Every time you yield to circumstances and do something you did not quite want to do, you splash a drop of it away. Maybe you give in and agree to that second starter or stay for another pint or give your boss an unrealistic deadline. Splash, splash, splash.

I yield to the impulse to please people like a puppet yields to its master's strings. Two things conspire to make me do this: the genuine pleasure of seeing people happy and the fear, verging on phobia, of disappointing them. This is not a virtue.

Every time you offer something which you did not quite mean to give away, be it your time or anything else, you allow your boundaries to be trodden. This hurts. Weak boundaries can make you resentful and aggressive and not even aware of it. They can also make you avoid people, certainly those people disinclined to notice when your enthusiasm is less than unreserved. Poignantly, this is often your fault more than it is theirs. Mindreading is a tricky business.

Sometimes it is a matter of culture. Here is a story my grandfather loved to tell. It is the custom in Moldova for hosts to offer their guests a dinner invitation by asking more than once; at the same time, guests are expected to start by turning them down. In this way, poor hosts can save face by still issuing a dinner invitation and poor guests can avoid appearing desperate (or so the legend goes). In Transylvania, such fussing about is not the norm, presumably on the assumption that guests know best and that foisting attention on them might be irksome. (Though it is also the case that Transylvania has always been the richer province.) And there is a popular trope about a Moldovan who travels to Transylvania and turns down the dinner invitation, by his own lights. Queue cartoon comedy as the hungry guest looks on, with disbelieving dismay, at the food stuffs being duly withdrawn and packed away to the kitchen. Proud Moldovans like myself are socialised to feel delight in their customary sort of undue generosity. 

Still, weak boundaries are not a virtue. They are a symptom of chronic insecurity. You become compulsive about pleasing (and performing and perfecting) when you imagine that relationships are transactional and that you must make it profitable for others to offer you their time, attention and regard. Individuals assured of their own worth have nothing to fuss about. They offer what they mean to offer and no more.

You might think that boundaries make you rigid. Not so. If you walk along the edge of a sheer drop and there is no railing, you will walk well away from it. Where there is a railing, you can go right up to the edge. Good boundaries can mean more freedom, not less.

In acting class, we play this game sometimes. You pair with someone. Your partner's job is to shout boundaries as soon as they feel the slightest distress. Your job is to try to unsettle them. You test a string of gestures, maybe you start by touching their shoulder and then touch their hand. Before long, something will set them off. (I find trying to stick a finger in their left ear works quite well.) Different people have different boundaries and your job, and their job, is to learn to notice them. Also, to notice them before you trample them over. It is a social talent in painfully short supply.

Here is why you should get good at this game. When you are dealing with people who stand well outside of your boundaries, you can be calm and reasonable and examine your disagreements with academic detachment. You can debate, without losing your temper, the pros and cons of digital proximity to the tympanic cavity. Not so after the rubicon has been crossed. Then the situation is more like get your f**king finger out of my f**king ear. Trying to be calm after someone has stepped over your boundaries is like trying to negotiate a peace settlement while the invading army is marching through the city, door to door, killing all the babies. You will not want to be tactical; hysterical is what you will want to be. As George Orwell once put it, you "cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from". 

Playing boundaries in your head is a fun way to go about your day as well as useful. It helps with the people-hating. Oh come on, don't be boring, tequila shots? BOUNDARIES! Would you like double fries with that? BOUNDARIES! etc. Don't use maybe to mean no.

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Person vs People

There is as yet no measuring unit for unconditional positive regard, so let me invent one: the kilocuddle (kCu). A kilocuddle is the amount of vitality required to get out of bed on a damp January morning, at 6:45 am, under low barometric pressure. It is equal to a thousand gram cuddles. At rest in an emotionally neutral environment, the average adult will exhibit a basal cuddle metabolic rate (BCMR) of around 60 kCu per hour (kCu/hr), with children under 5 going as high as 110. At present, most people get by on a daily intake of roughly 1750 kCu (just over 72 kCu/hr). In what follows, I will try to argue that this is in fact woefully inadequate and that the vast majority of people are severely and routinely malcuddled.


I found myself strolling down that thought path a number of times over the past few months. Here is why.

The first thing you will discover, if you happen to become unemployed, is that it becomes extremely difficult to introduce yourself. Unless you speak with a foreign accent, the first question anyone asks you is "what do you do". At an alumni event last month, I challenged a group of people to introduce themselves without giving their job title. Everyone struggled. One guy gave up: "Gosh, I don't know, all I do is work".

Why are job titles so important? One theory is that they replace conspicuous consumption. They signal to hurried strangers, in shorthand, key bits of information about ourselves: education, money, status, likeliness to enjoy sushi, opinion re:what constitutes a valid Sunday morning and cetera. Lawyer and musician are loaded terms. In different situations, from different people, they purchase different amounts of social capital. (Social capital is measured in kilocuddles.)

This is not a joke.

Here is one scenario. I have just met my future husband, Barry. He is intelligent, successful, handsome and kind. He is compassionate and strong. He loves me. Moreover, he likes me. (Which is no small feat because, while I am not a Yahoo, I'm quite a lot Yahoo-like, quite a lot of the time.) Meanwhile, Zanny Minton Beddoes offers to hire me to run a new blog for The Economist called "The Economist Explains Why Sausage Manufacturing is Difficult" (it is a series of explainers that debunk "why don't we just" political initiatives - like "why don't we just bring back the gold standard"). It's a roaring success. Life at 120 kCu/hr is great. When I receive optimal levels of affection, I am an infinitely better version of myself. I am patient, calm, balanced and compassionate. I am resilient and calm. I play. I welcome criticism. I am eloquent and witty. I exude empathy, talk with more enthusiasm and listen with fewer interruptions. All people, not just the smart and attractive ones, become fascinating. I exercise. I eat well. I take initiative and risks. I feel warm and expansive and open to experience. I laugh. I learn with renewed vim and explore with fresh curiosity. I can sit with interest through 90-minute of slides on pelicans. It is that general joy of living that is peculiar to new and reciprocated love (or to the renewed possibility thereof), and which reminds me of Pierre Bezuhov at the end of War and Peace:

"A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which he had thought himself incapable, possessed him. The whole meaning of life - not for him alone but for the whole world - seemed to him centered in his love (...) Often in afterlife, Pierre recalled this period of blissful insanity. All the views he formed of men and circumstances at this time remained true for him always. He not only did not renounce them subsequently, but when he was in doubt or inwardly at variance, he referred to the views he had held at this time of his madness and they always proved correct. 'I may have appeared strange and queer then,' he thought, 'but I was not so mad as I seemed. On the contrary, I was then wiser and had more insight than at any other time, and understood all that is worth understanding in life, because... because I was happy.' Pierre's insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes which he termed 'good qualities' in people, before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause, he discovered indubitable causes for loving them."

Consider now what happens at the other end of the spectrum. Barry, turns out, is a cheat. He married me for my EU passport. The Economist gig falls through because the government has banned immigrants from holding public opinion. Meanwhile, Joan from the party never approves my friend request and Lilly the writer from that networking event cancels our meeting. I sulk so often that my friends begin to keep me out of the loop. My pet turtle dies. Trump bans Hamilton. My marketable skills become outdated and I become poor and unemployable. Soon I am denied the baseline level of esteem in society otherwise known as dignity. Life below 50 kCu/hr is not fun. In fact, it turns into one long (unrelenting) love withdrawal symptom. No matter how enthusiastically the Harvard Business Review likes to claim otherwise, shrugging off rejection and failure is hard. Resilience is a tricky talent. Practice might help somewhat (compassion certainly does), but normal people don't operate reliably at such levels of self-assurance. I for one don't. Without Barry and Hamilton, I become quiet and tetchy. I am consumed by shame¹. I succumb to a slow smouldering rage and fantasies of omnipotence. I am vengeful. I lose interest. I find everything boring and everyone ugly. My intrinsic motivation weakens and I space out during conversation. I am always anxious. I feel tired and distracted. I don't return phone calls. I eat too much. I hate anyone who disagrees with me and pelicans.

In unemployment you can worry a lot about those scenarios. In those particular emotional terms.

This is very interesting because when your life is closer to scenario one, the attractiveness of the two outlines is exactly reversed. In the first scenario, the fabulous job and the loving relationship are burdens. They are incredibly tiring. Your time is forever occupied. You spend every hour executing the commitments accrued by your past self and have very little actual agency. You are weighed down by ridiculous expectations. You live off meal replacement shakes. You worry permanently about falling behind. You never feel good enough. Ever.

Conversely, the second scenario sounds blissful. You are master of your own time. You can, as Henry David Thoreau once put it, "go confidently in the direction of your dreams" and "live the life you have imagined". Freedom. Happiness.

At this point you might think that all I've done is proven that it is possible to find fault with any situation. Standing outside the rat race looking in was fun for a while, but then it got lonely. Maybe I just learned, the long way, one obvious truth: that competition is not really for money and status, but for the social capital they purchase. We compete for stuff we actually need: esteem, validation, respect, affection, recognition, regard, the interest of others, their attention, curiosity and time - their "love". That is the real scarcity in the system². You are free from the weight of expectation, but the result is not happiness³. The result is a sort of dreary limbo, like living outside of time. Sure - "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth" is a great quote, but even Henry David Thoreau wrote a book. What higher bid for social capital is there?

Actually that is not the conclusion.

The conclusion is that the compromise is always between authenticity and belonging. Between individual and society. Between being free and being loved. This is not to say you cannot have your cake and eat it. It is to say you can only have however much of the cake you didn't eat. Life is about choices.

The conclusion is also that Love⁴ is a very accurate predictor of behaviour, mood, personality, character flaws (or virtues), vitality, performance and, in general, sanity and well being. We all have within ourselves the capacity both for great good and great evil, both for fun and staggering dullness. The world can feed one or another of our impulses.

For me, life is optimal at or above 100 kilocuddle per hour. I get by on 90. Below 60, things get tricky. Below 20, I die. You have to work out these numbers for yourself.

There are ways to lower your basal cuddle metabolic rate. Meditation, for instance. Culture. Philosophy. Art. Accepting the idea that you are alone, actually alone, irredeemably alone and that the promise of "love" is for the most part an illusion. Breathing. Reading Proust. Good quality marijuana⁵.

Until then, I only mean to point out this permanent tension: person vs people. Authenticity vs belonging. Doing what you want vs doing what is expected of you. Freedom vs love.

We are like cells in a body - only saints and psychopaths can live without others. Love is highly addictive⁶. You notice this in the language: "self-worth" is distinctly transactional⁷. The result is that everything is extremely interlocked. You cannot talk about self-worth without talking about money, status anxiety, the culture of meritocracy, politics, advertising and capitalism. Normal people cannot exist in a vacuum. Only saints and psychopaths.

Unemployment, even the wealthy "gap year in Thailand" sort that I am fortunate enough to enjoy, teaches the value of belonging. Work is hard, often boring and always a limit on your individual freedom. It is also a way of participating in the human project.

----------------------------

¹ I warmly recommend studying Brene Brown. This audiobook is short and excellent. And for a quicker start there are her two TED talks (they are funnier in chronological order).
² If I had to guess. Economics seems to have a hard time reasoning about surplus. It never ceases to baffle me how, on the one hand, journalists complain that they must produce more copy than ever , while, on the other, there is too much news and everyone feels like they are drowning in pointless garbage. You would think the solution is obvious. But how do you stop an arms race? A discussion for another time, perhaps.
³ Unless you are an accomplished Buddhist.
⁴ Dignity, respect, regard, esteem, validation etc etc etc
⁵ Joke!
⁶ It may actually be an opiate. I will include the first reasonable link returned by Google because I am too lazy to look up the many source whence I derived this belief.
⁷ Self-worth, to nobody's surprise, is also measured in kilocuddles.

Intrinsic Motivation

There is one way to make yourself unhappy, and that is to hold unrealistic expectations. When I left my job in June last year, I left because I felt cheated. Work, certainly the sort of work that I was doing, relatively challenging and well paid, was meant to the rewarding. Turns out no and that they call it compensation for a reason. Maybe it works for some. I was certainly naive for taking the corporate propaganda at face value, with their patter about meaning and creativity and impact, rather than anything so base as money, but surely this notion that work can be both gainful and fulfilling is not all a lie?

To a depressive, motivation exudes a certain fetishistic allure, like luscious long hair to a bold head. Andrew Solomon calls the opposite of depression "not happiness, but vitality". It's about that energy required to bother about the business of living. Most people most mornings don't need a good reason to get out of bed. It just sort of happens. But imagine one day waking to discover that the impulse is missing. Darkness. Anguish does not even begin to convey it. That "why" is like waking up from the Matrix inside a windowless coffin with tubes coming out of your chest. Motivation is the blue pill. You want it because you miss the illusion of agency, the smell of freshly baked pastry and your friends.

Motivation can be mined from the world or generated in the mind. External motivation is the stick-and-carrot kind most of us discover in childhood. If you are human and not psychopathic, you probably prefer praise, validation, respect and curiosity to being abandoned by the canapés after giving your job title or just saying something naff. Money, status, power and fame (or the social capital they purchase) are powerful motivators. They also, like all drugs, build tolerance. Intrinsic motivation is necessary at least some of the time. I define this as anything you can generate independent of other humans and on top of the default instinct of survival.

I decided to go back to the basics. I believe work is a real human impulse. We might be naturally given to laziness, but I am not convinced that left to our own devices and free from want, we would spend all our time napping, nuzzling each other, frolicking and eating ice-cream (though there would be a lot more of that). We like making things and figuring stuff out. So in my seven months of gainful unemployment, I made a list: what keeps me engaged and motivated when there are no external incentives (money, praise etc). There are five things, so far. Progress, order, the intuition of coherence, mastery and art.

One - progress. If I am palpably changing the/my world for the better, whether by reading a book or doing the washing up, if the goal is drawing decidedly nearer, I usually persist. I like to finish things, complete tasks, tick things off lists and in general have a sense that things are moving forward. I also like walking, driving, hiking and running, so perhaps there is something in that universal notion of motion or travel that I find particularly satisfying. Or the pleasure of agency - it's fun and gratifying to cause change in the world.

Two - order. Alain de Botton clarified this for me: that people have an impulse to "cultivate the garden". It is certainly very satisfying to be able to impose order in an otherwise crazy world. It has a very calming effect; even if it just means tidying your desktop or making a list. Writing is that sort of activity for me. I find being alive, even on a fairly average day, pretty confusing. At any moment there are goals, impressions, projects, wants, questions, ideas, longings, needs, hopes and general apprehension lying around my mind in a confused messy heap. Writing is building a lattice - neat with the shelves, drawers, folders, pots, cabinets and boxes of better understanding.

Three - the intuition of coherence. I used to call this understanding, but I'm reading about "the intuition of coherence" in Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman and I like it better. Without going into details, cognitive ease makes us happy. Spotting a pattern which connects otherwise disparate elements makes us happy. Making the world intelligible makes us happy. Learning is just that: a guided tour around interesting places in which someone shows you how things stand. Sometimes the tour is self-guided. No matter. Making sense is autotelic.

Four - mastery. This is where people like Dan Dannette talk about flow. Activities that are autotelic (which I'm going to use again because it is a great word). I think the underlying mechanic is skill. It is very satisfying to do something you can do very well, and the more sophisticated the task, the more satisfying. Though I wouldn't shy away from listing touch typing in this category. Or riding a bike. Muscle memory is immensely pleasurable. To use Daniel Kahneman's terminology, if it can be done mostly by System 1, then it needs no justification.

Five - art. Also here I include beauty and self-expression. Making pretty things, cool things, clever things, things that represent some key aspect of ourselves made solid. So we can sit back and point to it and say: that's a little like me.

Also, as I explain in the next post in this series, work is a way of participating in the human project.

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