I honestly feel handicapped, as I’ve expressed before, in being able to distinguish whether someone is making a reasonable request of me, or if they’re trying to take advantage of me, or if they’re not actually being manipulative but still making an unreasonable request that I’d be perfectly in the right to refuse. It’s like whatever part of my system was designed to detect and evaluate such situations is faulty and constantly sends me slightly garbled data.
A large part of this comes from the fact that there are certain things that I feel strongly are a real bother for me to tolerate, which are very clearly not that much of a bother for the other party (so they’re completely unable to understand my aversion), and I can’t entirely rationally justify why they’re such a bother for me. I could claim that this is just my irrational preference and ask others to respect it, but unfortunately I’ve never lived in anything approaching a rationalist utopia and in my experience that’s not sufficient for having those aversions respected. I could do something like “set a boundary that’s not to be pushed”, to use language I see often on Tumblr (which I don’t fully understand or feel entirely comfortable with actually, and I may be using it wrongly here). But how do I know when the boundary I’m setting is reasonable enough that it’s worth worsening the life of the other person? Framing it that way pretty much puts me back at square one.
So I’m stuck with trying to evaluate my own intolerance and to what extent I can self-modify to have less of it (because if there’s a lot of room to increase my tolerance, then my attitude feels awfully closed to “being spoiled”), and at what point the effort involved would be enough for me to justify refusing the other person now. All the while trying to validly correct for the bias resulting from my phobia of saying no to people. *sigh*
(Yeah, this is vagueblogging about an annoying situation happening in my life. I’m not giving details partly because my main objective is to get these thoughts down in words rather than elicit specific advice.)
[Warning: devolved into a long and somewhat personal rant.]
Is it too much to ask that people express their personal preferences/aversions/needs as personal preferences/aversions/needs rather than The Objectively Correct Thing To Avoid Of Which Others Need To Be Informed?
I should explain myself by describing my position on how to deal with everyday habits people have that others don’t like (e.g. making certain noises, leaving clutter, etc., I’m thinking especially of things that affect others who live with you.) It seems that all of us have certain aversions that don’t come with any rational justification. (Here a rational justification would be something like “not washing the silverware well increases the risk of contracting certain diseases by X amount, which offsets the benefit Y of not bothering to wash the spoons and forks carefully”.) Now these aversions may originate in culture or circumstances of upbringing, but from my experience they’re highly variable among even individuals from the same family. It seems likely that variance among individuals in the same culture is much higher than variance between cultures.
So how should you talk to someone about not violating such a personal preference? I say, firstly by actually referring to it as a personal preference, and by describing honestly what effect it has on you (this is the old suggestion of using “I statements”). Now there are certain rules in each culture dictating which things are good and bad manners, and sometimes it’s helpful or even necessary to let someone (especially someone new to the culture) know that what they are doing is generally considered wrong in the eyes of the society around them. Even this should be treated with caution, since I suspect that many are overconfident in knowing how universal certain norms are in their culture; a lot of rules apply more to subcultures or even particular social groups. Still, in most cases, I think the only informing that should be done is informing others of your own preferences and aversions and the effect on you when they’re violated. Usually it comes at very little cost to the other person to stop doing the thing, so the reasonable and decent thing for them to do is stop. Otherwise, the other person can express their preferences which make it difficult to stop doing the thing, and usually something can be negotiated (I guess this is what rationalists mean by “competing access needs”?). In the rare and unfortunate case that it really can’t be negotiated (e.g. your roommate smokes and can’t quit easily, and you can’t stand the smell coming from their breath and clothes), then you and that person may have to break up, stop hanging out, etc.
The thing is, basically nobody that I’ve hung around long enough ever seems to consider putting this technique into practice.
Instead I get talked down to by others whose tone always implies that they’re just trying to teach me an objective lesson. They explain this lesson by invoking either the evident rationality of their preference or the universally understood fact that my habit is unacceptably bad manners, and usually both. But they often go beyond saying “Don’t do that; it’s wrong because of X, Y, and Z” by seeming completely unable to cope with or tolerate what I’m doing, or just being incredibly grossed out. And maybe they genuinely are. Maybe they can’t easily change their preferences. So in general I don’t feel that I really have the right to dismiss their reaction on the grounds that it’s irrational. But the thing is that that’s often how they deal with my requests: calmly giving a brief explanation of why they don’t make rational sense and dismissing them on that ground. So when they object to something I have an aversion to, I do try to defend myself on the grounds that their objection is not actually based in rationality or some universally accepted rule in the culture. My defense based on rationality will usually be dismissed in a confident tone (for a lot of these things, especially e.g. germ-related, there are so many beliefs out there that it’s hard to argue one way or another on rational evidence). And my defense based on the behavior not generally be considered wrong is usually met by flat denial, or (in the case of one roommate) by them actually polling other people to “prove” their point, either using random people on the street (literally!) or (one time) using a sample of our mutual friends behind my back.
To more concretely illustrate what I’m talking about, here is a list of some of these habits that have come between me and people I’ve spent a lot of time with, off the top of my head mostly in no particular order:
tending to leave things out, which eventually creates clutter
leaving a pot or a couple of dirty dishes in the sink
using (recently washed) hands to select one of visibly separated dumplings on a platter being shared in a restaurant
serving oneself food with one’s own already-used utensil out of a dish being shared in a restaurant
brushing teeth standing out of the bathroom in plain view
not wiping around the bathroom sink thoroughly after washing one’s face in it, leaving visible drops
touching doorknobs or the fridge handle without washing hands first while sick with a cold
leaving (at least partially) used tissues (not during a cold but after sneezing from allergies) out in plain view, or even on one’s own bedroom desk away from common view but then running the risk of touching communal objects after having touched the desk
Can you guess which three of the above are my own complaints about things others do, rather than the reverse?
Maybe from some subtleties in my tone, you can guess that the “touching doorknobs while sick” and “serving oneself food with used utensil” are my own complaints about others. From what I understand of germ science, these are probably based in some rationality, although they’re influenced by my being raised to be rather germophobic and are probably overreactions on my part. I’ve learned to cope with them. The “brushing teeth” one is mine as well, based entirely on an irrational grossed-out reaction to many things saliva-related, which at least half a dozen roommates have seemed mystified by. I’ve mostly coped with that one, with some difficulty. (Btw this is the only “criticism” I remember making of Stranger Than Fiction, which is otherwise a great movie.)
(Yes, the two germ-related objections of mine can each be paired with an obviously parallel neighboring thing on that list, which another person objected to me doing... in both cases the very same person. I point this out in order to highlight that, ultimately rational or not, these combinations of preferences don’t even look that consistent.)
And the fact that these norms aren’t consistently enforced or practiced among people I’ve known from roughly similar backgrounds sort of vindicates my frustration at being talked down to when these things come up. For instance, I have a tendency to leave some objects out after I use them and sort of “tune them out” so that I don’t think to put them away. I once had a roommate who found this very annoying, and his way of showing it was to tell me that I “needed to learn” (literal phrasing) how to put things away, with the air of a parental figure explaining something to a teenager (he was several years older than me and most of the time a pretty cool guy). My very next roommate had a far more severe tendency to leave everything out but promptly found so many habits of mine to “teach” me not to do that I don’t recall if I ever found the energy to tell him his clutter was annoying me; if I did, it certainly didn’t change his behavior. I could go on with more examples, but you get the idea. It doesn’t help that to most people I give off an impression (definitely not entirely false) of “not having common sense”.
Of course I try to practice what I preach. I’ve probably slipped up occasionally, but I think nowadays I present my preferences as Objective Etiquette pretty darn close to never -- at least, I can’t remember the last time when I did. But nobody around me seems to follow this standard. The result is that my preferences tend to get dominated by the preferences of people close to me. I mean, this is a major part of the reason that since finishing graduate school I made a priority of and put lots of money towards not having roommates anymore.
In fact, the one exceptional subculture that I think seems very likely to follow the approach I described above is the rationalist community. I’ve never spent time with rationalist community members in real life, so I can’t say for certain, but if this impression is correct then it is one major bulletpoint under the “pro” side of pros vs. cons of getting a job in the Bay Area and living with rationalists.
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Big claim, I know. Haven't fully cracked it yet, but in this blog post (originally published on the RSA website here on Feb 4th 2013) I try to provide a new way to look at this enduring human quest.
The original post is reproduced in full below (with minor fixing of a typo that had slipped through before!):
I recently came across an interesting blog post on a psychology website, written by Raj Raghunathan. The title alone, Happiness Now, or Happiness Later?, evokes a series of questions: Which is better? Can we choose? Can’t we have both?
We can have both, as it turns out. However, many of the things which bring us happiness now are not the same actions that will bring us happiness later. This is not at all a new conundrum, and is in some ways similar to the want/should conflict described by economist Max Bazerman and colleagues, which arises when we have competing internal preferences. I want to eat a big slice of that triple layer chocolate devil’s food cake right now, but should forgo it for my future self’s health and happiness.
But not all behaviour must be either-or. The Happiness Now or Happiness Later article presented this in an interesting graphic:
(Image credit)
I have written about the want/should conflict in the past, and more specifically about the use of commitment devices to temper or overcome the urge to do what we want so that we can do what we should. But if we were to superimpose the want/should axes onto the happiness now/happiness later graph, it seems to give the whole issue a slightly different feel.
Whereas when looking at the issue as a want/should conflict it seems easier to think of the ‘should’ behaviour as somehow morally superior to the ‘want’ actions, this is altogether less clear to me when framed as a ‘happiness now’ versus ‘happiness later’ question. In the latter framing, it seems much more obvious that we should seek out those actions that satisfy both – that bring us perpetual happiness you might say.
While commitment devices can be really helpful to help get from Quadrant 4 (‘want’/‘happiness now’) behaviour to Quadrant 2 (‘should’/‘happiness later’) behaviour, ultimately we should all be seeking out Quadrant 3 behaviour in the first place.
We should be wary of rationalising our Q4 behaviour as somehow being able to fall into Q3. Trying to convince ourselves that junk food will make us better off in the long run is not the answer. Instead, we might try to shift our Q2 behaviour over to Q3, that is, to make the behaviour we know we should be doing for the benefit of our future-self more enjoyable in the present. This might be by actually making it more pleasant to do right now, for example with small incremental near-immediate rewards, or perhaps by an attitudinal reframing (“I know I should go jogging for my long term health, but I also really want to go out on that jog today because the sun is shining and I’ll feel great as soon as I’m done…” )
Of course, I don’t know what the key is to eternal happiness. And writing this blog post has probably thrown up more questions to ask myself than it has provided answers. But I love charts and graphs, so it is an interesting exercise to connect the want/should conflict with the happiness quadrants. It may be a new way of looking at what may already be obvious to some: we should be seeking out activities that bring us both short term happiness and long term happiness, those that we both know we should do and that we actually want to do. And where that is not possible, we can try to reframe those activities that bring us long term happiness as being fun in the short term, too. Perhaps this is all easier said than done. I’d love to hear you thoughts.
