The Uses of Complacency

The optimal amount of self-satisfaction is not zero

Midjourney

Our Culture Expects Self-Justification

I really like David Chapman’s explication of what he calls “reasonableness” and “accountability.”

At least in the culture he and I live in, one is constantly called to account for one’s behavior. At any moment, one may be asked “what are you doing?” or “why did you do that?” And one is expected to provide a reasonable answer.

What’s a reasonable answer?

It’s not a rigorous, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt proof that at this very moment one is engaging in “optimal” or “morally correct” or “maximally virtuous” behavior. That would indeed be an unfair expectation! Nobody could possibly provide such a justification on demand.

What people actually expect is a more-or-less plausible-sounding account that makes your actions sound understandable, relatable, and okay.

You have a lot of leeway to present yourself in a favorable light. Not infinite leeway — if you’re caught shoplifting, it probably won’t be regarded well, no matter what you say — but within a given range of acceptable behavior, and absent preexisting bias against you, people will generally take your word that you’re behaving reasonably, if you can give a few seconds’ worth of calm, appropriate-sounding patter about it.

If you’re nervous, flustered, furtive, or resentful — if you act like you’ve been “caught” slacking, or like it’s embarrassing that you’re trying and failing to do something — you will have a much worse time socially.

There are a lot of echoes of this in different contexts.

Asking for favors

A (perhaps unreplicable) famous 1977 study found that people were more inclined to let a research assistant cut in front of them at the copy machine if they gave an excuse starting with “Because.”

“Because I’m in a rush” (an actual, if thin, justification) and “because I have to make some copies” (a nonsensical/trivial statement) worked equally well!

Common sense confirms that something like this is going on when we ask favors in everyday life.

You are more likely to get a favor granted if you have a “reason” why you particularly need or deserve it, or why it’s particularly easy to grant, or something — but people don’t apply that much critical scrutiny to the quality of your reasons. Maybe, if the request is minor enough, the content of your “reason” is literally irrelevant, as in the copier experiment!

In other cases it may not be that extreme, but you generally don’t need to justify your “reason” that thoroughly. If you sound “halfway reasonable”, and if you give the impression that you’re a generally considerate and upstanding person who deserves a favor, rather than a greedy person out for exploitation, you’ll be given the benefit of the doubt.

Denying requests

We do not have a social taboo against disappointing people or telling them “no”. It’s understood that nobody can please or satisfy everyone at once, and that there are many situations where it’s fair and reasonable to turn down a request.

But (especially in professional contexts), it is expected that people give a prompt, polite answer to a request, generally one that makes it sound like it’s perfectly normal and appropriate that this particular request will not be granted.

If you lack the implicit narrative/frame of “it’s perfectly all right to say no here”, and/or if you cannot articulate a “no” within that frame, then you’re going to be tempted to over-promise, under-deliver, procrastinate on responding, and generally engage in dysfunctional “people-pleasing” behavior.

Because while it’s not taboo to say “no”, it is taboo to say no without a frame that makes “no” a reasonable response.

It would be bizarre to stare somebody in the face with a hostile expression and say “NO” with no explanation, if they had made what they believed was a reasonable request. You need some sort of excuse, explanation, or other softening language, even if you aren’t conveying any real information with it, to communicate that you are generally a helpful and cooperative person, but that at this moment the asker’s desired outcome is unavailable.

Defending Your Reasoning

One thing I learned while working on financial projections is that there are a lot of degrees of freedom in what assumptions you make, which can lead to quite different numbers in a final report.

What I was told, by an investment banker, is that you are free to choose your assumptions “strategically”, to make the numbers look as good as possible, so long as you can (if asked) explain your reasoning and show where every number comes from, with more-or-less plausible judgment calls/estimation choices and no direct falsehoods.

You don’t need to demonstrate that your process is rigorous and unbiased. You don’t have to “preregister” your methods and commit to abiding by the result, no matter how it turns out. But you are expected to be prepared to justify yourself.

It’s baked into the startup investment process that everyone already assumes your numbers (like all marketing materials) are strategically chosen to make yourself look as good as possible. You don’t get penalized for being “biased” in your own favor and presenting an idealized picture; you get penalized if that idealized picture can’t stand up to critical scrutiny (of a depth that usually varies with the age of your startup and the size of the investment) or if at any point in the future someone finds you have literally lied about checkable facts.

Demanding Justification is a Cheap Heuristic

Why do people expect self-justification?

Because investigation takes time and effort. People do not have infinite resources (or motivation) to spend on figuring out who has behaved properly or improperly.

So we have a social “just-in-time” system; anyone can put you on the spot and ask you to account for yourself, and see if your answer passes the sniff test.

Obvious bad actors and screw-ups (and some unfortunate people with low social fluency) will fumble and struggle; they’ve been “caught” behaving “unreasonably” and have no explanation for why their actions are fine actually.

Sophisticated bad actors may well be able to bluff or bullshit their way through these “accountability checks” for a long time. But to some extent that’s a tradeoff people are willing to make.

The first, cheapest filter is “can you, on request, produce a few seconds of impromptu patter about why you and your course of action are Fine And Okay?”

It’s Good To Have A Self-Serving Narrative

If you know that we live in a world that runs on reasonable accountability, where at any moment you may be asked to give a (shallow, surface-level) account of yourself as Fine And Okay, then it really pays to have one.

It is helpful to be prepared with a story or frame about “if I were going to say this is Fine And Okay, how would I present it?”

For example, I’m writing a blog post right now. Someone might ask me what I did today. Someone might come up to me in this coffeeshop and ask what I’m doing right now. Someone might even ask me why I’m not doing one of the other things I’m supposed to do this week.

It’s good to have, at the back of my mind, some story like “This post has been nagging at the back of my mind for weeks and I really wanted to get it out. And anyhow I have a goal of publishing at least weekly. I like to write, and my readers appreciate it.”

Is this a full logical justification of the claim that blogging is an optimal use of my time? God no. But I don’t actually need to go that far! For social purposes I literally just need to be prepared with a surface-level, basically-reasonable account of why my behavior is acceptable, understandable, and in at least one sense Good.

Is writing “productive”? Who knows. Could a reasonable person think it is? Definitely.

That’s good enough.

Isn’t This Just Rationalization?

Yes. Yes it is.

If I have a concrete goal in the world, a pat story about why my behavior is okay will not matter to whether I end up reaching that goal or not.

If I care about something, for reasons of my own, I need my own metrics and standards, which don’t get massaged, separate from the “best-case scenario” self-serving narrative.

Self-serving narratives really shouldn’t be your whole means of thinking about your life and the world.

But it’s good to have the self-serving narrative available.

If (like me) your bias tends to be self-critical, you need the exercise of brainstorming “if this were good, why would it be good?” or “what would my biggest fan say?” because if you try to jump straight to “honest assessment”, you will miss that target.

There is a particular type of imagination, the positive kind, that self-critical people are deficient in. We literally have not thought about, and are bad at generating, positive scenarios or narratives that reflect well on us. Intentionally coming up with best-case scenarios and rationales feels absurd and taboo precisely to the people who would most benefit from doing it.

Also, in a lot of contexts, what people expect to hear from you is the best-case scenario, not the median estimate or a statement of your uncertainty, and for social reasons you need to be prepared with that narrative.

Now, in real life, you don’t always get to know, with any degree of clarity, whether a decision (like writing this blog post) is good or bad for your goals. We don’t often get the opportunity to have clean, unbiased, objective KPIs.

So it’s tempting to use habitual self-doubt as a sort of patch — don’t get too complacent, don’t let yourself feel like anything you’re doing is Definitely Fine unless you know for sure, keep a little tension in your shoulders Just In Case, save part of your thought-bandwidth for a little voice constantly muttering “but what if Bad?”

On the other hand, it’s really not clear that these unconscious, habitual hacks actually make us more prepared to change direction if we get evidence we’re on the wrong track.

Something closer to an actual objective KPI or check-in — like, if I’m wondering whether I can afford to do a fun thing, looking back at the end of the week to see if doing the fun thing still allowed me time to finish all my obligations — combined with a sense of “complacent” ease and comfort with my decisions after they’ve been made and before it’s time to evaluate their outcomes — might actually be more flexible and reality-oriented than trying to use crude channels like muscle tension to track my (genuine) uncertainty.

Everybody Gets To Stop Somewhere

All decisions, including epistemic assessments, are necessarily provisional.

It’s “Given the time and energy I am willing to spend on this decision, this is what I’m going with, at least until I decide to change.” And your decision is “final”, at least until you revise it.

Other people are doing this too. They stop justifying their actions at a certain point, at which they declare that it’s obvious, or that they’re sure, or that even if they’re uncertain they’re making a judgment call.

They might occasionally admit that they’re choosing somewhat arbitrarily; but even if they never admit it, it’s true that they’re making a choice, and that beyond a certain point that choice is not “justified” by any reason or rubric beyond their will to do it. Nobody can actually run through an infinite regress of reasons for reasons for reasons; a call inevitably must be made.

Standing by a decision means “ok, right or wrong, I’m done and I’m okay with it, at least until the next check-in point.”

The next check-in point might be when new data arrives. You don’t have to be inflexible or unwilling to learn from mistakes.

But you need to be comfortable with the fact that you made a call, that you could have dithered longer but you didn’t, and you “declared that okay.” Provisionally. You can always decide later that you were too reckless. But right now you don’t think so, right now you think you Made A Call and it’s Fine.

This is just the psychological experience of a practical necessity given bounded cognition.

But it feels a lot better than fighting that necessity. It’s a sense of comfort — or even (locally) a sort of complacency. Not second-guessing, not worrying, declaring a thing to be Fine, until such time as you might revise that view.

Don’t Knock “Mere” Feeling Good

Some of my old posts that get a little mystical, like my thoughts about “Space Mom” or “Metta Meditation My Way” are really just trying to point at the mental motion of deciding, at a certain point, and in a limited context, that you get to stop worrying altogether and enter a peaceful and pleasant mental state.

“How can this possibly be acceptable when you’re not perfect and the world isn’t Paradise?”

Well, to start with, that makes no sense. Worrying doesn’t make you perfect or bring you closer to Paradise!

Having a blissful meditative daydream before you go to sleep at night is pretty goddamn close to costless. In most circumstances, so is going whole minutes without second-guessing yourself or your current course of action. I wouldn’t suggest you talk yourself into believing you’re an infallible god, just that sometimes it pays to Think Positive, on purpose.

Other people are Thinking Positively instinctively, and with no more “justification” than you have. If you envy them — join them!

And I’m with the Epicureans — most of “positive thinking” or pleasure is actually a negative, the absence of pain or stress or worry.

If that sounds dull, you need to pay closer attention to your experience. When you feel joyful and refreshed after a good night’s sleep, or when you feel free and reborn when a problem you’ve been worried about has been solved, nothing new has been added to your experience; mental pain has been subtracted.

Relaxation is not the only thing in life, but my sense is it’s substantially higher-impact on overall wellbeing than things like entertainment (and I like entertainment), and probably deserves to be in my top five priorities, though not #1 or #2.

Relaxation isn’t quite the same thing as having an explicit verbal positive narrative or “frame” that you can use to justify yourself, but it does help you get started generating one, and provides a good nonverbal base for coming across as secure and at ease.

We live in a world where some people take for granted that feeling good is fine, and don’t even think to justify it (and maybe find the whole topic boring), while other people (sometimes on a subtle non-obvious level) actually believe that feeling good is bad, or that it has to be “earned” by something that of course you’ll never really attain, or that the cruelest possible insult is to accuse someone of doing something just to feel better.

And so my take is that plain old literal relaxation and pleasure — not in any “fancy” sense, not coming from a place of beating yourself up for not being cool enough, spiritual enough, or mentally healthy enough, but just literally seeking relief from stress because that feels better — is worth sticking up for.

You get to choose to be comfortable, and let people call that “complacency” if they will.