Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [23]
here are times when we’re called upon to change our course of action even though we are already usefully or pleasantly occupied. The fire alarm rings just as we get to the most exciting part of our book. We hear of an incredibly opportune one-day sale just as we settle down to an afternoon’s sunbathing. We spill our coffee all over the papers we were working on. The time has come to redirect our attention. If, at this juncture, we try to hold on to our old course, we fall into the trap of resistance.
We’re grading 150 long and terrible essays on the administration of President James Buchanan. At the same time, we have to get to the store before it closes for an indispensable item. Without this particular object, we will be in serious trouble before the night is out. Closing time approaches as we draw near the end of our work. The structure of circumstances calls for our going to the store now, before it’s too late, and finishing the essays when we come back. One task can wait; the other can’t. But we have only five essays left. It would be such a relief to have the whole business over with and out of mind. We rush through two or three essays more, doing a terrible job, and finally see that we simply must break off. We make a desperate rush to the store. But it’s too late. We’ve resisted change, and now we have to pay the penalty.
There’s a close affinity between resistance and the trap of persistence. In both cases, we continue with what we’re already doing when it would be better to quit. In persistence, we ought to quit because the present activity has lost its value for us. In resistance, the present task does not lose its value; but we ought to quit anyway because something else more important or more pressing has come up. We persist if we continue to play a game that has become tedious. We resist if we continue to play when there’s a fire in the kitchen—even if the game remains interesting.
Both these traps are often set for us by our own mental inertia. Having begun something, we feel impelled to bring it to a conclusion even if its value is lost or exceeded by another alternative. This tendency to stay on the same track can be overcome if the new alternative is sufficiently potent. Fires, floods, and air attacks will bring most people’s ongoing projects to a halt. But the inertia of the old task biases our judgment of the optimal time to switch. The result is that we change over to the new course too slowly. When we finally stop grading and run to the store, it’s already too late.
Resistance is the let-me-just disease.
There are three conditions under which we should abandon the past and turn to a new future: (1) when delaying our entry into the new diminishes our fortune, (2) when delay causes us to miss a potential increment in our fortune, and (3) when the change to the new is in any case inevitable—that is, when we are visited by emergencies, opportunities, and interruptions.
First, we should drop the task at hand when we’re faced with an emergency. The essence of an emergency is that if we don’t act immediately, we will suffer a penalty for the delay. It makes no difference that the present task is enormously important or that the emergency is very small. What’s at issue is only the effect of delay. It’s time to stop working on our symphony when the coffee begins to boil. The world can wait a moment longer for our symphony without suffering measurable harm. But the coffee won’t wait.
Of course, the task at hand may also be urgent. In that case it is itself an emergency, and we have to decide which of the two can least sustain a delay. It would be unwise to occupy ourselves with boiling coffee when we’re struggling with a masked gunman in the living room. The decision to stay on the same track isn’t always due to resistance. But if the old activity can be delayed without penalty and