Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [36]
The advantages and disadvantages of hurrying have different weights in different circumstances. The disadvantage of increasing the chance of making an error by hurrying through a minefield outweighs the advantage of getting away from the field a few minutes sooner. But the disadvantage of leaving the dishes less than perfectly clean may be less important to us than the advantage of getting away from them sooner. There is no universal formula that tells us how fast we should work in every situation. Nevertheless, there’s a class of circumstances in which hurrying is demonstrably non-optimal regardless of the values we assign to the various advantages and disadvantages. If going faster increases one of the disadvantages without increasing any of the advantages, then we know that it’s too fast. At this point, hurrying has turned into acceleration.
Let’s consider activities that are not unpleasant in and of themselves. In that case getting them over with quickly is not automatically an advantage, as it would be if the task were to carry a scorching hot plate to the table. But we might still wish to hurry (1) because the end result of our work is needed quickly or (2) because we have future business that can’t wait for long. There are no other reasons, however. If both the result of our work and the next order of business can wait, it’s a trap to increase the risk of error and diminish the pleasantness of the work by going even the slightest bit too fast. With nothing pressing, we should take all the time that’s needed to ensure a maximal performance.
Yet we’re often tempted to rush by the sheer magnitude of things to come, even though we derive no benefit from doing so. We wolf down dinner to get to sex. Assuming that the opportunity for sex will not get up and go away, this behavior results only in a diminution of our total pleasure. If a leisurely dinner is worth 5 points on our pleasure scale, then a hurried dinner will earn us less than 5 points. Suppose its value to be 2, and suppose that sex is a 10. Then a leisurely dinner followed by sex is worth 5+10=15, while sex following a hurried dinner gives us only 2+10=12. To be sure, we get the 12 points sooner than the 15. But this is significant only if we have a reason to hurry—for example, if there’s someplace else we have to get to immediately after sex.
Rushing through the activity at hand even though we’re not pressed for time is acceleration of the first kind.
If the present activity can wait, it’s a trap to rush through it even if the next order of business can’t wait. For here we could simply postpone the present project until a more leisurely time. Instead of hurriedly trying to finish a newspaper article before the commercial is over and the TV show begins, we can read it at our leisure when the show is done. In these accelerations of the second kind, there’s no need to rush through what we’re doing because we needn’t be doing it now in the first place.
What possesses us to rush when we are not pressed for time? Significantly, acceleration is always preceded by a divided state of mind. We wouldn’t rush through an innocuous or pleasant task unless we had some other project or condition in mind at the same time. We wolf down our dinner because we’re thinking of the after-dinner sex while we eat, and we rush through the newspaper article because we have an eye on the TV show to come—only one minute left! thirty seconds! twenty! If we had no agenda for the future, we would have no place to rush to. We would abide in the present task and make the best of it.
The unpleasantness of division causes us to resort to various folk remedies whose secondary complications are often as injurious as the original disease.