Category: Concepts

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How do you know what you want?

One of my friends recently wrote on Facebook “how do you know what you want?” and I ended up writing a fairly long response. Posting it here, too.

You know, one of my friends just asked me this too, and I don’t know the answer for sure.

I think part of it was after a young lifetime of being a perfectionist and also a people-pleaser, I had to get good at satisficing or I was going to burn out. Going to progressively more difficult environments (high school to college to a job) meant that I was surrounded by an increasing concentration of people smarter than me, and that was something my ego had to adjust to. But learning that I actually *wasn’t* always the smartest person in the room also freed me from having to always Be The Very Best. I could just be Good Enough, and that was okay too.

So I was able to apply that to my own decisions as well. Is this thing the Absolute Best Option I Could Possibly Choose? Well, maybe, maybe not. But the marginal benefit of obsessing over Relentless Optimization is so stressful to me that I had to Just Pick Something.

And now that I think more about this: I think I cut my teeth on this skill with choosing restaurants with friends as a young adult. I get hangry when I don’t eat (it doesn’t seem to be a disorder, I just have/had a fast metabolism), so when people started dithering about where to go, it meant that I was risking a fainting+nausea spell. So I started doing Executive Decision Making for the whole group, and for the most part it turned out fine. Some people don’t like me telling them what to do, but Oh Well Their Loss.

Like a lot of skills, practicing in small ways helps build up the muscle (literal or metaphorical) for bigger tasks.

Anyway, IDK if this is what you were asking about, but I hope it helps! ❤

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The Rural Idyll Fallacy

A couple years ago I was complaining about people who romanticize The Countryside™️, and coined (?) the term “Rural Idyll Fallacy.”

Basically, it’s that if many people move to an uncrowded rural area, it becomes crowded and loses the charm that drew folks to migrate there.

(As a side note: development needs to be carefully planned! Dense urban development with transit + old town areas continuing to exist is much better than miles and miles of cookie-cutter foam mansions sitting in former cow pastures. A McMansion doesn’t get better if you put it on 2 acres of monocrop fine fescue. Now get off my lawn, I want to grow a forest again.)

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Enough is, in fact, enough: a meditation on Pieces of Flair

Today I was coloring in a bookmark that had the quippy little motivational message, “A Winner is a Dreamer who Never Gives Up.” — Nelson Mandela

“A Winner is a Dreamer who Never Gives Up.”

Nelson Mandela

And it made me think: is that really accurate? No, it’s not. Or, more to the point: it’s incomplete. A winner is a dreamer that never gave up and also scored better than all of the other dreamers who also never gave up.

But that doesn’t make the non-winner any less worthy of respect and admiration!

I have always hated the old “joke” about “What do you call the guy who graduates last in med school? Doctor!” Frankly, I don’t care what my doctor’s rank in a classroom setting 30 years ago was; I care that they know enough to be a doctor. If this person was actually too stupid to be a doctor, they would not have graduated.

Likewise, and I think we’re better at recognizing this side of things, an Olympian who doesn’t win a medal is still a goddamn Olympian. The person who finishes last in a marathon still ran a goddamn marathon. That’s far more than any of the armchair haters will ever accomplish.

Being told you have to be the best just to be good enough is a stupid (and, frankly, toxic) attitude to take. Do the thing. Do it well. Don’t worry about your relative ranking compared to others.

(Bonus note: this is also what I told my fellow new parents when my daughter was a 99th percentile chonker. Everyone has to be somewhere on the percentile chart, and every percentile has to be filled. It’s just the pigeonhole principle. It’s not a referendum on the quality of your baby.)

The bookmark. Is this a Mandela Mandala?
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Romney Poor

A few years ago, I remember the Romney family getting in hot water rhetorically speaking because one of them (I think it was Ann?) said something very tone-deaf about financial difficulties. It was along the lines of “Yes, we too have known poverty. Why, one time during graduate school, we had to sell some stock to make ends meet!”

I think about this a lot, when I see finance getting talked about on the Internet. If you are well off, there’s a certain level of desperation that you will simply never know, because you have enough cushion/backup (whether that’s from your own savings, family support, or savings you have BECAUSE of earlier family support).

One of my friends and I have a running gag about the very un-self-aware articles that are sometimes published in places like Business Insider. You probably know the drill: “This plucky young lad paid off $120,000 of student loans before age 30! What an inspiration!” Then you read the article and (a) there is no budget presented, and (b) the most mathematically significant “tip” offered is something like “He chose to live with his parents to save money on rent” (good! If you can swing it!) “and also rented out the Harlem condominium his grandmother gifted him upon graduation for $4000 a month of extra income! What a hustle grindset, am I right?” (Laughably out of reach for almost everyone in the country).

The thing that makes these puff pieces laughable is the lack of a written budget and the lack of comparability to even the median American, let alone the lower quartiles.

Someone recently shared this article in a space I’m in, and people immediately started talking shit about the interviewee. At first glance, I agreed – if he’s got very wealthy parents, that’s why, right?

But then I actually clicked on it, and there were a couple features that made this different from the normal puff pieces.

  1. The very first sentence of the article acknowledged his privilege in growing up wealthy. There’s a lot of benefit that you get from even just turning 21 with a net worth of Zero, let alone a positive net worth, that can be hard to articulate. Additionally, being surrounded by people who are making good financial decisions (regardless of how easy it is to make them) helps build the right attitudes about money and savings. It’s why the whole “role model” thing is so important. It’s why mentoring is important.
  2. The article actually included his monthly budget and how he got there. $2000/mo for a studio he shares with a partner is actually not completely insane, even in DC. Would everyone want or be able to live like that? Of course not. But this isn’t “live in genteel poverty in your father’s estate’s carriage house while renting out your condominium for pocket change” nonsense.
  3. 82k is actually a decent income in this area, especially if you’re half of a two-income household. And saving 20% of that means he’s effectively living on 65k, which – while not great – is still pretty okay.

I would have preferred slightly more acknowledgement that not everyone can join the military (due to medical restrictions and so forth) but overall? It’s actually a pretty good article.

Anyway. I was just having some feelings about that, and it made me think of the “Romney poor” concept at the same time.

It’s important to keep things in perspective, no matter what stage of the journey you’re on.

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Other people’s thoughts

I think this is a really good explanation of why it’s important to not assume what other people are thinking.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL9yBL_NJzc/

I used to have a friend who would get SO CONVINCED that other people hated her, based on various indicators. As an outsider to her interactions, my perspective would generally range from “hmm, I don’t think they actually thought anything about you at all” to “I think they were actually sympathetic” to “they’re just in a bad mood, but that doesn’t mean they hate you.”

It’s much better and less exhausting to not assume everyone hates you.