Category: Concepts

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The Advice Column Paradox

I didn’t invent this term, but I think it’s a really excellent one, so I’m going to share it here. If you have an earlier citation for the use of this phrase, please leave it in the comments!

The Advice Column Paradox: nobody writes into an advice column when things are going well.

The Advice Column Paradox: nobody writes into an advice column when things are going well. When we vent to our friends about our marriages, but don’t share the positive things, they may think things are worse than they are; but sometimes, there just aren’t positive things. (It’s why I always took pains to say “There’s good stuff too, I just don’t need help processing THAT” whenever we had these discussions. I try to be self-aware at least a little bit.)

It is very common to see, on Internet advice boards like r/relationships or r/AmITheAsshole, people complaining in the commenters always jump straight to “omg, divorce!” But what those people miss, I think, is the core of this paradox. If you are writing in to an Internet advice column, it is because something has gone wrong. Something may have gone so very wrong that they are writing in to an anonymous forum to ask for help. There is a strong possibility that they feel ashamed or afraid to ask the other people in their lives for help. The people who say “Modern couples are too quick to divorce” are either not saying that in good faith, or are ignorant of the fact of the Paradox. I don’t have a snappy name for this one; maybe we can call it the “Why So Much Divorce Corollary” or something.

Ultimately, this paradox and the corollary of people being confused by it is an example of selection bias. “You Should Break Up” being given as relationship advice is not overly common, percentage-wise; if half the advice column responses are “Break up!” and 1 in 100 people are writing into an advice column in the first place, then only half a percent of relationships are getting the “you should break up” advice. If you scale that out into the real numbers, it’s even smaller.

So, no: Advice column readers are not “too hasty” to tell people to divorce. And our culture is not somehow “devaluing” marriage by telling someone who is locked out of a bathroom while pregnant, or worse, that they need to leave to protect themself.

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Analogies of Privilege

This post is a set of essays that I have read that explain privilege, and specifically poverty/class privilege, in ways that really make sense to me. I’ve tried to put them in approximately chronological order, but WordPress doesn’t seem to appreciate that.

Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Economic Unfairness (1993)

The theory can be found on the L-Space Wiki. It’s a great illustration of how starting off a little bit ahead can have a compounding effect into the future: buying quality things that last means you don’t have to spend more money on lower-quality things that need frequent replacement.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms – Goodreads link

Being Poor (2005)

I read Scalzi’s “Being Poor” in 2005, after Katrina. It affected me a great deal, and – in a lot of ways – really put me on the road to being the person I am today, with regards to how I look at The Meritocracy and so forth.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

The high cost of poverty: why the poor pay more (2009)

Great article in the Washington Post, from 2009, that really made me stop and think about my assumptions about thrift. You can’t save money by buying in bulk if you can’t afford to buy 64 rolls of toilet paper in the first place. Or if your apartment is too small to store bulk foods/paper products/etc. The article also goes into the nature of time costs for things.

Hard Mode (2012)

Learning about privilege is a hard thing. You really have to work at it, and you really need good analogies for it to make sense.

Some people refer to having privilege as playing life on the Default Mode, whereas people without a given axis of privilege are playing life on Hard Mode. (I’ll see if I can find the essay – got it!) John Scalzi’s Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.

You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.

Of Dogs and Lizards (2010)

An essay that I absolutely adore, Of Dogs and Lizards, uses the old temperature wars as an analogy for privilege/misogyny. “I would like it if X happened, so why wouldn’t you?”

How to explain privilege to a broke white person (2014)

This is a classic essay from the Huffington Post, of all places: Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person. It explores the issues of class, which are often ignored in the superficial discourse we get about racism and other *isms in America. I do not personally subscribe to the Internet Socialist theory (not to be confused with actual thoughtful socialist theory!) that class is the only axis that matters, but a lot of people will use class as a confounding variable or a smokescreen to distract from issues of race and racial privilege; so it’s important to make sure we distinguish which kind of oppression/privilege we are talking about.

Siderea on Solidarity (2019)

I have a few Siderea essays in my list o’ things to put in this blog. One of them belongs here: Flunking Solidarity, or why Americans don’t talk about their salaries.

It is a deep and unquestioned part of American culture that Americans feel entitled to pass judgment on their fellow Americans’ worthiness to receive the most basic of resources.

Poor in Tech (2021)

Poor in Tech, by Meg Elison, is an essay about social class in the weirdly rarefied world of Silicon Valley and the tech industry writ large. There is also a MetaFilter thread about this one.

I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I never got over not having to punch a clock.

Five Stupid Habits (est. 2012?)

The John Cheese essay, The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, is a great look at how our upbringing can shape our behavior – something that is very difficult to break.

This is a problem, because that’s actually a very shitty way to manage a budget. You skip over the great 2-for-1 deal on laundry detergent because you’re not out of laundry detergent yet. It’s kind of opposite of the way we bought food when I was a kid — where you should be stocking up because buying in bulk is cheaper and the stuff is on sale, you wait until you’re scraping the residue off the lid. Then you have to take whatever goddamned price the store gives you that day, because you can’t wash your clothes otherwise.

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With whatever bitter brew you’re drinking

I saw a lot of chatter on Twitter this morning about how Bezos “came from nothing,” and it really got me thinking.

We have a lot of ink spilled, in our society, over the idea of “meritocracy” and such. The idea is that if you work hard, you can have anything you want. “We don’t provide equality of outcome; just equality of opportunity.”

But even that platitude isn’t really true. People who say he “came from nothing” are talking about his working-class parents who worked hard, saved up money, believed in him, and helped him grow his business into a world-consuming empire. And here’s the thing: all those facts are true. They did work hard, all three of them, and they *did* make good decisions. I’m not contesting that. But I think we need to delve a little deeper into the negative space surrounding our view of American Success, because there’s a lot of it.

For a little bit of background on me: My mother’s family has lived in Virginia since the 1700’s. (I won’t say “since time immemorial” because we do remember, thank you very much.) We are the “hey, colonizer” guy’s interlocutors. (I wonder a lot about how our early family interacted with the locals. Allegedly it was friendly. But then, that’s the story we would tell, isn’t it?) For folks who know the difference between hillbilly and redneck, we’d probably be the latter (although I think only a couple of my cousins ID that way).

By contrast, my father’s family came to America from Eastern Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s. His maternal grandfather stayed in Jersey City and scrubbed toilets during the Great Depression (part of our founding mythos), but his paternal grandfather was a coal miner.

I’ve recently started going through a bit of a Mining Song Phase, and I kept feeling like a poseur because my mom’s family never had coal miners – we just weren’t that far west. We’re lowland farmers, and honestly we had it pretty damn easy compared to the folks in the mountains. My mom’s family was less fucked by the Great Depression than my dad’s family was, because at least they always had enough food to eat, because they grew it themselves. (My paternal grandfather had to stuff himself with bananas and drink a gallon of water in order to make weight for the CCC’s, in the same Founding Mythos that we have. He would have starved if he’d stayed at home, but his mom budgeted him some constipating food for that weigh-in.)

But then I remember: We were coal miners. It’s just that I don’t think about the “we” in the Northeast nearly so much as I think about the “we” in the southwest of Virginia.

And then I think about how damn lucky I am that my great-grandfather did, in fact, leave Harlan alive. Even when Harlan was McAdoo. If he’d died in the mines, his family would have been in even more dire straits.

We made good decisions. I’m not going to deny that. But we also had a healthy serving of luck, and I don’t want us to deny that either.

There’s a concept in psychology called the Just World Hypothesis. The idea is that if we make good decisions, then bad things won’t happen to us. I’m sure you can see the appeal of this idea already. But it is also called the Just World Fallacy, because as anyone over the age of 5 is aware, bad things still happen to good people. Believing otherwise is fallacious.

I think it’s natural to over-credit our own efforts, and under-credit the role of luck, in looking at our life outcomes. It makes us feel better. When we’re confronted with people who made good decisions but still had bad things happen to them, we feel bad and try to retcon the situation to convince ourselves that actually, those people made bad decisions. (This is separate from the philosophical tenant that even people who make bad decisions deserve to, e.g., have food to eat; I’m not addressing that idea in this post.) Retconning in this way restores our own sense of security and makes us feel safe again. But that doesn’t make it true.

Who am I trying to reach with this post? I don’t know. Maybe my own psyche. Maybe the world writ large. Maybe my dead ancestors. But for whatever reason, I needed to put it out there. Thank you for reading.

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Silk Ring Theory: comfort in, dump out

A few years back (2013), there was a really excellent opinion column in the LA Times entitled “How not to say the wrong thing.” In it, the authors (Susan Silk and Barry Goldman) describe a system of concentric rings for modeling human relationships and the direction that support should flow in case of a tragedy or difficulty.

I think I started conceptualizing of it as “Silk Ring Theory” because of the URL; looking at the article now, both authors are credited in the byline. But “Silk” just stuck in my head.

In any case, it’s a really excellent essay with good advice on how to support your loved ones without increasing their burdens, while also receiving the support *you* need.

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Emotional and mental labor

I wanted to take a moment to round up the various things I’ve read that explain the problem of emotional labor, or mental labor.

This is very often a gendered problem; but it isn’t always, and we should be careful not to dismiss cases as irrelevant when the genders don’t shake out in the usual way. (In a rare moment of self-awareness, I sometimes refer to myself, in my mom group, as “the useless husband of the marriage.” I’m the one who doesn’t mind little hairs on the sink, toothpaste bits on the mirror, etc.)

The post that made me think about the subject today was https://www.mamamia.com.au/delegate-mental-load/ (2021) – the one about the dog. For full disclosure, I think she’s being really pointlessly stressed about the dog itself – but the point of the overall post is that it’s not about the dog.

Another one that’s a classic in my circles is Fallait Demander, translated into English as You Should Have Asked (2017). It’s told in comic form (and I’m not sure if it has alt-text?) but it’s a very well-told narrative explanation of how this sort of thing tends to happen.

A little before that, a man wrote a good essay explaining it from his side – “She divorced me because I left the dishes in the sink” (2016). As he explains in it, it’s not actually about the proximate causes of the crisis, but rather about everything else that’s going on.

For emotional labor in specific, which is often grouped in with household mental labor but is worth examining separately, The Toast’s “Where’s My Cut?” (2015) is a good read.

On the subject of grouping emotional labor with the mental load: It’s useful to be able to separate these things out and classify them individually, because a given relationship dynamic is likely to have variance from other relationships (cf. the famous Anna Karenina quote). In my example, I’m bad at the mental load of remembering to wash the dishes or how much food we have in the house; my husband is great about those things. But we had a lot of angst a few years back about emotional labor, expectations of how to handle extended family, and the like. Even someone who is good and wonderful in one area can sometimes fall down in another; and I find it helps to give credit for the good parts while still asking firmly for the bad parts to be remedied.

Here in 2023, I’ve been finding some other things that summarize the Mental Load pretty well. This TikTok (and the one it’s linked in from) talks about how Thinking (of what tasks need to be done, etc) is itself a form of labor. “There are a hundred things that need to get done around this house and at any given time I’m thinking about at least six of them. I need to to take six minutes, come up with a list of six things that need to be done, and then go execute four of them.”

I saw this list of links in a Reddit comment, and figured I’d add it here!