Balance Point

A few days ago, I listened to a Freakonomics podcast on commitment devices.  Essentially, a commitment device is a contract devised by your present self to try and keep your future self from doing something.  Think of Odysseus when he had himself tied up to the mast of his ship so he couldn't give into the Sirens or putting an embarrassing alarm on your refrigerator door - both perfect examples.

The example in the podcast seemed a bit extreme.  A middle aged man decided to give up every food, drink, or activity in his life which he thought had a negative impact, cold turkey.  It was a list of thirty-some activities, which seemed to set him up for failure.  His penalty?  If he messed up and his best friend heard about it, he had been instructed to send a $750 check to someone the giver-upper loathed (Oprah).  In the end, he made it, except for accidentally sipping a coffee with creamer in it (milk was on the list).  I'd call that a win, and so did his friend, but in the end he sent the check in out of guilt.  In the process, he lost some weight and made some significant lifestyle changes, but considered his effort a failure.

So, did it work?  Was it a good thing?  Depends - do you judge by means or by ends?

I was talking to a friend in Costa Rica who is currently in the process of temporarily giving something up, and even though he's stopped enjoying the vacancy in his life (a feeling which seems to have worn off after a week or two), he thinks it's been a good thing because he anticipates his future being brighter than his past.

The real question here is the one I posed to my friend last night: are habitual actions like cruise control or a refrigerator?  Imagine you're driving a car down a highway.  You're speeding by about seven miles per hour.  You know you're breaking the law, doing something you shouldn't be doing, but you feel like you aren't harming anyone around you or yourself.  Then, something happens.  Maybe you see a cop or narrowly miss a stray road cone or see a deer jump across the road in front of you.  You realize that maybe you really are enjoying that speed a little too much and knock down the cruise control a few notches (maybe even all the way down to the actual speed limit).

Refrigerators don't work that way.  If you put a glass of water in a 32 degree refrigerator (or 0 if you're a Celsius person), it won't freeze.  You can't just ease off the warmth - you have to create an environment which is actually colder than your target temperature in order to achieve that new state.

The idea that our existence is some compromise or balance between opposing forces seems like a nearly universal human belief.  Conscience and sinful nature, yin and yang, faith and reason, aesthetics and utility, simplicity and complexity, wave and particulate, war and peace, consistency and change itself.  Both members of each pair will always exist because none can exist in the absence of their partner, which means nothing on that list will ever be eradicated.  This is, admittedly, a more pessimistic (and realistic) worldview than I can ever remember holding.  I have always been an idealist, but somewhere between meeting some very different people, succeeding in certain respects, and dramatically failing in others, I believe I have come for the moment to this conclusion.

On a side note, I think this means that trying to eradicate whatever ideology you oppose is a wildly ineffective way to try and change your world for the better.  Focus instead on shifting the balance.  It's better to lovingly allow someone to freely oppose you than to force them to convert to your own opinion (and it typically results in more converts anyway).

As I think about my experience here in Costa Rica and how I may or may not have changed, this distinction seems important.  The analogy isn't perfect - sometimes we do find ourselves in control of a situation to the point where we can just slow down, but sometimes we don't.  Sometimes I think we need to experience something extreme in order to find our balance point.