In one of the last chapters of one of the books I’ve been reading, Meditations for Mortals, the author Oliver Burkeman indicates
When it comes to confronting the myriad problems large and small that life throws at us, we have a standard operating procedure for how we try to respond, one so fundamental it can be hard to perceive that it even is a procedure, or that there might be any alternative. It goes like this: first, you try to work out exactly what the hell is going on. Then and only then, once you’re confident you’ve got a handle on the situation, you take action.
However, Burkeman points out, this is only one strategy. It is a modern illusion that we should first attempt to understand how a system operates before taking any action.
Imagine how things might have felt for a medieval peasant – or, really, for anyone at any time in history when people experienced life as radically more uncertain than today, yet were perhaps more clear-headed on the topic of human limitation.
While I have only a passing understanding of the work of Nobel laureate Herb Simon, I wonder whether Burkeman is suggesting that we moderns should make decisions about our actions in a satisficing way. That is, we should take action once we discover a sufficiently satisfactory solution, because when we delay a decision we could incur costs such as lost time, wasted resources, divided attention, and lost opportunities .
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I am someone who can err on the side of analysis paralysis. For example, over the past day I’ve been considering whether to buy a travel backpack on a big discount that I saw last night at REI. Because it’s a Re/Supply item, it’s non-returnable, so I’ve been thinking about how much it costs, where I would store it, how often and under what circumstances I would use it, alternative items that I already own or could instead purchase that serve the same function, and so forth. While this process entertains me to a certain extent, there is an opportunity cost to my time. Likewise, I have been thinking about buying a MagSafe-compatible power bank for my upcoming trip to Mexico, because too often on last month’s trip to Japan I found myself constrained when the battery on my smartphone was low. But for me this involves reading reviews, comparing dimensions and weights, learning about battery capacities, etc.
I think both Burkeman and Simon would suggest that I should lower my mental threshold for how much information and consideration I need to do before making these purchases.
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On the other hand, there is the question of how to know whether a proposed action is sufficiently satisfactory. In the case of my purchasing an item like a backpack or power bank, the stakes are not that high for each individual item. But there are other very real human situations where we would be better off to take more time rather than make a decision hastily. For example, Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire with fascist tendencies who holds the imprimatur of Donald Trump, is dismantling entire government agencies and threatening to destroy more. He is operating under the strategy of breaking things, with the idea that maybe they will get patched up afterwards. You can get away with this in a company, where you are responsible only to a board and shareholders, and failure means bankruptcy. But to act in such a hasty manner is a foolish way to run a country, especially the world’s most powerful country, where breaking things means endangering the safety and livelihood of citizens as well as people around the globe.
It also takes time to know people as individuals, to avoid stereotyping and prejudice. All of us use mental shortcuts when we meet someone, to understand how to conduct ourselves in their presence and to predict how they will behave. But we should have some awareness of these cognitive biases. Furthermore, these heuristics should fade as we become better acquainted with a person.
Both in magnitude and in kind, these two circumstances — running a functioning government and conducting interpersonal relations — are vastly different than individual purchase decisions. And both of them illustrate an inadequate threshold for satisficing. Herb Simon also used the term bounded rationality. Musk’s decisions are rational in the sense of satisfying his and Trump’s political grudges and their own economic interests. For many people, their actions do not seem to be about government efficiency, but rather about settling personal scores.
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Originally this was going to be a blog entry on taking time in an entirely different realm — taking time to make food. After reheating pieces of Domino’s pizza in an air fryer and on the stove, I realized that the ingredients and arrangement Domino’s uses are good enough quality, it’s just that the dough was simply undercooked. The bottom of the pan pizza wasn’t crispy enough on arrival, but with additional heating time it gained a crispy crunch, and the middle of the crust lost its raw chewiness. I guess the Domino’s model has always been to make things fast (“30 minutes or it’s free”), to satisfy customers’ hunger and to maximize the throughput of their ovens. However, the outcome is a less satisfactory product.
Some things do take time.