September 20, 2007
View Comments | Post CommentHidden benefits
The more life experience I acquire, the more I learn to distrust my own instincts about when I should be embarrassed, when I should be pissed off, when I should feel like my time has been wasted, etc. Increasingly, I'm learning to see the hidden costs and the hidden benefits of the things that happen to me. Many of these costs and benefits are social, some are psychological.
For instance, whenever something really shitty happens to us, it's almost always good for a story. And if it's something truly shitty, and if we're decent storytellers, we might end up telling that story tons of times, and getting a bunch of laughs each time. In that way, the cost of some tragedy is never really as great as it seems initially, because we get all sorts of benefits out of telling the story of the tragedy. It's why self-deprecation usually works so well. What one loses in tearing down some aspect of one's public image, one gains in the perception that one is comfortable with oneself and one's faults.
The recent example that brought this to mind was my friend Eric's story of losing his cell phone. He recounted it to me with some flourish:
Eric: yeah im a dope
Eric: i was sitting on a bench out on the pier
Eric: and the phone rang
Eric: I reached into my pocket
Eric: it slipped out
Eric: bounced once
Eric: and then SPLOOSH
For all the times he'll tell that story in his life, each time relishing the laughs, perfecting the timing, by the end, it might just be worth having to get a new cell phone! Maybe not, but those benefits certainly diminish the overall negative effects that would otherwise arise from the occurrence.
Similarly, for all my three years as an upperclassman in college at Vandy, I never locked my dorm room door. There were occasional thefts that happened, non-students walking the halls of our dorm, and the shady friends of Gretchen always around, but still, I left my door unlocked. Why? Because I guessed that if I left my door unlocked all through college, I was likely to get robbed approximately once. The only things I had of value were my wallet and my camera. In analyzing the risks, of course I realized that losing my wallet and my camera would be pretty crappy. On the other hand, not having to lock and unlock my door would save me, in the aggregate, lots of hassle. So much so that I determined the benefits of leaving my door unlocked for three years outweighed the costs of having my shit stolen once. It turned out that I never had anything stolen, but even if I had, it would have been worth it.
And there are all sorts of things like that; hidden costs and benefits that we don't take into account. So next time something pisses you off, realize that there are probably some pretty good things about it. You may just not recognize them at first.
Posted at September 20, 2007 3:11 PM | Comments (1)
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This reminds me of a few stories from my Presentation Skills for Lawyers. One was a guy who told us the story of his first car a VW that he lost to a flood. The point of his story was that material possessions are just that--but it is the memories that last. Another story was about a girl who had started monetizing everything--to the point that she was doing a cost benefit analysis of the train ticket to visit a friend's parent's funeral. In the end she went and it made her, as well her friend feel really good. Her moral--you can't assign monetary value to everything.
-Z-
Posted by: Zeeshan at September 26, 2007 6:35 PM
