the virtues of shortsightedness and impulsivity
on loving and honoring your current self as much as your future self
Sometimes someone will say something, often without much thought at all, that subtly changes the way you live forever.
These moments are so well hidden inside the mundanity of everyday life that years have to pass before you recognize how much power secretly lived inside that single scene.
—
At around nineteen, I briefly lived with my boyfriend and his friend Carl in a crappy basement apartment facing a Jack in the Box parking lot.
Carl was a few years older than us and had previously been living out of his car. He was a bassist in a local indie band, didn’t otherwise have a job, refused to wear shoes anywhere he went, and had the worst hygiene practices I’ve perhaps ever encountered in another human being. Regardless, he was actually quite clever.
I was in college at the time and didn’t have classes on Fridays, and well, he didn’t have a job. So, throughout the period of a few months we’d spend each Friday doing drugs and talking all day. I remember our conversations were highly philosophical and filled with abstraction. And, I remember I loved talking with him. But I do not remember many of the specifics.
Looking back, I could tell that this period had mattered extra. There have been other times that have mattered just as much, several that mattered much more, but this one definitely possessed the special “mattering” juice and feels worth writing about.
I have come to believe that what I am perhaps tracking here is the degree to which something during that time embedded itself in my psyche.
—
At some point Carl started dating this girl. I don’t mean to speak ill of her, she was really just a sweet lost soul. But she was quite obviously mentally unstable. She had severed ties with her family, had no money, and had a severe cocaine addiction. I believe when they first started seeing each other, she’d just gotten out of the hospital after her most recent overdose and was living on her friend’s couch. She needed to leave her friend’s place soon, and Carl decided he wanted to move her into our place.
I think at some point we intervened. Early into the conversation, he said something like:
“Of course it’s going to end poorly. Do you think I’m stupid? I’ll just deal with it once it does.”
He brought up some points:
She desperately needed help, and he wanted to help.
Not helping her would likely lead to a breakup, a thing he really didn’t want at the moment.
He knew where his limits were and wasn’t going to allow himself to get pulled into anything particularly awful or compromising.
In the most likely outcome, dealing with a breakup is a relatively standard procedure as far as bad things go.
And, in the worst case scenario, she would almost certainly not be in a worse situation than she was in right now.
She moved in, she had time to sober up (at least temporarily) and found a job, they had a relatively dramatic breakup, she found somewhere else to go and moved out.
He got to have a really weird “I told you so”.
—
I think about this story often. I do think that I, and most of the people I know end up falling into a strange failure mode of never taking the locally optimal path when it has a predictable bad outcome, without even pausing to check how bad the bad outcome is relative to how valuable being shortsighted might be.
—
If you’ve done any amount of inner work, specifically IFS, you’ve probably been exposed to the idea of having your different desires be in communication with each other.
To give a concrete example: You are often finding yourself super tired during the day and regretting going to sleep so late, only to find yourself doing it again repeatedly. It is likely that the part of you that wants to feel energized is not in communication with the part of you that wants to go to sleep late.
Getting these parts in communication will not always lead you to making the decision you thought you wanted to make going in. But rather, even if you aren’t able to fix what seemed like that problem, just being able to actively (as opposed to passively) choose staying up over feeling energized the next day provides a bunch of relief.
Basically, it is worth thinking about the decisions you are making that are causing you problems later on without creating an adversarial relationship to your short-term desires.
—
I think people tend to have more of a blindspot when it comes to doing this with social risks, and that it leads to a bunch of confusion around why they keep on ending up in undesirable circumstances.
The most obvious example that comes to mind is people who find themselves repeatedly entering relationships with individuals who have personality disorders.
In general, I think that people who find themselves in such relationships are really into the closeness and intensity that dating people with personality disorders brings. I think in general, if they aren’t vilifying the other people, they try to approach talking to themselves about the pattern while vilifying their desire. And, I don’t think it’s particularly useful to have a conversation in which the prerequisite upon entering it is that you abandon something as load-bearing as “your desire to experience intensity in love”.
Exposure to Carl and the way he lived life has had loud echoes inside my mind. I think it’s fascinating how people and moments can end up living inside you in this way, often without you really noticing. Some of my best decisions have had predictably bad outcomes.