It sucks to have principles
That is...precisely the point
My partner and I have been trying to deal with the tension of getting emotionally derailed by tough conversations. On the one hand, if you try to wait until there is a “good moment” to have an emotionally thorny discussion, it will never happen. On the other hand, if you try to hash something out right then and there, it has a tendency to go pear-shaped. You’ll derail whatever you were planning to do that evening, everyone ends up resentful abut the waste of time, and you don’t even resolve the actual problem.1
What I suggested was that we start time-boxing this stuff, which is a nice-sounding workplace-productivity-hack kind of thing that sounds very smart on paper. In actuality, you try telling someone, right after they’ve just spilled their most vulnerable fears, that you need to cut this short in order to finish a Kaggle exercise. It generally doesn’t go well.
As someone who scores 0 on agreeableness and conscientiousness on the Big 5, I often fuck up when dealing with folks who have people-pleasing tendencies. I assume they will just speak up if something is wrong. I assume that if I say or do something stupid, or hurtful, or just plain wrong, they will tell me to my face. I also believe that boundaries are important, and I get very indignant when other people don’t respect them.2
So, like many workplaces and friends and partners love to do, I whipped out that familiar abdication of responsibility: “Well, you need to tell me when something is bothering you, because I can’t read your mind.” Sounds morally watertight, doesn’t it? If you don’t say anything, then it’s your problem. How convenient for me.
Yet when I woke up in a mood of moods this morning with zero serotonin, and my partner asked to put a cap on the whole “being supportive” thing in order to get us to the gym, I seethed. I had to begrudgingly ask myself what was worse: having my feelings shoved aside, or being a hypocrite? Wasn’t he just asserting a boundary? In a way that my feelings found awfully annoying at the time?
Here’s a shitty truth. More of my “principles” than I’d care to admit are a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of thing. Post-hoc constructions, cherry-picked to fit the behaviours that happened to be convenient and gratifying at that moment in time.3
If people are having trouble being assertive around you, it’s not because you are strong and they are wimps. They’re just responding to past experience that when they try to assert themselves, things tend to get worse4 than if they had just said nothing at all.
None of this was to say that it was easy to check myself, because I sometimes have the emotional regulatory skills of a 5 year old. (Heck, I’m definitely still a little bit mad.) But the whole point of being a person who tries to operate on principle is that others can expect you to do the thing, even when it’s painful, or difficult, or just plain inconvenient.
Otherwise, you’re just another liability to be managed. And then you might as well be dead, because that makes you a transaction to negotiate. A risk to insure against. A thing, not a person.
Only the hard shit counts
I have repeatedly encountered the idea in Buddhism5 that you don’t really get any credit for being good to the people that you like, because it’s easy to like them. Likewise, principles are much like promises: keeping them when it’s convenient to do so doesn’t count for much.6 One of my favourite definitions of faith comes from C. S. Lewis, who wrote:
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
-Mere Christianity, p. 77
And Lewis has no illusions about just how bloody hard this is7:
But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true.
-p. 76
Sacrifices are hard to make - that’s why they are sacrifices
The keeping of a principle is always the sacrifice of something. You do the hard, shitty, difficult thing of giving up something awfully tempting in the moment (i.e. throwing a temper tantrum at hearing something you dislike) in exchange for some better long term outcome (i.e. knowing that others will feel comfortable telling you the truth).8
The sacrifices that count are really fucking hard. I am, by definition, not very good at making them. And that’s precisely the point.9
#141
Or, as Kanye put it, it’s that “fuck up your whole afternoon shit”
My morally outraged brain starts spitting out all kinds of judgements. You toxic, selfish, disrespectful person! How dare you step on my bOunDariEsss. I am defending something sacred. I am a bastion of viRtuE
The time horizon of that gratification is often alarmingly short. A temper tantrum is the ultimate example: it’s a burst of immediate emotional release and expression, at the expense of unmeasurable relational damage. It also severely decreases the likelihood that people will be honest around you ever again.
Examples of how things can get worse include: being yelled at. Being told that the thing will get fixed, and then feeling the disappointment of being lied to. Being told that your feelings and needs are dumb / unreasonable / wrong. Being called a shitty / selfish / inconsiderate person. Being silently and passive-aggressively seethed at. Being fired. The list goes on.
I’m mentally mashing up Thich Nhat Hanh’s philosophy on love and the Blue Cliff Record Zen koan about Emperor Wu and Bodhidharma, but it’s basically this: you don’t really get any credit for being good to people when you love them, or when you stand to gain something from treating them well. You’re just doing the obvious, advantageous thing that you would have done anyway. Apparently, true merit lies in your ability to love a person despite being furious at them and wanting to punch them in the face.
“The nature of promises, Linda, is that they remain immune to changing circumstances”:
In this the rest of this passage, Lewis also makes the very important distinction between fighting an impulse that overrides reason, vs genuinely entertaining the idea that a principle might be….wrong. Emphasis mine:
And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.
-Mere Christianity, p. 77
Or you give up something that would be individually advantageous because a society where everybody does that shitty thing would be a hellhole. The complication with this one is that you can’t guarantee the rest of society’s participation, and then your individual action feels pointless. This is why people don’t recycle, or care about climate change, or get worn out on a team that doesn’t give a fuck.
Lewis knew this too:
Very well, then. The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues is that we fail.
And one of Christianity’s cool pieces of mental jiujitsu is that this failure is nothing to be desolate about. In fact, it means that no matter how badly you fuck up, it’s both ok and not ok. Ok in the sense that you were just doing that whole being-flawed thing that all humans do. Not ok in the sense that the fuckup shows you exactly why you really, really ought to do better next time.