Rules are for Lazy People

[photo by madmolecule]

Okay, that was a cheap shot so let me clarify what I’m talking about. Laziness does not mean ignorant or gullible or any other pejorative descriptor attacking a person’s mental abilities. I am using the word lazy to mean “a state of conserving effort or energy.”

I was thinking about this as I was loading the washing machine. I was doing my laundry because I had finally run out of underwear. This led me to think about human psychology.

And when I think about human psychology there’s a phrase which keeps going through my head; people are lazy. That’s my shorthand way of remembering what is probably more diplomatically stated as; humans are efficient energy conservators.

We are always looking for ways to do less work, expend less effort and at the same time make our lives more comfortable. The washing machine is a perfect example of this. The modern washing machine allows us to get our clothes cleaner than we ever have in history, faster than we ever have in the past while expending less energy accomplishing the task than at any previous time.

And there are so many more examples. Automobiles, airplanes, microwaves, mobile phones…the list is practically endless.

Still, as David Benatar pointed out when I visited with him a few weeks ago, we are a lot closer to experiencing the worst things we can imagine than we are to experiencing the best. We can always find ways to improve our lives and do even less work.

So we have a long way to go before reaching utopia but we’re making efforts daily through the use of technology and laziness.

Avoiding mental work

Effort is expended in all kinds of ways, mentally as well as physically. While we’re probably most used to seeing people avoid physical effort, the same tendencies apply to mental work as well. We will avoid it whenever possible.

This is because mental work is hard. Anyone who’s tried to understand Stephen Hawking knows this. But even thinking about things more mundane than the vastness of the universe takes its toll.

Thinking hard is one reason couples fight during home construction and remodeling projects; the stress of making the innumerable important decisions weakens their mental capacity to tolerate each other’s imperfections.

Have you ever looked at a whole aisle of different kinds of shampoo and inwardly groaned at all the choices?

One of the ways we’ve been able to avoid mental work is to make rules. We have to think hard about some things to reach a decision and come up with the best possible course of action. We don’t want to do that every time so we develop a rule. The next time we’re in that situation, or a similar one, we can simply apply the rule we’ve previously developed. Easy peasy.

So after we’ve decided on a brand and formulation of shampoo we are satisfied with we make it a rule to always get that kind of shampoo and shopping is less mentally taxing.

The mental loophole for rules

If you listened closely to when we apply rules, you heard an important loophole; “the next time we’re in that situation, or a similar one, we can simply apply the rule we’ve previously developed.” What situation qualifies as similar enough to allow us the luxury of not having to think about the question all over again?

Well, if you’ve been following my train of thought you know exactly where this is headed. Our mental laziness kicks in again—I mean our energy conservation mode—and we don’t think about when to apply it. We apply the rule wherever we can.

This is why we see people making some really poor decisions; they are following mental rules which are outdated or inappropriate to the situation.

Take a guy who is going to make his first major purchase—let’s say it’s a car. He thinks about a bunch of things: will it meet his transportation needs, will it last a long time, will it get good gas mileage and will the girls think it’s sexy?

And after all that he has to confront the financing. It’s a lot of paperwork, a lot of figures, more mental effort. What does it all mean? After struggling to make the best decision possible he comes up with a rule to avoid such work in the future. As long as I can afford the monthly payments, I’ll get it.

Now let’s say this same guy is offered an adjustable rate mortgage on a house he wants to buy in Las Vegas…