my guess is more common is “bring it up, but the output is ‘man I am too exhausted to negotiate this’, and then there’s nowhere for the conversation to go.”
This is a problem I’ve run into in other areas before. Some parts of my thoughts around it:
Some people cannot handle stress, have little mental resilience, etc. In situations like this, their inability to cope will by-default impose costs on those around them.
It is often worth simply avoiding people-who-cannot-handle-stress for exactly this reason, unless they’re bringing some large counterbalancing value to the table.
In an emergency, definitely try to keep such people out of the loop if possible. They will make things strictly worse.
If you are that sort of person, then you should be aware that you are probably doing this sometimes, and getting better at handling stressful things will make more people more willing to be around you. At the very least, learn to recognize the feelings and stay out of the way.
Dealing with lots of fear/exhaustion/trauma: best-case, you’ve figured out ahead of time which people respond badly to mental stress. Those people have developed at least some ability to recognize the warning signs in themselves, and know that they should usually defer to others and try to stay out of the way.
Saying “I am too exhausted to deal with this” is fine, once or twice. If you are too exhausted to deal with important things most of the time, then that is a rather big problem. At the bare minimum, defer/get out of the way so people who are not too exhausted can make progress.
Obviously this is… not a very kind way of framing things. But it is both true and important.
I think that’s a totally valid way of framing things for an org. I think it’s valid as part-of-the-frame for group houses. But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live. “Alice gets out of the way so that Bob and Cameron can make progress” isn’t really workable when “progress” is built out of “Alice and Bob and Cameron having a healthy life together.”
My frame on this is option #1 above, where “refactor into smaller houses so you can have fewer stakeholders”, which goes along with “and people self-sort into groups of houses where people with similar preferences can have more agency over their lives.”
There was some intrinsic shittiness to the situation where a major thing early on is “well, we have a bunch of people living together, who weren’t really filtered for ‘How Well Do They Cope With Crisis Together?’, and it’s probably better if some of them leave, but being forced to leave your home suddenly is among the more stressful things that can happen to a person. So I see the key question as “how do negotiate who leaves, or, how people decide to stay together and what new norms they create, in a way that is fair.”
But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live.
I think the problem is a bit harder than this. Even if you get a bunch of “can’t deal with it” people together in one house, that house still ends up in a not-great place. They maybe don’t block other people, so that’s a plus, but it still sucks for them.
The bottom line here is, if someone does not have the mental capacity to deal with a problem themselves, then the only way to get a good solution is to outsource the thinking/deciding to someone else.
This feels like it’s missing something important to me. I can say the object level things that feel off, but suspect this is more of a frame disagreement situation (which I expect to be hard).
On the straightforward, factual level:
I think how well people can deal things is very contingent on their environment. In a world where they are constantly under pressure from a bunch of people with varying degrees of distrust, I think it can be really hard to deal with things. If they’re in an environment where they more or less get to directly control their life, I expect them to fare much better. Both because they object-level get to live in ways that are good for them, and also because having self-directed-efficacy is good for people even if they don’t get to use it to live exactly how they want.
When I imagine people splitting into sub-houses, I’m not imagining everyone splitting up based purely on how well they handle stress. I’m also imagining them splitting up based on what other things they actually want, and what style of stress management they prefer. i.e.
...do they prefer staying in their original home?
...do they prefer long walks in nature?
...do they prefer easy access to outdoor walks, or indoor hangouts, without other in person friends? Or are videocalls a good enough way to be social? Do they even care about being social?
...do they really want to remain in a city where they have lots of social or professional connections?
People vary on a lot of axes, and they form subgroups that enable each subgroup to thrive without as many competing access needs.
And then there’s the fact that smaller groups just requires less negotiation, period.
I agree that this a dimension along which things can improve orthogonal to stress-capacity, and if improvement along this dimension reduces stress-level enough, the original problem can go away to a large extent.
Also… just because you’re dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn’t, doesn’t mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.
Also… it seems really unreasonable to say “if you can’t handle 10 hours of grueling negotiations about what COVID precautions to take, you’re weak and I need to cut you out of my life and/or take away decisionmaking power from you during times of stress.” I would guess that, uhh, most people are weak by that definition.
That link offers a good analogy for some situations which are not this situation. There are parts of society whose primary role is to help people through tough times, just as an umbrella’s primary role is to keep one dry in the rain. It is entirely unfair to call people “a burden” for using mechanisms which are there for that purpose.
By default, most relationships are not like this. People have their own lives to live. Imposing a year of strict lockdown on my roommates because I cannot handle a day of negotiations would not be fair to my roommates. They are not an umbrella whose purpose is to keep me dry of rain.
(And it’s not just imposing a burden on the roommates! Subjecting oneself to a year of strict lockdown, to avoid a day or even a week of hard/stressful thinking and negotiating, is not a good tradeoff. It’s a tradeoff which clearly reflects stress-impaired judgement. If I can’t handle the problem, outsourcing decision-making isn’t just good for those around me, it’s good for me too.)
Also… just because you’re dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn’t, doesn’t mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.
This I definitely agree with, and I definitely am not saying that someone who cannot deal with the stress of thinking through a group problem should just defer to whoever’s most insistent. There are degrees of freedom in who to defer to. Deferring to norms of some broader group (e.g. general social norms) is one option, for instance. When one’s thinking/judgement is sufficiently impaired that better-than-typical results are unlikely, deferring to what everyone else does is a decent way to at least get typical results.
By default, most relationships are not like this. People have their own lives to live. Imposing a year of strict lockdown on my roommates because I cannot handle a day of negotiations would not be fair to my roommates. They are not an umbrella whose purpose is to keep me dry of rain.
I think a major disconnect between your outlook here, and me (and I assume maia’s) outlook is… while it’s true that most relationships are not about being umbrellas to keep you dry, friendships are to some degree that, and housemates are disproportionately friendships.
They don’t have to be, and some people have different ways of conceptualizing friendship. But… basically insofar as I have roommates I’m not friends with, I think I’m making a mistake, or doing a temporary thing I hope will change. (Because: why would you want to live with people who you aren’t also cultivating some longterm relationship with? It’s a huge lost opportunity)
I think friendship is complicated. And, it’s certainly the case that I don’t want to subject my friends to a year of unnecessary precautions. (It’s my responsibility as a friend to try not to do that, and if I can’t not do that, get help minimizing the damage). But, yes, my friendships also explicitly come with my responsibility to help make sure they are okay when they are dealing with tough times, and to not drop people when they become inconvenient.
(If I was housemates with a friend who it turned out I was incompatible with during a crisis, I’d consider my goal to be to somehow refactor our living arrangement such that we were not imposing those costs on each other, so that I could continue to help them and be their friend from a position of slack and security. This might include helping them process their feelings and getting intellectually oriented, or renting temporary airBnBs while we sort things out, or each moving out)
(And it’s not just imposing a burden on the roommates! Subjecting oneself to a year of strict lockdown, to avoid a day or even a week of hard/stressful thinking and negotiating, is not a good tradeoff. It’s a tradeoff which clearly reflects stress-impaired judgement. If I can’t handle the problem, outsourcing decision-making isn’t just good for those around me, it’s good for me too.)
This seems to be assuming “it’s possible to make outsource decisions in this way”, which just seems mostly false to me. You can outsource these decisions by giving up on your agency, but I think that’s a really big deal that would probably mostly make things worse.
I think people essentially have a responsibility to make sure they have enough slack, so that they don’t burden each other unnecessarily. i.e don’t pursue strategies that’ll reliably make you constantly need help from people around you, if other strategies are available. This includes noting how easily stressed out you are, and accounting for it. But, the thing is that covid was just a huge slack cost that was overdetermined to overwhelm many people’s usual slack buffer.
I think it’d probably have been a mistake to be maintaining enough slack for covid not to fuck you* up (that’d mean you’re just leaving value on the table most of the time. You can’t be prepared for every single type of emergency that might come up. I think people should maintain enough slack to weather, like, 3 minor emergencies coming up in a given week without having to dip into reserves, and covid just continuously soaked up more than that allocation each week, for months on end)
*for many values of ‘you’. Obviously some people vary here.
You can outsource these decisions by giving up on your agency, but I think that’s a really big deal that would probably mostly make things worse.
A pretty key piece of my thinking here is: if I emotionally cannot handle a decision, then “don’t give up my agency” is not an option. My agency is already basically gone at that point. If I am not emotionally capable of choosing between at least two different decisions (e.g. engage in a long negotiation to change circumstances or keep going with status quo), then for agency-analysis purposes, I am a rock with my already-chosen decision written on it.
This is why we have things like power of attorney and living wills. At some point, there is no meaningful agency left to retain. The first-best option (i.e. retaining agency) is already gone, and it’s time to move on to next-best.
(John and I just chatted offline, and a point of confusion we resolved was that I thought John was saying something like “the majority people in the house who are able to do thinking better should take over the thinking for the people who are too overwhelmed to think”, but the thing he meant was more like* “the people who are having trouble thinking should proactively find a person to be their lawyer, and/or help them think. Their “lawyer” should be whoever they trust most to help them.” Which is a pretty different frame.
I happen to not think this would have worked very well – I think a key problem was that everyone was overwhelmed at once, so there was nobody you trusted to be your lawyer who actually had bandwidth to do so. But, this is more of a straightforward factual constraint than a deep disagreement. I agree that looking for people to help you think, and/or represent you at house meetings, is a useful approach in some cases)
*I’m not 100% sure I represented his viewpoint well here.
Also… it seems really unreasonable to say “if you can’t handle 10 hours of grueling negotiations about what COVID precautions to take, you’re weak and I need to cut you out of my life and/or take away decisionmaking power from you during times of stress.” I would guess that, uhh, most people are weak by that definition.
To be clear, I do indeed think we have the luxury to exclude most people from our lives. Indeed any rule that doesn’t exclude 90%+ of people from your life to a very large degree seems far too lax to me.
Also, 10 hours really doesn’t seem that much over the course of a pandemic, so I do think the above holds for me. It just seems really really crucial to maintain coordination ability in crises, and this will require some harsh decisions.
This is a problem I’ve run into in other areas before. Some parts of my thoughts around it:
Some people cannot handle stress, have little mental resilience, etc. In situations like this, their inability to cope will by-default impose costs on those around them.
It is often worth simply avoiding people-who-cannot-handle-stress for exactly this reason, unless they’re bringing some large counterbalancing value to the table.
In an emergency, definitely try to keep such people out of the loop if possible. They will make things strictly worse.
If you are that sort of person, then you should be aware that you are probably doing this sometimes, and getting better at handling stressful things will make more people more willing to be around you. At the very least, learn to recognize the feelings and stay out of the way.
Dealing with lots of fear/exhaustion/trauma: best-case, you’ve figured out ahead of time which people respond badly to mental stress. Those people have developed at least some ability to recognize the warning signs in themselves, and know that they should usually defer to others and try to stay out of the way.
Saying “I am too exhausted to deal with this” is fine, once or twice. If you are too exhausted to deal with important things most of the time, then that is a rather big problem. At the bare minimum, defer/get out of the way so people who are not too exhausted can make progress.
Obviously this is… not a very kind way of framing things. But it is both true and important.
I think that’s a totally valid way of framing things for an org. I think it’s valid as part-of-the-frame for group houses. But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live. “Alice gets out of the way so that Bob and Cameron can make progress” isn’t really workable when “progress” is built out of “Alice and Bob and Cameron having a healthy life together.”
My frame on this is option #1 above, where “refactor into smaller houses so you can have fewer stakeholders”, which goes along with “and people self-sort into groups of houses where people with similar preferences can have more agency over their lives.”
There was some intrinsic shittiness to the situation where a major thing early on is “well, we have a bunch of people living together, who weren’t really filtered for ‘How Well Do They Cope With Crisis Together?’, and it’s probably better if some of them leave, but being forced to leave your home suddenly is among the more stressful things that can happen to a person. So I see the key question as “how do negotiate who leaves, or, how people decide to stay together and what new norms they create, in a way that is fair.”
I think the problem is a bit harder than this. Even if you get a bunch of “can’t deal with it” people together in one house, that house still ends up in a not-great place. They maybe don’t block other people, so that’s a plus, but it still sucks for them.
The bottom line here is, if someone does not have the mental capacity to deal with a problem themselves, then the only way to get a good solution is to outsource the thinking/deciding to someone else.
This feels like it’s missing something important to me. I can say the object level things that feel off, but suspect this is more of a frame disagreement situation (which I expect to be hard).
On the straightforward, factual level:
I think how well people can deal things is very contingent on their environment. In a world where they are constantly under pressure from a bunch of people with varying degrees of distrust, I think it can be really hard to deal with things. If they’re in an environment where they more or less get to directly control their life, I expect them to fare much better. Both because they object-level get to live in ways that are good for them, and also because having self-directed-efficacy is good for people even if they don’t get to use it to live exactly how they want.
When I imagine people splitting into sub-houses, I’m not imagining everyone splitting up based purely on how well they handle stress. I’m also imagining them splitting up based on what other things they actually want, and what style of stress management they prefer. i.e.
...do they prefer staying in their original home?
...do they prefer long walks in nature?
...do they prefer easy access to outdoor walks, or indoor hangouts, without other in person friends? Or are videocalls a good enough way to be social? Do they even care about being social?
...do they really want to remain in a city where they have lots of social or professional connections?
People vary on a lot of axes, and they form subgroups that enable each subgroup to thrive without as many competing access needs.
And then there’s the fact that smaller groups just requires less negotiation, period.
I agree that this a dimension along which things can improve orthogonal to stress-capacity, and if improvement along this dimension reduces stress-level enough, the original problem can go away to a large extent.
This post really bothered me. I think perhaps the best way to sum it up is this old post of Kelsey’s: https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/99440932816/saying-you-are-a-burden-on-society-is-just-such
Also… just because you’re dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn’t, doesn’t mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.
Also… it seems really unreasonable to say “if you can’t handle 10 hours of grueling negotiations about what COVID precautions to take, you’re weak and I need to cut you out of my life and/or take away decisionmaking power from you during times of stress.” I would guess that, uhh, most people are weak by that definition.
That link offers a good analogy for some situations which are not this situation. There are parts of society whose primary role is to help people through tough times, just as an umbrella’s primary role is to keep one dry in the rain. It is entirely unfair to call people “a burden” for using mechanisms which are there for that purpose.
By default, most relationships are not like this. People have their own lives to live. Imposing a year of strict lockdown on my roommates because I cannot handle a day of negotiations would not be fair to my roommates. They are not an umbrella whose purpose is to keep me dry of rain.
(And it’s not just imposing a burden on the roommates! Subjecting oneself to a year of strict lockdown, to avoid a day or even a week of hard/stressful thinking and negotiating, is not a good tradeoff. It’s a tradeoff which clearly reflects stress-impaired judgement. If I can’t handle the problem, outsourcing decision-making isn’t just good for those around me, it’s good for me too.)
This I definitely agree with, and I definitely am not saying that someone who cannot deal with the stress of thinking through a group problem should just defer to whoever’s most insistent. There are degrees of freedom in who to defer to. Deferring to norms of some broader group (e.g. general social norms) is one option, for instance. When one’s thinking/judgement is sufficiently impaired that better-than-typical results are unlikely, deferring to what everyone else does is a decent way to at least get typical results.
I think a major disconnect between your outlook here, and me (and I assume maia’s) outlook is… while it’s true that most relationships are not about being umbrellas to keep you dry, friendships are to some degree that, and housemates are disproportionately friendships.
They don’t have to be, and some people have different ways of conceptualizing friendship. But… basically insofar as I have roommates I’m not friends with, I think I’m making a mistake, or doing a temporary thing I hope will change. (Because: why would you want to live with people who you aren’t also cultivating some longterm relationship with? It’s a huge lost opportunity)
I think friendship is complicated. And, it’s certainly the case that I don’t want to subject my friends to a year of unnecessary precautions. (It’s my responsibility as a friend to try not to do that, and if I can’t not do that, get help minimizing the damage). But, yes, my friendships also explicitly come with my responsibility to help make sure they are okay when they are dealing with tough times, and to not drop people when they become inconvenient.
(If I was housemates with a friend who it turned out I was incompatible with during a crisis, I’d consider my goal to be to somehow refactor our living arrangement such that we were not imposing those costs on each other, so that I could continue to help them and be their friend from a position of slack and security. This might include helping them process their feelings and getting intellectually oriented, or renting temporary airBnBs while we sort things out, or each moving out)
This seems to be assuming “it’s possible to make outsource decisions in this way”, which just seems mostly false to me. You can outsource these decisions by giving up on your agency, but I think that’s a really big deal that would probably mostly make things worse.
On the other side of the equation:
I think people essentially have a responsibility to make sure they have enough slack, so that they don’t burden each other unnecessarily. i.e don’t pursue strategies that’ll reliably make you constantly need help from people around you, if other strategies are available. This includes noting how easily stressed out you are, and accounting for it. But, the thing is that covid was just a huge slack cost that was overdetermined to overwhelm many people’s usual slack buffer.
I think it’d probably have been a mistake to be maintaining enough slack for covid not to fuck you* up (that’d mean you’re just leaving value on the table most of the time. You can’t be prepared for every single type of emergency that might come up. I think people should maintain enough slack to weather, like, 3 minor emergencies coming up in a given week without having to dip into reserves, and covid just continuously soaked up more than that allocation each week, for months on end)
*for many values of ‘you’. Obviously some people vary here.
A pretty key piece of my thinking here is: if I emotionally cannot handle a decision, then “don’t give up my agency” is not an option. My agency is already basically gone at that point. If I am not emotionally capable of choosing between at least two different decisions (e.g. engage in a long negotiation to change circumstances or keep going with status quo), then for agency-analysis purposes, I am a rock with my already-chosen decision written on it.
This is why we have things like power of attorney and living wills. At some point, there is no meaningful agency left to retain. The first-best option (i.e. retaining agency) is already gone, and it’s time to move on to next-best.
(John and I just chatted offline, and a point of confusion we resolved was that I thought John was saying something like “the majority people in the house who are able to do thinking better should take over the thinking for the people who are too overwhelmed to think”, but the thing he meant was more like* “the people who are having trouble thinking should proactively find a person to be their lawyer, and/or help them think. Their “lawyer” should be whoever they trust most to help them.” Which is a pretty different frame.
I happen to not think this would have worked very well – I think a key problem was that everyone was overwhelmed at once, so there was nobody you trusted to be your lawyer who actually had bandwidth to do so. But, this is more of a straightforward factual constraint than a deep disagreement. I agree that looking for people to help you think, and/or represent you at house meetings, is a useful approach in some cases)
*I’m not 100% sure I represented his viewpoint well here.
Endorsed.
To be clear, I do indeed think we have the luxury to exclude most people from our lives. Indeed any rule that doesn’t exclude 90%+ of people from your life to a very large degree seems far too lax to me.
Also, 10 hours really doesn’t seem that much over the course of a pandemic, so I do think the above holds for me. It just seems really really crucial to maintain coordination ability in crises, and this will require some harsh decisions.