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.
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.