22 Pay the five dollars!

Many years back, I stumbled upon a delightful piece in that venerable, and much maligned (by the intellectuals), magazine Readers’ Digest, titled “Pay the five dollars!”.  In essence, it said that there are situations where it is simply not worth arguing or fighting, one complies and carries on. A traffic offence,  for instance: a cop pulls you up because you didn’t stop at a light, or you touched the zebra crossing, or you started moving when the lights were not yet green (the last happened to me!), or because he has year-end targets to fulfill. Of course you could try to contest the cop’s charge, or you could demand to make that phone call to your lawyer, or you could call the entire police force corrupt and demand to talk to your MP… or, you could pay the small fine and whizz off (decorously) and carry on with your life. You need not even wait around for the receipt, but thank the cop for being such a devoted public servant, and ask him to mail it to you!

 Among the many amazing things about life, it is remarkable how a small negative offsets all the positives, affecting  our entire enjoyment of life… the whole trip spoilt by a small traffic fine or by a blown tire or even less, a whole meal spoilt by a slightly chipped dish, and so on. Part of it is probably our sense of dignity, of self-worth; we feel most keenly, not the minor inconvenience or imperfection, but the implicit affront to our sense of self-importance. Such things are not supposed to happen to people-like-us. We do not like to be bundled together with the herd.

Economics has a theory for this syndrome, and they try to explain why a given loss looms larger than an equal gain in normal human psychology.  It says that the marginal utility (the satisfaction you get from the last unit of something consumed) of anything keeps falling, the more you have of it, so that your tenth strawberry  ice-cream isn’t as interesting as your first (at one sitting, that is!). The working out of this principle of diminishing marginal utility compromises our whole outlook on life. It diminishes, or discounts, the value of what we have, and makes us hanker after what we are still to acquire. This also may explain, incidentally, the twists and turns in affairs of the heart (and why an astute lover will play hard to get!).  It also gives us a strong hint that we should count our blessings, since human nature generally tends to devalue or under-value what we have in our desire for new things. It also relates to the 20-80 rule: although 20% of our possessions may satisfy 80% of our wants, we still hanker after the unattained 20% because it has such a high marginal utility in our eyes! It also explains why one man’s nectar is another man’s poison… it all depends on how much of it you have already! It also explains why the home-grown  chicken is like porridge to our taste (to paraphrase a pithy Hindi proverb), and why the richest magnates in our country spend so many millions to build the ugliest mansions in the world… they have such a surfeit of pretty things around them!

 Coming back to the original theme, the principle here is to minimize the hassle factor, and just pay up and get out. We are not going to win every time, in business or in the daily exchanges of life, so we may as well learn to cut our losses in good time, not throw good money after bad, and so on. There is also a wonderful concept in Economics of the sunk, or historic, cost, which I feel deserves a piece by itself, but which tells us to let bygones be bygones, and measure each transaction afresh, without reference to the past. There is also the question of how much baggage we want to carry around in our lives; will we be so affected by small defeats, that we will fight to the finish for every single thing? Or will we toss out some small losses as part of life, forget about them, and carry on with our lives?

15 How easy it is to make ourselves miserable…or happy!

This one is a simple no-brainer: we can make ourselves totally miserable, just thinking of all our ills, all the things we should have got, or done, or had done to us, the things that got lost, the deals we missed, the commissions or compliments we had to pay others, and so on.

It’s equally easy to make ourselves happy, or at least less miserable, by not thinking about these things, or by thinking the opposite type of things. Easy to say, but human nature being what it is, one loss outweighs all the gains: we tend to dwell on the negative, probably an evolutionary trait that must have been good in scanning the neighbourhood for threats to survival. Persons with a very strong long-term memory system (women are said to have this type) obviously have a tougher time doing this. 

I would look on those lost deals, the tips paid for poor service (or none at all), the wasted advance payments, the unrecoverable loans and unrequited gifts (including your first love affair!), as just paying your tithe in life! There has to be a certain amount of friction in life, that converts energy into useless heat; similarly, there are losses in transactions over a lifetime. Things don’t ever balance perfectly. The fact that you have your limbs and eyes and hearing is itself too much... you’re already far ahead in the game! All the rest is a bonus… and I say this from harsh personal experience, not as a general platitude.

Granted, these bits of “wisdom” sound like a string of homilies… but if so, they’re homilies, or bits of the experience of living, that have been propounded and expounded over the millennia, and have been tested and found effective. I will come to some of the old literature by and by, but in the meanwhile we can easily extract what little lessons are possible, from our own day-to-day, year-to-year experience.

We’ve seen people in front of our eyes, day by day, ruining themselves by doing some or all of the things we’ve been talking about… maybe they’re our loved ones in our own families! Maybe it’s your friend’s old man who had shut himself into a well of silence for fifty long years… maybe it’s a child who grows into a brat and then goes off the rails… maybe it’s a colleague at work who complains so much he has no time for anything else… we observe, we think about these things, and we draw lessons for our own conduct and attitudes.