Mini Blog Post 15: The illusion of doing nothing
(This post is very much in the spirit of Become a person who Actually Does Things, but I try to focus on fleshing out the underlying errors and next actions better)
One of more unexpected benefits of interning in the finance industry is that I now have a much crisper intuition for probabilities, expected values and reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty. And this highlighted a strong bias in my mind, that given a risky opportunity it feels much more comfortable to do nothing. When faced with a risk, I always want to stick with the safe option. To say no to new opportunities. To not put myself out there.
And I think this is super, super dumb. The world is full of opportunities that can make my life much better! Strangers who could become close friends or partners. Unknown jobs that I could really love. New hobbies and passions in which I could thrive. Awesome talks I could give. New foods I might love.
Yet, when faced with uncertainty, it’s hard to take the step of saying yes and being bold. It feels scary, and my mind fixates on all of the costs, the risks, the effort required, the downsides. And it neglects all the amazing benefits I could be missing out on. And it is true that often downsides are more important than upsides - I would prefer to avoid losing £1000 than to gaining £1000. But this is a much more pronounced effect than that. And this significantly holds me back from achieving my goals, because it means I systematically miss out on ways things could be better. I call this the illusion of doing nothing - it feels safe to do nothing, but this is ultimately all in my head, while my goals live in the world.
In the jargon of economics, I’m ignoring opportunity costs. Whenever I spend money on something, the question is not “do I want this thing?” it’s “is this thing better than the alternatives for how I could spend this money”. And this is extremely easy to ignore, because the opportunity costs are invisible, not visceral. But they’re still there. And I’ve found opportunity costs are a fundamentally important way to understand the world and how to make decisions, because they’re everywhere. When I do nothing, I’m ignoring all the opportunity costs of what I could be doing, because they don’t feel visceral.
For example, let’s say I meet somebody interesting, and we could one day be close friends, but I feel socially anxious and lack the courage and initiative to keep in touch with them. This feels safe, and this feels comfortable. But I’m trading that temporary feeling of safety, for the major loss of a close friendship. And this doesn’t feel visceral, because it’s a potential, vague future thing. But the feeling of being visceral lives in my head, and doesn’t affect my long-term happiness. It may feel OK to pass up an opportunity like that, but ultimately I have lost. And this feeling of safety is just the illusion of doing nothing. A thought experiment: picture a close friend now, and ask yourself how much effort and social anxiety that friendship would have been worth to you. And ask yourself how much it would be worth for, say, a 10% chance of getting another similarly close friendship? And how much do you actually put in when you meet somebody interesting? Are your actions in accordance with your values, or are you just doing what feels safest?
This is a really common error. This underlies a lot of the significant problems with my intuitions. I’m a pretty loss averse and risk averse person, because it feels safe to stick with the status quo, to do nothing, and it feels scary to put myself out there. And this partly comes from a sense of self-justification and avoiding blame. It feels justifiable to do nothing, like it isn’t my fault. While if I put myself out there and things go wrong, that feels like failure, and I know I’ll feel regret. But these emotions of guilt, blame, justification, are all just illusions. What I care about is the results, the things that achieve my long-term goals.
Another way this manifests is in a sense of the default action. It feels safe to do whatever the default, socially conventional thing to do is, and it feels scary to deviate from this - this is just another example of the illusion of doing nothing. I’m a massive perfectionist, and that’s in part because it feels like the default to obsess over my work, and it feels scary not to, to just put something out there. Cambridge is full of students who spend all their time working, and pushing themselves. And sometimes this is the right decision! But in my experience, it’s most often because working feels like the default, their role, their obligation. And it feels safe to do this. And it feels scary and irresponsible to do something different, like go out and join a society, or take up new hobbies. The cost of having less time to work feels visceral. While the opportunity costs of all the exciting new things they’re missing out on don’t.
I think this is a highly common problem, but everybody has different values, and neuroses, and opportunities. So at this point, I highly recommend setting a 5 minute timer and trying to generate your own examples. For me (I’ve made a lot of progress on this problem, so these are mostly problems of “Neel of 3 years ago”):
I default to saying no to things. Like interesting project ideas, invitations to events, new people to meet. The costs, and possibility I won’t enjoy it feels visceral, while the uncertain benefits do not
Not initiating things socially or romantically: it feels scary to initiate a friendship with somebody I’ve just met, or to organise events, or to ask somebody out. There’s a really visceral chance of bothering them, or causing emotional labour if they aren’t interested. And the major future upside doesn’t feel visceral
Not putting myself out there: saying no to things that feel a bit scary or outside my comfort zone. Like giving a talk, throwing a party, starting projects.
Not investing money, and wanting things that are perfectly 0 risk, even at much worse rates (I’m still bad at this one)
Taking a job, or course that violates my self-image - it feels like the default to be a pure mathematician, who lives in a world of pure abstraction. And it feels weird to do something outside of that, it’s not the default.
At this point, a natural objection is that there is cost to risks. That losing something is painful. That life is full of opportunities, and it takes mental energy and effort to evaluate and prioritise them. That taking every risky opportunity probably loses things on average. And I think these are all good and important points! You should not just do everything risky. You shouldn’t say yes to everything. There is a definite skill to evaluating things, and this takes time, experience and practice.
But I think that ultimately the error happening is that people don’t want to choose how to approach opportunities. Having to come up with a policy, and think explicitly about these questions is hard, and tiring. But ultimately, you always have a policy. And maybe your policy is “given an opportunity, perfectly follow my intuitions and the default, safe action”. And sometimes this works well, sometimes it works badly. And changing your policy will involve adding a term for “expending time and effort in thinking about things”, and maybe that would be bad enough to make it worse. But you don’t get to choose not to have a policy at all, that is the illusion of doing nothing. There is a trade-off here, and if you do not think about it, you’re letting your choice be taken from you, to save the mental effort of not needing to think about it. There is no truly safe option, just differing shades of grey.
Hopefully I’ve now convinced you that this is an important and significant bias, is present in your thoughts, and holding you back from your goals. But this is insufficient to solve the bias. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that understanding the bias is the entire battle, and that you can just Try Harder next time, and avoid it by force of will. This basically never works. So for the rest of the article, I’m going to outline how I’ve made overcoming this actionable.
One reason it’s hard to correct this error by trying harder is that it’s easy to forget in the moment - there’s lots of other things in your mind. So, it can be useful to explicitly block out some time to prioritise and think over things, if you ever have a big decision to make, and remind yourself then of these biases. If your life is full of these decisions, then have regular reflection time, like a weekly review, where you ask yourself “what decision am I currently dragging my feet about?”. This can feel like a waste of time, but taking time to genuinely consider things is extremely valuable - spending 5% of your time to make the rest of your time 10% more effective is an awesome trade. This is an instance of your intuitions being wrong, and holding you back from your long term goals.
A lot of the work here is being done by what you set your default expectations to be - doing nothing feels safe, because the current state of the world feels like the default, and the idea of going out of your comfort zone is scary. It doesn’t feel that exciting to make your life better, while it feels scary to make your life worse. Just realising this can be helpful, because I think you can have some conscious control over where you set the Zero Point.
A further underlying thing here is that risks feel concrete, while benefits do not. So a good first step is to make the benefits concrete! Try to explicitly plan out a best case scenario, and why it would be awesome. Make the costs of the default action feel concrete. The mindset is quite related to status quo bias - when the current state of the world feels privileged and special. A good solution to status quo bias is to viscerally imagine an alternate world. And imagine you lived in that world, and ask whether you’d switch to the current one. And this can transfer here quite well! Don’t ask yourself whether it’s worth your time to start an ambitious coding project, imagine a world where you’ve made something ambitious, and ask whether you’d trade the loss of that achievement for some extra time. Look into the dark, and realise that you can’t not make a choice, you just need to choose what you’re giving up on.
A good way to make things concrete, is to just do them and gather data! See if something is actually scary, or just all in your head. And remind yourself that whether it’s a failure or not, you still win! Because you’re improving the sum total of all decisions you make over the course of your life.
This is often much easier in the right social environment. I’m a really big fan of Comfort Zone Expansion workshops (see p121 here), which I’ve done at summer camps I attended while in school. Where you take a few hours for everyone to list things that feel on the edge of their comfort zone, but which they want to get better at. And then just doing them, in a safe & supportive environment, and seeing what happens! As a result of these workshops, I’ve practiced: having open, honest and vulnerable conversations about my feelings; seeking sincere criticism from people; and asking people for favours. And as I result, I both feel more comfortable with these specific actions, and it’s become far more visceral to me that my intuitions systematically hold me back from doing what’s best for me. Even outside of a workshop context, and I think spirit of doing something uncomfortable just to see what happens can be super valuable. This reframes the question from one of success or failure, to one where every outcome is a success. Because ultimately the goal is to gather information.
Another general solution to biases is to recognise them as a systematic flaw in your thinking, and to intentionally push the other way - create an artificial counter-bias! If you do systematically avoid opportunities and scary things, then having a policy of “every time I feel borderline about an opportunity, take it” could systematically improve your life.
This is often easier if you can get excited about this counter-bias! Don’t see it as forcing yourself to do a scary thing, reframe it as something that is changing your self-image so that you’re systematically getting closer to the kind of person who Actually Does Things. Talk to a friend about the opportunity, and talk about all the ways it could be awesome. Try to get yourself as pumped as possible about it!
I find it often helps to set myself a quest - a big, open ended goal to push myself towards a behaviour change. Every term I try to have a goal for myself, some big, ambitious project or change I’m striving for (much in the spirit of this), and I’ve found this can work extremely well for being excited about things. And an excellent quest was to spend a term seeking novelty - doing new things for the sake of doing them, defaulting to yes for any opportunity presented. And looking back, I think that was one of my most fun terms at Cambridge! A few highlights: I went gliding, pole-dancing, trampolining, got a makeover, overhauled my personal sense of style, tried amateur rapping, went travelling solo, got Tinder, took up baking
So, notice next time you feel paralysed. The next time you have an opportunity, or a chance to deviate from the default, and feel a compulsive urge to stick with the safe option and avoid putting yourself out there. And remind yourself that your intuitions are stuck within the illusion of doing nothing, and holding you back from your true goals. Try to make the trade-off concrete, resist status quo bias, reframe the question, and see if you can be excited about it. Remind yourself of all of the things you’re missing out on. Does doing nothing still truly feel like the safe option?
