There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.
— Hunter S. Thompson
When I say this Hunter Thompson quote, people often laugh.
The paradox is surprising and the surprise is why we laugh.
When we tell someone our fears, we are generally craving reassurance and validation.
We are hoping that we are being *irrationally* paranoid. We want the person to say, “You’re being crazy and everything is going to be OK.” We do not want the person to say, “Good point, you *should be* paranoid.”
Ignoring clinical paranoia, what we are really talking about is risk management.
The problem with life is that bad things outweigh good things. This is known as asymmetrical downside. It’s easy for your place to get messy and hard to keep it clean.
There is a good quote that has been floating around the past few years: “Trust is earned in droplets and lost in buckets.”
This is a fresh quote for an old idea: negative events can disproportionately impact our lives compared to positive ones.
Some other examples:
- You can ruin your life in five text messages.
- It takes a lot longer to earn a million dollars than it does to spend a million dollars.
- It can take years to construct a building and a day to demolish it.
People can do things that are permanently bad, but you can’t really do anything that is permanently good.
If you save my life, then punch me in the face every time we see each other after that, then I’m probably going to stop giving you credit for saving my life and start focusing on the punching.
Conversely, someone can be a great person to you, then betray your trust one time and forever damage the relationship.
Any series of numbers multiplied by zero is zero. So, if one zero wipes out everything, we can see why divorces make sense and people tend to have fewer close friends as they get older.
This all sounds negative and unpleasant because who wants to think about bad things happening?
The goal of course is to feel good, so we prefer positivity to negativity. But things aren’t always positive, so for us to be positive all the time, we have to ignore reality some of the time. And if we ignore reality long enough, something bad is going to happen.
As Ennius wrote, “The good is mostly in the absence of the bad.”
If you take care of your downside, you’re only left with upside.
The Solution (Moms, Fire Departments, & Bankers)
Think about how good moms are at this. They bring the Capri Suns, the snacks, and sunscreen to insure against the bad things (thirst, hunger, and sunburn), so that everyone is free to enjoy the moment. No one thinks of a mom as being overly negative for preparing for a wide range of outcomes. (They may say she’s paranoid, though.)
She just knows — thru painful, hard-won experience — what’s likely to happen if you fail to prepare.
A fire department is another similar metaphor. We know there is going to be a fire, we just don’t know when or where.
So, we want to be prepared like a good mother or a fire department. We touched on some of the ways to do this in Emotional Decisions and will expand on it in the future. But, ultimately it’s a balance of acknowledging the truth and acclimating yourself to bad news, while keeping a healthy self-esteem.
I love the scene in The Godfather where Robert Duvall’s character says “Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news immediately.”
This was the most memorable scene in the movie the first time I watched it, and it has stuck with me ever since because good news takes care of itself.
Rubbing my nose in bad news has conditioned me to accept it unemotionally. I find that the more vague I keep something in my head the scarier it is. When I label it, talk about it, write it down, it loses its power. When I’m talking to friends about situations I’m in, I usually value the risks, downsides, and bad things they bring up more than the good.
This is what bankers do. You think of all the bad things, then structure a deal around them in a way where it’s hard to lose.
It’s equally important to not let this information consume us.
My default disposition is pretty positive and optimistic, so this has been a helpful habit to balance me out.
While the idea of our worst fears coming true is uncomfortable, embracing it in our imagination ironically helps us avoid it becoming a reality.
extra guac 