Bike
“It was stolen,” I said, as if talking about any everyday topic.
“What?” she replied in horror, “why didn’t you tell us, we could’ve gotten insurance?!”
“Because it didn’t really matter to me.”
“Why did we spend money to get this bike?”
My bike was stolen in the middle of June. I had foolishly parked it in Berkeley for a few days, and this was a predictable outcome. As soon as I noticed it, I mostly waved it off. I called the police office grudgingly, but I didn’t really care about this bike. I already had a bike at home, not as good as this one but still functional and rideable, so the law of diminishing returns took maximum effect.
I should have realized this back in August of last year, when my parents bought this bike for me before college, and I did to an extent. They graciously offered me a new bike as a birthday present. I weakly said a few times that I would be content using my current bike, but they easily rolled over this. Weakly said. Vaguely said. That’s a general problem for me, not being assertive enough when making points. But this was not the whole flaw. I felt it easy to say this weakly, you see, because it wasn’t my money. It wasn’t my money, and I was getting a marginal benefit - a better bike, if not one in the place of none. How dare I? Shouldn’t I have pushed more strongly what I thought, so my parents would not waste their money? It would not hurt to add some more conviction. If I convinced them, my parents would not waste, and so long as I was diplomatic, there would not be much bad conflict. Declining a gift is socially rude, yes, but warranted in this case.
So that’s one important thing to draw from this: don’t waste the resources of others on you. Just generally being empathetic to others and not being a selfish resource whore is something any human can improve on.
But what else can I learn? Well, this is only one part of the story. The other part comes much later. Should I have told my parents about the stolen bike immediately? I thought at the time the answer was “no”. Or perhaps that wasn’t quite it, but rather I convinced myself that it would be more convenient not to say anything. This tends to be foolish. The common wisdom says that you shouldn’t withhold information that you will likely end up revealing later. Obviously there are some problems here: maybe you want to hold a surprise party, or more seriously there is a covert operation going on now that can harmlessly be explained later on. In this case though, if the information is explained later, it is going to have a similar or worse immediate reaction, unless “later” is five years in the future.
The reason I didn’t say anything is because, as I said before, I didn’t care about the bike much. Also, I thought my parents would become stressed if I told them about it, and I didn’t really want to make them stressed. Though it looks altruistic on the surface, this is fairly selfish - mad parents stress me out too, and they also have a worse opinion of me than happy parents. Knowing me, it was probably a mostly selfish decision.
Like most people, I have a hard time facing the truth, and telling the truth. I could do to remember the Litnay of Gendlin:
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
For they are already enduring it.
-Eugene Gendlin
I am going to say this to myself in the mornings, when I wake up. Robin Hanson suggested that keeping track of biases is a good way to get an honest assessment of yourself and help to fix those biases. Taking that advice, I am going to record times that I lie to myself and to others throughout the day. There would be a lot of these.. Always being truthful is not necessarily correct, but being more truthful than I am almost certainly is.