Out With the Old, Part II

Jettison Your Trash and Make Room for Treasure

Welcome to Tuesday morning, everybody. I hope you have an extra large warm and/or caffeinated beverage of your choice. I don’t love Tuesdays. Tuesday is only my second-favorite Shelf Life day. Thursday is my favorite Shelf Life day because when I publish Shelf Life on a Thursday I don’t have to publish again till Tuesday (a long time) but when I publish Shelf Life on Tuesday I have to publish again on Thursday (a short time). Tuesday is to the week what late January is to the year. Today is a double whammy in that regard.

Last Thursday (a good Shelf Life day) we were talking about how to identify things that don’t serve you and why you might be hanging onto them anyway. I wrapped up with my nominees for the four categorical reasons people hang on to things that don’t or no longer serve them: Nostalgia, sunk cost, obligation, and habit. Today I’m going to go over these categories in detail to give examples of how each one looks when it’s the reason you’re hanging onto some deadweight and talk you through how to let go of these stage-four clingers.

Nostalgia

When you have nostalgia for something you prioritize your past experience with it over your present-day experience. Nostalgia controls you through your sentimentality. Keeping things around out of nostalgia can look like:

• Shopping old manuscripts before newer, better work because the old ones “deserve a chance.”

• Keeping a relationship on life support when the other party has moved on.

• Maintaining a membership you don’t use anymore.

The key with nostalgia is to remind yourself that if something that used to bring joy no longer does so, you might be hanging onto it because of the fear that if you let go of it you’ll lose it forever and can never return to that joy-bringing state that might be on the verge of coming right back (after all this time). Most of the time, though, you can stop putting your personal resources into something and it won’t be gone forever. I mean, if it’s a plant that no longer brings you joy and you stop watering it then, yes, gone forever. But most things that are kept alive out of nostalgia can simply pause until such time that they might bring you joy again. 

Let a membership lapse, and then you miss it? Rejoin. Let a dwindling correspondence die off and then regret it? Send another email. Stop shopping your old manuscript for a while to focus on newer work? The old manuscript will still be there if you change your mind later. A strategy I employ when I need to stop sinking resources into something nostalgic is to remind myself that I can always revive it, acquire it again, or create it again later if I have regrets after letting it go. (Hint: I haven’t often had regrets about letting something go.)

What if whatever it is isn’t there anymore when I come back to it? Well: I move clothes I’m on the fence about but can’t seem to get rid of to a specific section of the guestroom closet. If I fetch something out of that section to wear it even once then it goes back to the main closet—it gets a reprieve. After about a year in the guestroom closet, clothes go to Goodwill. If I haven’t needed it for a year, I don’t need it at all. “But what if—?” Nope! That’s a trap. When that “what if” scenario finally happens, the clothing won’t help me anyway. It won’t fit by then or it’ll be out of style or I’ll want something new anyway.

Sunk Costs

Sunk costs trick you into putting more and more resources into something to avoid losing your earlier resource investment. Sunk costs control you through your fear of loss. Hanging onto things due to your sunk costs can look like:

• Slogging through a revision that’s headed nowhere because you already spent time drafting.

• Attending a class you’re not benefiting from because you already paid for it.

• Keeping an unused possession around that’s taking up space because you can’t get your money back.

I’ve already written about this in The Sunk-Cost Fallacy so I won’t go into great detail on the subject again here. The critical thing to remind yourself, if you are devoting energy to something that doesn’t serve you because you are afraid of losing the investment you’ve already sunk into it, is that the investment is already gone.

The time and energy you have put into writing a manuscript is gone forever. You have a manuscript now, yes, but you can never get that time and energy back no matter what you do with that manuscript. If you realize you have a manuscript on your hands that will need a tremendous amount of revision and editing to become viable, you may feel that you need to put in the work to avoid losing the work you already put in. Not true. The work you put in is already lost. You can only decide how to steward your personal resources going forward. You cannot rescue spent resources by spending more resources.

Sometimes it’s better to cut our losses and move on to better things. I have personally experienced all three of the above bullets. I dropped out of an expensive, prepaid UCLA course during a time when I was having mental health struggles after a dear friend pointed out to me that my tuition was spent and gone whether I completed the course or not. I could complete it for a credit—knowing I might not follow through with the remaining courses in the program—or I could ditch the class that was stressing me out and preserve my mental health instead. I’ve given up on completed manuscripts when I realized they would require an unreasonable (to me) amount of revision—energy I wanted to spend on another manuscript. I’ve resold barely touched exercise equipment just so it would stop haunting me (more than once).

I’ve regretted the initial investment I made in something when it didn’t pan out but I’ve never regretted giving up on something  when it came to the point of throwing more resources at it to try to make the initial investment good.

Obligation

An obligation is something you are morally or legally bound to do to avoid a consequence—meaning, there is an external factor driving your need to do it. When you have an obligation to do something, it may serve you in the sense that you avoid the consequence. You are obligated to answer your jury duty summons or you might go to jail. Honoring this obligation serves you because you don’t go to jail. Going to jail is serving (time) but it does not serve (you).

Holding on to something from a sense of obligation can look like:

• Working on a story you’d rather sideline or quit altogether because you don’t want to disappoint readers.

• Organizing a group activity you no longer enjoy because the other members depend on your effort.

• Attending an event when you’d rather not because it’s expected of you.

However: Sometimes the consequence we’re trying to avoid when we honor an obligation is not real. Sometimes the entity that imposes an obligation has no authority over us and sometimes we impose obligations on ourselves with  invented consequences.

If the IRS tells you to pay your taxes, they have a legal authority over you to impose a consequence. You have an obligation to pay your taxes. If a scammer pretending to be the IRS calls you and tells you to pay your taxes in the form of giving your credit card number to them on the phone right now, they do not have any authority over you. They might say you’ll go to jail for tax evasion if you don’t give them money but they have no authority to imprison you. You do not have an obligation to pay a scammer.

If my work tells me I’m required to work during an all-hands-on-deck period as a condition of continued employment, then refusing to do so could cost me my job. That’s a work obligation. If my boss invites me to happy hour and I tell myself, “I have to go because it will look bad if I’m not there hobnobbing and when it comes time for promotions she might favor someone who goes to her social events,” then I have imagined a consequence. This is a self-imposed obligation. Could there be a consequence to not going, like I imagined? Yes. Does that mean I am obligated to go because something bad might happen if I don’t? No. I cannot evaluate the cost and benefit of going or not going until I acknowledge that I am imposing this obligation on myself using imagined potential consequences.

Likewise, sometimes we tell ourselves we “have to” do something because if we don’t, another person will have an emotional reaction we don’t like. “If I don’t go to Cousin Millicent’s fiftieth, Great Aunt Hortense will be mad at me, therefore I have to go.” No I don’t. Aunt Hortense can just be mad. The consequence for me is not that Hortense is angry (that’s more of a her problem than a me problem). The consequence is that my relationship with Hortense might be damaged. What I need to ask myself is: What is the value of a relationship with someone who controls my behavior using my fear of their emotional response?

I can’t ask myself that question if I’ve skipped the personal introspection and went straight to “it’s an obligation so I have to.” It is a self-imposed obligation. I can’t arrive at the real value of the thing I’m hanging onto until I unpack the actual consequence and why I’m afraid of it.

I’m still not anybody’s therapist.

Habit

Finally we have habits. Everybody has habits. Good and bad and neutral ones. When you do something or hang onto something out of habit you’re maintaining the status quo. You are doing something, or keeping something, because of inertia—it costs fewer personal resources in the short term to just keep doing it than it would to figure out a different way. But in the long term, you pour a lot more resources into whatever it is than if you just did the work up front to change or ditch it. Sticking with things out of habit can look like:

• Sticking to an old writing routine that no longer makes sense for you instead of creating a new routine.

• Staying in an unsatisfactory job because you’re unsure if a new one would be better.

• Preserving a process because “we’ve always done it like this” when new tools might be more effective.

Habit is a bit like nostalgia because it has roots in something that used to work for you but no longer does. The difference is nostalgia reminds us that something used to work for us and we think it might work for us again if we keep it alive and ticking, while habit is more about knowing something is no longer useful or effective but keeping it going because effecting a change is harder than continuing along the same path. A habit that has run its course probably doesn’t hold the promise of “maybe in the future it’ll become good again.” It’s often something that isn’t serving us but has not become so bad that it’s a disservice.

When you habitually put a small amount of personal resources into something that doesn’t serve you, you drain those resources over time. Even if it’s just something small, the time and energy you spend could cumulatively be put toward something positive rather than maintenance of nothing. The issue is that to change a comfortable habit—to develop a new routine, process, or procedure—requires more of an outlay of resources up front. You have to put time and energy into developing the replacement or even into thinking through the consequences of just ditching it. If it’s something really simple, even the administration around just quitting (like letting people know you’re not going to do it anymore) might be more upfront effort than keeping it up.

If you’ve ever said “it would take more time to teach someone else how to do it so I’m just going to keep doing it myself” then you know exactly what I’m getting at. While just “doing it myself” five more times, or ten more times, or fifty more times, might be less effort than teaching someone else how to do it (or taking care of the administration of stopping something, or selling it off, or driving it to Goodwill, or whatever), if I’m going to keep up this habit forever then in the long run it will cost me more than just passing it to someone else or otherwise giving it up.

I’m a big fan of creating good habits by starting out small but this is also a great way to end up with a habit that doesn’t serve you. When you’re trying to build a habit, imposing a small success condition like “I’ll write for 15 minutes every day” is an effective way to get into a routine. But as you build your routine you have to push out of your comfort zone every now and then until you get to a habit that serves your goal. If you want to become a full-time writer, for example, someone who writes for a living, you’re going to have to write more than 15 minutes every day. If you get to 15 minutes every day and never push yourself to develop the habit further, you end up with a writing habit that doesn’t serve the goal.

I hope any part of this has been useful for you. As usual, Shelf Life is nominally about writing but actually could be about a lot of things. For those of us who don’t write for a living (me), it can be hard to make time, energy, and motivation to write regularly when we have so many other things needing our resources (family, friends, work, and so on). This is true not just of writers but anyone who has a time-consuming creative project they want to find time for (I know people making video games, people making mobile applications, making music albums, stuff like that). 

If you have things in your life causing you stress and not contributing to your health, happiness, and well-being (or your loved ones’ health, happiness, and well being) then you’re spending time and energy on them that you could be spending on the things you care about. Get your valuable time back and spend it wisely.

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