Varieties Of Inaction

Really, nothing gets done when seemingly there's everything calling for attention.

I sometimes get a bit overwhelmed contemplating the opportunity costs of picking one task over another against the backdrop of having limited time in a day coupled with having relatively lots of things to do. The decision isn't always well-informed or thought out, and can just boil down to based on feel good (or not) in the moment.

Say I can read now or just do it later in the night when I feel more receptive to reading. For now, do nothing or why not check on my notifications, it's more work visually but at least I get to also feel engaged without spending the mental currency required to actually focus.

There's basically no clear winner in this mental calculus, so inaction easily masquerades as decision-making.

Doing nothing.
It's such an uncomfortable, disempowering way to describe how we spend our time, but sometimes it's the most honest way of describing what's really happening.

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Enforced patience

In a way, I got reminded of it recently while following through with my national identity card process started since last year February. Even though I need the document so bad, there's literally nothing I can do to speed up the process, even knowing someone on the inside doesn't help as the problem is more systemic than individual favoritism.

There are no alternatives. No temporary solutions. No amount of anxiety or phone calls that will make the machine move faster.

This is a case where individual priority clashes with external realities that are indifferent to my urgency, leading to the priority downgraded because the wall is too high to climb.

Then there's the "doing nothing" of restraint, which looks quite deceptive to me, in that it resembles passivity, but is actually an extreme exertion of will.

It's when you choose not to send that reactive text message or not intervene in a mess that isn't yours to clean up. I mean, to an outside observer, you are doing nothing while on the inside, you are holding back a flood.

I personally find it much easier to exit almost entirely this headspace when I firmly remember I'm not obligated to have an opinion, solution, or response to everything that crosses my path.

Harder kind of nothing

It's a bit more nuanced when it comes to markets, specifically the age-old adage of doing nothing as a way to preserve and compound wealth over time.

Short-term changes are by nature noisy and emotional, designed to trigger action. This has basically ramped up with the current era of social media.

Spotting the long term trends and having the know-how to adapt is a bit on the high spectrum of financial literacy and emotional regulation combined.

In between the two, I'm gradually coming to terms with the intensity of the short term changes potentially masking an underlying long term change that's happening and the old world of just hold and do nothing may no longer work as expected because the assumption that markets always recover given enough time is built on specific conditions, i.e stable institutions, growing populations, etc. and those foundations themselves are now deemed as variables and not something constant.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Most of the time, doing nothing still works, volatility is mostly noise, and compound interest is timely magical. But the margin for error has narrowed.

You can't just set and forget, have to set, monitor for genuine structural breaks, and then, perhaps most of the time, still do nothing. A more demanding kind of nothing than our parents' generation faced, basically.


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