Over time, we will face the usual malaises of the human experience — stemming from illness, death, corruption, deception, evil, stupidity, etc. There are infinite versions of such malaises.
Debating whether or not these malaises are controllable, or mitigatable, by their subjects is not the intent of this essay. Let’s assume they are not controllable, ie, experiencing some combination of bad things over a lifetime is inevitable. To provide a blunt example: you will die. Yes, you can extend your life by eating healthy foods and driving safely. But there is no meta-mitigation that removes all risk of harm.
[An anecdote, which you can feel free to skip]
The move had to happen soon. Less lead time than ideal but manageable. It was mostly my fault for dragging my feet on the project (the remainder of the fault pie chart attributable to the unreasonably inflated apartment rental market). But our stuff was in a storage unit in Seattle and we needed it in Miami as soon as possible.
One of the most underratedly dreadful parts of moving is the actual mover selection process: it is extremely fragmented, opaque, manual, filled with shady characters, time-intensive and the antithesis to Apple’s privacy-first PR campaign — as in, you should expect your phone number to be shared with millions of cold callers.
After exhausting every blue link on the first page of search results, finding flaws with every vendor, I decided to contact Marsik Moving, the local movers we had used in Seattle. They replied to emails quickly and were good bang for the buck when we moved apartments a couple years ago. I trusted them.
Marsik couldn’t do the cross-country move themselves but had a partner in Florida that could. They were called Perfect Van Lines. I spoke with their rep on the phone, and he said it would take 2-3 weeks.
An ideal timeline would have looked like this:
Day 1: They confirm that the truck is loaded with our stuff.
Day 3: “Hey Pedro, just a heads up the truck is on the road. There are a couple of jobs between Seattle and Miami, but we’re on track to get you your things on time.”
Day 12: “Pedro, expect a call from the driver next week to give you an exact day and time.”
Day 20: Pedro gets his things, and drinks a lemonade and eats some cookies as the movers unload, unpack and re-assemble his furniture. Pedro tips the movers and is generally in a good mood because he only had to sleep on an air mattress for a couple nights. His wife is thrilled to have her postcard collection, handcrafted chopsticks from Japan with little bunnies on them and large suitcases of shoes.
What actually happened is far too draining to type out, let alone read, so below is a condensed summary:
Day 1: They confirm that the truck is loaded with our stuff ***and that they are taking it to their warehouse in Kent, WA because they are waiting for the truck to come***.
(also) Day 1: Me: oh, interesting!
Day 10: In an innocent email exchange intended to be a status check, I learn that April 10, the day I expect my things to arrive in Miami, is actually the FADD. [In case you’re highly ignorant and couldn’t infer what FADD is when a moving company customer service rep repeats it to you, it is the First Available Date of Delivery, aka the earliest possible date that my stuff will leave Seattle (well, Kent…potato tomato).]
(also) Day 10: Me: Wow, that’s fucking stupid of them! At least now they understand how urgent the move is.
Day 30: It is now 1-2 weeks delayed from when I wanted to receive my stuff. “Well, sorry, it hasn’t shipped yet, it is hard finding a driver and fuel prices are high. But we will credit you $20 per day that the delivery is late.” (Spoiler alert: the retroactively applied fine print behind this verbal offer is that we are capping it at 10 days.)
Day 60: My wife and I are relieved that weeks ago, we decided to buy a new mattress and bed frame. Incredibly, we have lived off a silverware set of: two forks, two knives and no spoons. We are so delirious in the fog of war that we celebrate behind the backs of restaurant workers we duped into giving us a third set of plastic spoon-knife-fork sets when we get take-out. Suckers! By now we have accumulated enough plastic forks and knives to supply the raw materials for a child’s bicycle .
Day 90: We buy tickets to go to Seattle and take our stuff from the warehouse ourselves. Of course, on the day of our flight, they tell me the truck is about to be loaded up. I demand them to FaceTime me to prove it, and they do. (In a memorable, sociopathic EQ gaffe, the mover smiles on video, maybe expecting me to be smiling and apparently picking up on none of my emotional cues in our 20 previous phone calls). We fly to Seattle anyway but cut our trip short because our stuff will be in Miami “in two days”. They claim to have paid extra for an express carrier – oh no woe is they, the poor moving company that is now over two months late on their promise.
Day 104: When my wife and I are once again told on the phone, at 5pm on a Friday, that they actually can’t deliver it today (they were supposed to deliver at 2pm today, guaranteed), we irrationally decide to take action by driving to a truck stop in Davie, FL, an hour away from Miami, a location that a sloppy Arizona-based dispatch guy (??) let slip on the phone with us a few days earlier. We have basically become the kids in Stranger Things, when they stupidly wander into the dangerous lab and weird bad stuff happens. Incredibly, we find their trailer and cross-check it with the DOT numbers we found online on a website that reminded me of a PowerPoint I made in 7th grade, roughly the time when WordArt peaked in usage. My wife wants to camp overnight to make sure they don’t leave the premises, but I extinguish that fire by recommending she google “truck stop crime”. We go home and get a friendly Davie police officer to demand to the moving company on the phone that they deliver our SHIT by Monday.
Day 105 (which is a Saturday): For some extra firepower, I ask a close friend of mine who is an attorney to send them a demand letter on legal letterhead threatening to sue them unless they deliver our stuff by Monday. “[They] have 2 days.”
Day 107: They tell us whoops they actually can’t deliver it but we can come pick it up in Davie and take it ourselves in a U-Haul. Which funny enough, we had been proposing for weeks but now they think it’s acceptable. So we channel our inner Russ and spend the next 55 hours of our waking, non-dayjob existence performing U-Haul, unpacking and decorating activities (aka the worst kind of activities).
Day 108 / Coda: Learning: when it seems like shady people are taking advantage of you, lawyer up.
[The anecdote is now over, and your head is probably spinning, and the rest of this will make more sense if you re-read the first two paragraphs]
Bad stuff will happen to us – it is inescapable. Picture dark clouds constantly floating above our heads, which calculate the probability of any particular event occurring. The clouds evaporate and re-spawn, mimicking something naturally occurring but much faster and, well, invisible. Say you’re on a flight:
There’s a 3% chance of moderate-high turbulence on my flight, which could cause a disastrous coffee spill over my laptop. The captain announces we are “heading into some weather”, upping the probability to 7%. I hold my cup. As we escape the weather and begin to descend, the chances of me dying in the next five minutes actually increase slightly, because a disproportionate amount of accidents occur on the landing.
Ok, so we have these dark probability clouds. And there are infinity of them. The vast majority disappear and expire worthless, since each cloud represents a discrete event among a universe of possibilities and low-probability events, by definition, don’t usually play out. (By the way, we landed and I didn’t die). And some variant of the expired one is reborn instantly, and so forth.
A cruel, never-ending Bayesian nightmare.
This dark cloud framework is a morbid one, to be sure. Focusing on it as you live your day to day is a recipe for unhappiness. But there are happy frameworks, too. An obvious one is to simply take the inverse of the previous paragraphs and imagine bright probability clouds of good things that may happen. A Bayesian daydream of riding a unicorn through flowery meadows, if you will.
A more succinct happy framework, one that became painfully salient to me amidst the cross-country moving saga, is captured in three words: “scarcity brings clarity”.
As we wondered if our possessions were long gone, if we were totally scammed, it became apparent to me that most of those possessions don’t matter. At the risk of sounding overly cheesy1, I won’t spell out why.
But what if our possessions were very meaningful, and we did end up losing them?
I think a potential route one can take in these situations of relative scarcity is to think about what deeper meaning those possessions represented. Maybe wearing my fuzzy Miami Dolphins slippers brought me peace; maybe having a particular painting hanging on the wall helped shape my worldview.
The new gap in my life will force me to reorient, to learn another route that replaces the abstract “meaning” I had lost in those possessions. Rather than dwell on the physical things themselves (which I can’t replace anyway), I focus on deriving meaning from those things.
The experience of having to solve this scarcity problem in real life — crucially, not a thought experiment, but a production environment, where the weird juices in your gut spark a chain reaction via neurons that permeate the thoughts in your brain — is one that results in positive change to your life. It may not be a practical, immediately accessible lesson. It may not necessarily bring you closer to meaning at a conscious level. But it is a new, human experience, that special type of experience which has no substitute.
Scarcity brings clarity.
(Also, fuck my movers.)
Paradoxically, I am willing to admit I thought about making a lactose intolerance joke here #metacheese
I thank you for including my (three standard deviations out of ) demographic in your distribution. I'm sorry (if not surprised) that you moving experience blew. I guess the reason any of us continue to read a blog is because even if you don't agree with everything, at least it is well-written. Thanks so much for that, since it is "hen's teeth" on the blogosphere.
Scarcity does bring (breed) clarity is true. When looking at the situation in Europe/Ukraine,
(I think it was) Kissinger's quote: "No revolution ever started with a full stomach" drives the point home. No Oil or Nat Gas, no cap on the price, no money left over to feed your family. Stark choice this (rapidly approaching) winter.
Economics, despite the appellation of 'the dismal science' is, at its heart, the study of distribution of scarce resources.