“In The Short Run” Vol. 2, Issue 4. John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most famous economist of the 20th century, famously said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” The purpose of this series is to pose that in the short run, we are all alive, and economics can teach us to live well. (Issue 1; Issue 2; Issue 3)
Everyone has bad hair days. You can go to sleep with your hair perfectly normal and wake up with a tumbleweed on top of your head. To bring it closer to home for our bald friends, you can also go to sleep feeling great and wake up with so many aches that you’d think a train ran over your bed during the night. Your body tends toward disorder.
These examples illustrate a universal rule, namely, the second law of thermodynamics: everything tends toward entropy and disorder. Consider the kitchen – without constant cleaning it will become unruly. Destruction and chaos are irresistibly easier than creation and order, and they control the world like gravity.
But there are instances when destruction is actually more difficult than creation, and the rarity of these situations can often catch us by surprise and ensnare us in unfavorable circumstances. So before building one must consider the cost and ramifications of such an endeavor.
NPR’s Planet Money podcast recently detailed a perfect example of the difficulties of “unbuilding.” Baltimore is a shrinking city and outlying, abandoned houses only hurt the society. These egregious eyesores serve as hotbeds for crimes. Yet, to tear down just a single block of 17 abandoned houses cost Baltimore $700 thousand and took 8 years. Like repealing a government policy with concentrated beneficiaries, it’s difficult to “unbuild” houses.
It is likewise challenging to “unbuild” your schedule. About a month ago, I was chatting with a few college freshmen who were overwhelmed by the opportunities available at school. They wanted to do it all. Being only one year removed from their delirium, I understood their situation, but being on the other side of freshman year, I advised them to leave space in their schedules. It’s easy to add things to schedules throughout the year; it’s extremely difficult to bail on commitments.
Another example of the trials of “unbuilding” is budgeting. If you pack your budget tight with little to no room for error, unexpected expenses will bite your heel. There is always some hiccup of extra expense in a month. Cutting down a full budget to cover an expense will look like going hungry or sleeping through some very cold nights. Rather, it is easier to leave budget space to build extra expenses into.
Admittedly, these instances are rare. The much more common occurrence is something like writing a paper. Creating verse is considerably more difficult than editing it. But the concept of “unbuilding,” though manifested differently, can still ease the building process. When writing, an author has a host of words available to him. This can be overwhelming. Unbuilding your options by requiring a rhyme or (Twitter’s trademark) a mere 140 characters from yourself can actually simplify and magnify the writing process.
Finding pictures for these Odyssey articles was always the hardest part of writing. I would lose hours striving for the perfect picture. Fed up with the exhaustion, I unbuilt my options. I began saving photos from a daily blog I read and limited myself to those photos. Unbuilding was freeing. The stress of needing to find the perfect image evaporated, and I saved myself eons of time.
This entire discourse really centers around habits. Habits, while strenuous to build, are incredibly more difficult to break. Further, our habits define us. What we do, where we go, what we eat, how we speak – these all synergize to form our character. Our habits are taking us somewhere and, like a river, it is mighty hard to alter their course. So before you forge your habits, ask yourself: will I want to unbuild these later?
