Whenever I would travel as a kid, I had this obsession with making my suitcase as light as possible. I thought of it as an act of manliness: taking too many clothes was for girls; boys carried only what was strictly needed. Although not traveling with unnecessary stuff is in general good advice, the reality is that I spent way too much precious time (as I always packed at the last minute) trying to decide which pieces of clothing were essential, and many times I ended up underestimating my clothing needs.
One day, as I was packing in a hurry and trying to eliminate some shirts I had selected, my mom quipped: “Who are you trying to impress, the check-in lady?” (“Check-in lady” was the gendered term my mom used to refer to airport personnel who work at the check-in counter.) This really struck a chord with me because I had never stopped to think about who I was trying to impress with all my efficient packing. I knew it was part of an image I was trying to project, but exactly to whom had never crossed my mind.
It also got me thinking about how much time I would spend enjoying the potential praise I could get from carrying little luggage versus how much time I would actually spend enjoying the contents of my suitcase. Packing few pieces of clothing would certainly avoid one or two mocking comments from friends about how much luggage I was bringing, but that was it. Most of a trip’s time would actually be filled by using clothes and going to places, not carrying luggage around.
I also realized that this kind of mistake, in which people fail to adequately weigh their need for social validation with competing desires, was much more prevalent than I first thought, and permeated decisions much more important and with much more severe consequences than how much luggage to carry.
The most obvious example is career decisions. When applying for a job, you may think that it would be cool to tell people you work at Morgan Stanley or McKinsey (assuming you think these institutions are prestigious, which from my experience most college undergraduates do). But how much time will you spend telling people you work at Morgan Stanley versus the time you will actually spend, well… working at Morgan Stanley? (I am not claiming that working at Morgan Stanley is inherently good or bad. It’s up to you to decide that; in fact, this article is completely Morgan Stanley agnostic.)
With this in mind, I created what I call “the check-in lady test”. It simply consists of asking yourself “How much time will I actually spend enjoying the praise?” before making major decisions. It’s a rather simple heuristic, but it helps with answering a more fundamental question: “Should I care about what other people think?” To even ask this second question seems weird as most of the “intellectual” debate around merely concludes that you shouldn’t, period. This always felt weird to me because it was very different from how people actually behave. On one side, you have motivational coaches and philosophers saying people should be themselves and ignore what other people think, while on the other side you have people actually living their lives and caring very much about what other people think.
But asking yourself “How much time will I actually spend enjoying the praise?” and maybe even “How big of a praise will it actually be?” allows you to accept that you do, in fact, care a lot about what other people think. To deny that causing a good impression is a powerful personal motivator, that it plays out in various circumstances, and that it is almost always at the back of our minds when making decisions, is to deny our feelings altogether, which, paradoxically, goes against the coaches’ advice of following our innermost desires.
What you can do, instead, is to accept that which motivates you and to use the check-in lady test to adequately compare your desire for causing a good impression with other relevant desires. Instead of being ashamed of your need for social validation, you can control it so it doesn’t take over. And once you realize how little time for enjoyment social validation actually provides, you will probably start making better decisions.
For instance, you may have multiple reasons for wanting to do a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and one of these might be that you think it would be awesome to tell people that you are doing a Ph.D. in Neuroscience; that’s perfectly fair. But, using the check-in lady test, how does that compare to five or more years of dissecting mice’s brains, filing research grant submissions, and reading papers? If you don’t enjoy the daily work, the importance of impressing people at your significant other’s Christmas party kind of pales in comparison.
Notice that the check-in lady test also entails that in some circumstances it may be reasonable to do stuff to impress others. Spending a little extra on a nicer smartphone may make perfect sense because you carry your smartphone with you all the time, and most of the people you interact with will see it. You may get laughed at by sociology majors or materially detached hippies, but it is hard to argue it is an unwise decision — unless, of course, it is the sociology majors themselves that you want to impress. But spending that little extra on a nice laptop merely to impress others makes a little less sense, and on a nicer-looking air conditioner even less so.
Moreover, I believe that the kind of self-knowledge that you acquire by accepting your “futile” desires is much more useful than the pure denial of the self-help coaches. It provides you with a powerful tool for action: you can use vanity in favor of good endeavors. The perfect example is charity. Charitable work is not exactly the kind of work that appeals to our most immediate desires — unless your immediate desire is to impress someone at the charity auction. But as charity is both socially desirable and socially praised, you can use your need for social validation to motivate you into being more charitable. If boasting that you donated money is the fuel you need for that extra work, so be it. By aligning these “vain” incentives with other desirable goals, you gain much more than if you simply deny them. And obviously, this doesn’t stop at charity: it can help you exercise, save money, write a book, or go after that job at Morgan Stanley.
Once again, luggage offers a great illustration. If you are planning a trip that will require you to carry your luggage around a lot of the time, it makes sense to put your big-bag-shame into action and pack a light backpack. What you are doing is merely aligning your social incentives with other equally valid desires.
I admit there is a danger here, which is to get carried away by social praise and forget to put your actions into perspective. It can lead you into making things that are not socially desirable — or not optimally so. For example, posting on LinkedIn that you were extra nice to a job candidate versus posting that you contributed to an organization that distributes mosquito nets to prevent the spread of malaria may get you the same amount of praise and likes, but one is much more socially desirable than the other.
Still, although the risk exists that once you accept these “futile” desires you may end up letting them take the wheel, I think this is even more likely to happen if you merely try to repress them. You will start creating rationalizations in your head about why you’re actually doing things, to a point where you may end up convincing yourself of these reasons. Self-delusion, not surprisingly, is much more dangerous than acceptance.
The only way to fully control the process is to be conscious and accepting of your desires, which will allow you to use them as motivation when it is reasonable to do so. And if you are afraid of getting carried away, you can always use the check-in lady test to put yourself in line, as it allows you to put social incentives into perspective. In the end, it reduces your risk of ending up with no underwear to wear because you wanted to impress airport personnel.
Thanks to Arthur Alberti, Felipe Germanos, Frederico Porchat, François Boris, Paula Sampaio, Sambhav Bhandari, Vanessa Zogbi, and Victor Saraiva for reading drafts of this.
Stop trying to impress airport personnel
People want to work at Morgan Stanley or McKinsey because our brains are wired to value status over even happiness. A young person can anticipating being able to "wear" the status of being a McKinsey Man for the rest of his career, even if he is only asked about it occasionally.
Status has clear utility for all the other basic motivations that people have, and so the cost of procuring it (100-hour-weeks, constant business travel, PPT hell, up-or-out pressure, alienation from the work, potential moral injury) is worth it. The McKinsey Man is unlikely to ever want for income, job prospects, romantic partners, or flattering bios. This reward *may* even be worth future risks: divorce, alienation from children, deteriorating health, ennui, guilt, etc.
In light of this, do you try to pack efficiently to impress the gate worker, really? Or could it be because of the addictive feeling of savvy that confers... status? Of being one of those business travelers effortlessly clicking through their airport routine like George Clooney's character in "Up in the Air?" Not one of those common rubes sweating under a bag they overpacked and underground the publish shaming of justifying it's sinful girth!