The Disappointment Algorithm
On the quiet cost of trying to keep everyone happy.
When you feel overwhelmed, it’s not just that you don’t know what to do. You also worry about perpetually disappointing people. You do your best, and you know it’s not enough.
So you experiment with different patterns of triage.
Pattern one: cyclical. Today I will disappoint my parents, tomorrow I will disappoint my partner, the next day I will disappoint my boss.
Pattern two: relationship management. Status check—who needs me most right now? Who’s been waiting longest? Who will be the most frustrated if I keep ignoring them?
Pattern three: avoidance. Don’t open the email. Don’t check the text. If I don’t see it, technically I haven’t disappointed anyone yet.
(My personal favorite is #3.)
You are essentially trying to keep up with an algorithm of disappointment.
But just like any terrible social media algorithm—the ones that keep you watching short videos you don’t need to see—the disappointment algorithm is not good for you. Because ultimately the person you disappoint the most is yourself.
As we’ve noted before: caring for yourself is not selfish. Or if you prefer, it’s okay to be selfish! Among other benefits, it will give you more capacity to care for others.
You Can’t Have it All, Edition 27
A long time ago I wrote a post on the “four burners theory“ that continues to bring Google visitors to my site years later.1 The post referenced a David Sedaris article that used the analogy of a stove with four burners:
“One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. The gist is that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”
When I first shared the post, I got a lot of comments from people who found it disturbing. Which is understandable! The idea that we can’t do everything is indeed distressing. Life would be much easier and simple if we could “have it all.”
Isn’t that what it comes down to? If we had unlimited time, energy, and attention, we could make everyone happy and still keep up our Duolingo streaks and plan a solo trip to Japan. Alas, all of those resources—time, energy, attention—are severely limited.
So we are constantly disappointing people (including ourselves), as we negotiate between competing responsibilities and demands for attention. We know we aren’t good enough; we wish we were!
This is especially hard for caregivers of all kinds, including parents of young children. And it’s also hard for those who tend to put other people’s needs before their own. Do that long enough and—look out—one day you realize you’ve forgotten about your own needs altogether.
Getting Back to the Disappointment Algorithm
One weird thing about algorithms: they run in the background whether you’re paying attention or not. You can spend years of your life optimizing for the disappointment algorithm—shuffling who gets short-changed today versus tomorrow—without ever noticing that YOU never come up in the rotation.
Also, the algorithm only knows about people who complain. It doesn’t ping you when you skip your morning walk, cancel your doctor’s appointment, or stop calling the friend you like to talk to. You don’t disappoint yourself loudly. You disappoint yourself in silence, over years.
So maybe the question isn’t “how do I get better at triage?” Maybe it’s “what would it look like to stop running this algorithm at all?”
See also
Funny how these things go. Sometimes the most random work ends up enduring far more than the work you put great effort into. I guess the lesson is: try more things and see what happens.
That’s a really powerful thought, that the algorithm only surfaces people who complain, so you end up disappointing yourself silently. That’s going to stay with me.
Here's how the "disappointment algorithm" showed up in my life:
I was convinced that I SHOULD be able to keep all four burners going (while juggling chainsaws), if I only had the right productivity system and was optimized enough.
As a result, I always thought I was letting myself down, and the people around me, because I couldn't get my sh** together enough to make everybody happy and get everything done. I also assumed that no matter which choice I made, I was disappointing the other side of that decision.
So I would beat myself up, spend days delaying on making a decision, and eventually getting to the point where no matter WHICH decision I made, I was unhappy with it!
These days, I try to avoid this trap. I make the decision sooner than later, and accept that I'll never be able to get it all done, because that's impossible. Cheers man!