Wednesdays in the itsnotmyfault household are a bit hectic. itsnotmrsfault works late Wednesday night, so on top of my usual cooking and cleaning, I’m also giving all baths and milk bottles and brushing teeth and putting everyone to bed. And, since it’s midweek, all the stuff that I forgot to pick up on the weekend grocery trip has started to chafe at us, so sometimes she makes an extra Target run, meaning she might get home at 9:30, which is inconveniently right at the middle of the war for bedtime for our oldest. He will not hesitate to use the new arrival as a convenient excuse to squeeze an extra 15 minutes out of the day by saying hello and getting hugs and talking about his day, and trying to switch who is in charge of getting him into bed.
This week has been especially hectic due to some tournaments (I won the equivalent of $50, plus I squeezed them for an invite to this weekend’s tournament) and hospital visits and birthday parties and power outages, so things are generally a mess around here.
And so, last night, a Wednesday night, amidst the groceries and the clutter and the struggle for bedtime, the day’s breastmilk got left on the kitchen counter instead of going into the fridge.
Today, Thursday morning, we considered it too far gone to use. We have plenty of extra in the freezer, so we’re not in a pinch, but it’s more or less the same feeling as if you spend all day writing a big paper and then your computer crashes and you lose everything (or so I’m told). A whole day’s work is just gone.
After this, mrsfault angrily stormed around the house, cleaning everything in sight and making stern demands about how things should be done (trash to be taken out daily, and everything to be cleaned up on weekends). The time is 6:45 AM Thursday morning, and she has indicated that she has a meeting at 8:30, which is already much earlier than our typical schedule.
As she pulls out a can of Comet and start scrubbing the bathtub, I think to myself “she’s tilted out of control”.
“Tilted” is one of these gamer lingo terms that are an integral part of the way I perceive the world, but I’m very aware of how near-universal it must be as a concept. If you’re in a female-dominated hyper-liberal space like I am, the closest analogue would be something like “emotionally disregulated” or “triggered” or “having a panic response/anxiety attack” or maybe just “fucking fuming” or “I literally can not”.
When someone is tilted, they are mad, but the more important thing is that they’re upset by either a misplay or by an opponent’s luck, and the fact that they’re upset is likely to be causing them to play badly. They’re making reckless or stupid decisions that will cause them to “feed” or “get owned”, often motivated by a sense that they need to go out there and reclaim their honor after being humiliated by their mistakes.
If you’re trying to get somewhere at 8:30, the best way to do that is to focus ONLY on what you need to do to get out the door, not to start scrubbing the bathtub.
But, because arguing with a teammate who’s tilted is also an easy way to get them more tilted and REALLY throw the game, I just continue making lunches, packing bags, and washing dishes.
Later on, after calming down a little, mrsfault explains that it’s not just that the trash wasn’t taken out last night, or that the milk spoiled, or that there’s still leftover clutter from things that are kind of out of our control, it’s etc. etc.
However, she continued, cleaning the house and the bathtub is still the right play for two reasons. The first is that the milk was lost amidst the clutter. No clutter → No lost milk. If she doesn’t want to lose the milk ever again, she can just clean now and have the house clean and then the milk won’t get lost. The second is that cleaning feels good. It’s very refreshing to be able to just do something that takes 5 or 10 minutes and has obvious and immediate results. A visible, viscerally felt, immediate change, and a sense of control.
Ah, I get it. “Use your life total as a resource”.
I think I explained it poorly to her, because as she was heading out, she said “I’ll try to manage my resources better”, which is very nearly the opposite of what I was trying to say.
“Use your life total as a resource” is a stock phrase in Magic the Gathering that is mostly used for those who are learning to play a style of deck called “Control”. In Magic, you start the game with 20 life points, and if you drop down to 0, you lose. Typically, when playing “Control” style decks, your opponent will try to put a creature onto the battlefield, and you have control over whether or not they can. So, you will have to decide “do I have to deal with this now or can I deal with it more efficiently later?” If it’s a small creature, you can let it get onto the battlefield and even hit you and reduce your life points a few times before doing anything about it. New players might be tempted to keep their life as high as possible, dealing with everything right away to try and stay at 20 life points. Veterans use their life total as a resource: If I only have one “kill any creature” spell in my hand right now, I don’t think this creature is worth using it on. I can afford to lose 6 life getting attacked by it, because having my “kill any creature” spell in hand for something bigger and scarier is worth 6 life to me, and I’m likely to find a “kill a small creature” spell soon.
The thing is, there are a lot of resources to be managed, and you have to manage all of them in a very Anna Karenina way. Every game you win, you’ve successfully managed every resources, but every game you lose, you might’ve reached zero on a different resource. In the game you might be juggling your life total, your cards in hand, the amount of mana you have each turn, how many cards left in your deck, and a bunch of other things, but you also have to juggle a bunch of hidden meta-resources. Most notably, I have a difficult time playing control decks because I play too slowly, and you have to finish your games in a certain amount of time.
I bring this all up because maybe the resource you’re most low on isn’t kill spells, or life total, or time. You’re low on your tilt meter. In a way, the veteran control player is asking “how many life points is my ‘kill anything’ spell worth right now” when they decide whether or not to use it on the first creature the opponent plays. When playing life, sometimes you have to ask “how many minutes is it worth to not get completely tilted if I lose my milk again”?
One of the things I liked most about playing competitive magic was that back in the good ol’ days of all-day tournaments, was that you did have to manage all those meta-resources. Sometimes a quick loss in round 5 felt like a good thing rather than a complete thrashing, because you had 20 minutes free to eat lunch and could beat the other players to the line. You know, the other players that didn’t get completely trounced. After every round you would see a crowd of players just outside the door, hands still shaking from their exhilarating win or loss, wolfing down cigarettes to try and regain their composure.
The Big Short is a great movie for all kinds of reasons, but one little thing that I liked about it was that it depicted the good traders as not only very human, but also as very self-aware of how human they were and actively take steps to correct the human biases they have.
I like when Vinny says (at 7:40 of this clip) that “You want him to be right”, and goes back and forth about how easily blinded you can be by that kind of bias, but the underlying truth will not be effected by the emotional layer.
I like when (at 1:30 of this clip) all of the traders get steaming mad and yell at Jared for pushing the price up on something that should be worth less, and he sort of calmly lets them get their anger out and resume the rational decision-making 20 seconds later as if nothing had happened at all.
I often think about this scene, and how a “naive rationalism” might be one in which feelings don’t matter, or don’t exist. A “realist rationalism” is a wiser one, in which the feelings exist, they matter, and they must be accounted for. You have to purposefully counteract them if they pull you in the wrong direction, or let yourself feel mad for the 20-30 seconds of yelling, then ask “are you done yet?” before taking a deep breath and making the correct choices and taking the correct actions.
I like when (at 4:20 of this clip) Burry seriously thinks about a pitched hypothesis that he’s wrong about the valuations, turns it down saying “Sure, it’s possible I’m wrong, I just don’t know how”, but as he tries to walk away, his mind involuntarily assesses that statement and he is compelled to add that “I guess when someone’s wrong, they never know how” (or else they wouldn’t be doing something that’s wrong).
Anyway, to put it simply, if the goal is to get to your 8:30 on time, the resource to be managed is time, because that’s what you’re short on. As you later explained, the real goal is to have a happy and productive life, and it’s not fun to tilt out of control, so everyone should just deal with the 20 seconds of yelling before resuming the rational decision-making, and it’s worth letting the 8:30 chip away at your life total a little bit if the real resource is tilt-meter.
I still think that because I cooked yesterday, most of the cleanup could take place tonight when I’ve got less dishes, instead of this morning, so the sequencing has still been kind of misplayed, but I’m not playing the same deck as you, if we’re even playing the same game.