ERPZ Stop Mugging. Start Learning.

Cost of Being Easy-going

If you're easy-going, and the story here sounds rather familiar to you; take comfort that you're on the right path and life is going to work out well for you.

When you were going out for a snack and your mum makes you run an errand to some supermarket further up the street to get some rice? Being easygoing you decided to agree and seeing that, your sister tells you to pass a parcel to her boyfriend who lives in the next street. You might as well, since you're not exactly carrying anything for now. You carry the bulky parcel and pass the snack shop, thinking you should get the snack later; you go up to your sister's boyfriend's place and ring the bell - no one answers.

You wonder why you even agreed to walk an extra 100m or so to get rice for your mum in the first place. You called your sister and she says you'll have to wait for about 10 minutes for her boyfriend to reach home so you decided to wait, now regreting that you didn't get the snack before arriving at the place. Her boyfriend comes, and took the parcel and tried to tip you but you kindly declined.

You reach the supermarket only to realise that there's only 10kg sized rice left on the shelves and your mum confirms that she'll need you to buy it anyways because there's no more rice at home. You lug the 10kg nylon sack and pass the snack store, drag the sack into the store to get your snack. The miser boss says he has no change and you will either have to sacrifice your change or walk away without the snack if you don't have the right amount. Only then, you realised you should have accepted the tip from your sister's boyfriend.

Back at home your mum and sister thank you, but you wonder if your efforts should have earned you much more than a word of thanks. The overpriced snack don't quite serve as consolation either.

I spent some time wondering, why do people who are easy-going always end up getting on the bad end of every deal while those fussy snobs always gets to go scot free from work, hassle, errands and trouble? I'm not exactly easygoing but I found that in any environment, relatively easygoing people almost always definitely end up doing the bulk of the work and suffer from the majority of necessary trouble.

Use a prop to vent it

I grew up in a family with a fussy sister who is picky about food, particular about cleanliness and extremely paranoid about people moving her stuff around. And most of the time, I'm 'forced' to give in, letting her eat the rare stuff she loves to eat (despite those being my favourites too) and making way on our common table for her stuff. Using her powerful tools of complaining, whining and sometimes weeping, she pushes work, chores and various little errands around and often over to me.

Yes, so why? It turns out that applying economic thinking about incentives works great on this matter. When you're easygoing, you have less incentives than others to push chores/work away to others; in other words, you would rather do the work yourself than spend the effort trying to find someone else to settle it. For those who are fussy and going all out to slack, they'd have more incentives to force someone else to take up the chore; they'd rather sacrifice a friendship, be unpopular amongst their friends and waste energy flaring up than to do the work themselves. There, you've got the equilibrium - the slacker spends his energy-emotion currency convincing the easygoing dude to do chore while the easygoing dude expends his energy-emotion currency to complete the task.

Alternative outcomes are usually worse off for both parties. In an event when the easygoing guy accidentally manages to push the chore to the slacker; the slacker ends up feeling frustrated, does a bad job, complain wildly, leaving the easygoing guy feeling guilty, and sad that he upset the slacker.

So if you're easygoing and wondering why you've taken over a chore or duty from your friend who needs to go on a date with his girlfriend, you know you're not entirely losing out.