L'esprit de l'escalier
In a culture that prizes fast decision-making, comfort with hesitation is a superpower. Pause when agitated or doubtful. Give yourself time to get to the bottom of the stairs.
Conclusion First: Sometimes we can’t think of the right thing to say until after the moment to say it has passed. We reach the bottom of the stairs after being insulted before we can think of a rejoinder. Our brains are wired to make this indecision feel like agony. But contrary to popular thinking (and popular books), our attachments to fluency and fast decision-making can hurt us when we’re in a novel situation.
Around the time I turned 40, I lost my mind a little bit. It was hard to know at the time if it was my age or the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The two things I felt like I lost were my ability to make quick decisions— knowing what I was going to do without really thinking about it—and my penchant for planning.
As it turns out, it was the pandemic that had killed my penchant for planning. The uncertainty of, frankly, everything made it hard for me to commit to the future. Out here on the other side of COVID, I’m back to my old antics. I have a detailed spreadsheet in progress about our summer 2024 vacation, a full calendar of summer activities mapped for the kids, and my joy in budgeting and tracking our finances is renewed.
Decision-making is another story. The pandemic was my initiation into the world of the hesitant. It started with deciding what to do about schools. I could see all the pros and cons of both remote learning and going into the school building. It was agonizing, and I still feel a bit sick when I think back on the summer of 2020 when the decision had to be made.
The end of the pandemic didn’t stop me from being more hesitant than I was when I was younger. And although my newfound propensity to pause has been maddening at times, I’m coming around to the idea that it might be a superpower forged in the wisdom of age.
Books, liquor, and clothes!
Join us at Shop Alice today, April 25 from 4 to 6 PM CT for a book party and spring fling to celebrate a Dog’s Book of Wisdom and fabulous women’s fashions.
A portion of the proceeds will support Proverbs 12:10 Animal Rescue here in Nashville.
Afterwit
We have Denis Diderot, the French encyclopedist, to thank for the whimsical (obscure?) title of today’s post. If you’ve ever thought of the perfect reply too late, you’ve experienced l'esprit de l'escalier or the spirit of the staircase.
In his essay, The Paradox of the Actor, Diderot recounts the story of attending a dinner party during which a remark left him speechless in the moment. Yet by the time he “reached the bottom of the stairs” (effectively when he left the party), he came to his senses again and thought of the perfect response.
Diderot describes himself as a sensitive man who was taken off guard. Confused by the party banter, he took some time to gather his thoughts. This is entirely reasonable. Yet our culture looks upon this type of fumble and unfairly assigns labels like “slow” or “dimwitted” to the fumbler. Of course, Diderot was, by all accounts, an intellectual of the first class.
Fluency Bias
We all yearn for the fluency of the quick wit—we want to be the guy with the snappy retort or at least be in his audience. Think of the dialogue in your favorite TV show or movie. It’s so satisfying because everyone says the perfect thing at the perfect time, without hesitation. We are naturally drawn to smooth-talkers: charming flirts, adept salespeople, and winking politicians with polished pitches.
Psychologists have shown that the subjective ease with which we can process information affects how much we like or value the information. Fluent statements sound more truthful. Clear images are more attractive. Researchers have even found that the ease of pronouncing a company’s name and stock ticker symbol can improve stock performance.
In his 2005 book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell introduces his audience to the concept of “thin-slicing.” He characterizes this brain function as the ability to use limited information gleaned from limited experience to come to a fast decision. Gladwell concludes that many spontaneous decisions made with thin-sliced data are often as good as or even better than carefully considered ones. Quick decisions are not undermined by the analysis paralysis induced by the information overload inherent to our era.
Yet Gladwell points out that quick decisions are potentially corrupted by our personal prejudices and stereotypes. He offers the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo as one horrifying example of rapid, intuitive judgment gone wrong.
So while quick decision-making has its place, we have likely trumpeted its virtues too loudly. It’s time we learn to hesitate.
Buying Time
One of my favorite parenting books is Michelle Icard’s Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen. In one of the early chapters she explains that raising tweens and young teens requires a whole new bag of tricks, totally different from what you’ve mastered as a parent to younger children. Her nine tactics could be boiled down to “don’t get overhyped about anything.” In other words, react slowly, decide slowly, be OK with silence. This advice is contrary to the quick-reacting, punishment doling, lecture-heavy, decisive parenting of previous generations.
Icard explains that the tween/teen brain is undergoing the fundamental changes that take it from being a child brain and to an adult brain. During this 10- to 14-year period (!), the prefrontal cortex has pretty much gone on vacation. And the always hyped, always emotional, forever down-to-clown amygdala is running the show.
One of the best tools you can deploy in a fraught situation (and many situations with teens are fraught) is to take your time. Icard writes, “...if your tween snaps at you for not packing the right kind of sandwich in their lunch, you might say something like, ‘Hmmm, I’m not even sure how to respond to that. I’ll get back to you in a few hours once I’ve had time to think.’ The idea that you would not snap back, and you would go off to consider your next move, should frighten your kid right out of their selfish stupor… Nothing is as effective at getting your child to slow down and think than a dramatic pause before delivering a verdict.”
The Agony of Indecision
Consider the agony of the teen whose mom or dad is mulling over their punishment for some infraction. We inflict the same agony on ourselves when we can’t decide. But just as the teen is forced to use a little bit of their prefrontal cortex when they slow down and wait for a verdict, our brain is also doing something good for us when it can’t decide.
Scientists in several fields acknowledge that speed-accuracy trade-offs are inherent in many activities. Type too quickly and you make more mistakes. If the goal is accuracy, you’ll need to type more slowly. If the goal is to capture the gist of every idea that crosses your mind, be a speed demon and ignore all the red squiggly lines in your word processor.
When you feel the agony of indecision, that’s often your brain signaling that this is something important to get right. Your brain is pumping the breaks on speed as a trade-off for accuracy. As much as we hate a “flip-flopper” (sorry John Kerry), going back and forth is a sign that the brain is weighing evidence (or even still gathering it). It’s also a sign of maturity (ahem, age) that we are OK with living in a period of disfluency while we collect information and consider every angle before moving forward.
My husband and I are in such a place. He has a major decision to make about his career, and there is no obvious right path. Days go by when we think he will go one way. Then new information appears to make us consider another path. We are doing all we can to buy time and live in the agony of indecision. It’s pretty awful. Yet I think we will both feel better about whatever choice we make because we traded speed for accuracy. Hopefully we reach the metaphorical “bottom of the stairs” with the perfect reply.
“I have little control over myself and my moods. Chance has more power here than I. …I do not find myself in the place where I look; and I find myself more by chance encounter than by searching my judgment... If I erased every passage where this happens to me, there would be nothing left of myself.” — Montaigne
“I’m never at a loss about what to say because mostly I say nothing.” Margaret the Pug
You love each other and have two great kids, so what can go wrong? The foundation is solid.
Best of good fortune and wise counsel to you and your husband as he makes his decision.