In my previous article titled So You Hate Your Job, I said,

When you feel forced into a decision to take a job, it means you need to seriously look at the negatives of not taking the job. My Thinking Labber joked about being homeless if he didn’t work, but homelessness is no joke. If you really need the money to avoid foreclosure, you need to seriously look at what happens in your life if you don’t take the job.

 

It is not fun to look at the worst-case scenario. But this is part of accepting reality. Your choices have consequences, and in order to make sure you make the best choice possible, you need to look at any predictable negative consequences in harsh detail. You need to do this so that you can see clearly the value of having some but any job.

This raised some questions with readers.

Doesn’t analyzing negatives stop you from orienting to values?

No! It’s a necessary part of the process. Orienting to values consists of looking at the whole situation at once in terms of all of the values you could be acting to gain and/or keep.

When you’re feeling conflict over a decision, you are confused over how to sort out which option is best. Every alternative has some positives and some negatives. You feel desire for the positives and aversion to the negatives. But how do you weigh them? They are incommensurable.

Before you can make a decision, you need to get all of the relevant information into the same currency. An advantage on one side represents a disadvantage on the other, and vice versa.

You could look at everything in terms of the disadvantages — the negatives — and choose the one that minimizes the negatives. That has been dubbed the “maxi-min,” and it’s a prescription for mediocrity and giving up on your dreams and ambitions. The least bad option is typically the one with the fewest risks, the fewest challenges, and the most familiarity.

Ayn Rand analyzed the “maxi-min” approach in her article, “An Untitled Letter” (in Philosophy: Who Needs It) and offered an alternative:

[I]n long-range issues I choose that alternative whose best possible outcome is superior to the best possible outcome of the others. “You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.” (Atlas Shrugged.)

This focus on the best possible outcome is especially important when you consider long-range issues, such as anything concerning your productive work. But it requires figuring out what the best possible outcome is.

And that is something you do not know until you have analyzed the negatives. The negatives are threats of some kind and you need to see exactly what values they threaten. Often the fear triggered by the threat is so intense, it feels like the issue is obvious. But it’s not.

Often, the threats are wildly distorted by exaggeration and defensive motivation. Until you look at them carefully, you literally don’t know the values that are threatened and so you can’t make an objective decision about what (if anything) to do about it and which alternative is better.

For example, I recently felt some resistance to doing my final hour of work in the day. “I’m too tired” was what I said to myself. But I know that I need to investigate that, even though it seems obviously true. Surprise, surprise. The actual truth was that I was feeling some lower back pain. I took a Tylenol, filled an ice pack, and did my hour of work with no problem.

In that case, I found a way to mitigate the negative, so it became a non-issue. Sometimes you can’t mitigate the negative, but you may decide that the positives of an option make it worth dealing with the negatives.

For example, remodeling your house is wildly disruptive and expensive. You either need to move out (even more expensive and disruptive) or you need to deal with workmen and dust and non-working parts of your home. And regardless, there are hundreds of little chores that the owner has to do when remodeling — it can’t all be delegated to the contractor. Plus you need to supervise the contractor, and you may not know how to do that. These negatives could cause you to dread the idea of renovating the house. No one issue is a showstopper, but taken together they are formidable negatives.

But if the payoff is worth it, if the new design will have so much benefit to you that it’s your top priority, then you jump in and find a way to manage the effort in as positive a way as possible.

In other words, you may choose an option that involves huge negatives and considerable fear and dread — but you’ll do it because the value at stake is so big it’s worth it. You’ll need to draw on your courage to take the plunge, and develop any resilience needed to handle the negatives as they arise. But you’ll do it in the name of the best within you and the future you want to create.

Aren’t the values at stake obvious as soon as you identify the negatives?

No, the values at stake are not always obvious — in part because the negatives are often exaggerated.

To go back to the example of hating your job, suppose that when you ask yourself why you hate it, you tell yourself, “It’s wage slavery.”

“Wage slavery” is a bizarre socialist anti-concept that would totally distort your thinking.

Slaves were beaten when they didn’t want to work. Their feet were cut off when they tried to run away. They could be sold at any time to another master who lived far away — and therefore could not maintain family relationships. They were forcibly prevented from learning to read, and if they did learn to read, they were severely punished if not killed. Etc. Etc. Etc.

No employee of a company is a slave. Employees trade a value (their work) for another value (money). You might wish you had a more reasonable boss or a better salary, but it is in no way slavery and it is a ridiculous exaggeration to think of it that way. If you do think of it that way, it distorts the value comparison.

The real negatives that correspond to so-called “wage slavery” are things like:

• not as much free time for myself as I’d like
• don’t have as big a budget as I’d like
• spend time with people I don’t like that much

These are mild negatives, which you can deal with. Everyone would like more free time, more money, and more time with their favorite people. But it’s just not the earthshattering issue that it feels like when you insert the word “slavery.”

Can’t you just name all of the values you want without actually introspecting threat-oriented emotions?

The negatives trigger emotions — and that’s a feature. The threat-oriented emotions are particularly useful for identifying defense values and defensive motivation. If there is a compulsive quality to the emotion, it almost always concerns a “defense value” and/or “anti-value.” If that’s the case, you not only don’t know what is good for you, you are motivated to do something that is not good for you.

For example, suppose you experience an intense fear of disapproval. It seems that you want approval very, very badly. This may be true, but it reflects distorted motivation that is slowly destroying your soul.

When you feel a compulsion to get approval, it comes from a secondhanded approach to life, one in which what other people think is more important than what you, yourself, judge to be true, good, and important. That inversion is truly self-destructive and it stops you from developing the knowledge, values, and skills that make you a happy, productive person who can and does pursue his dreams.

If you notice that you’re craving approval, you have a chance to untangle some secondhanded motivation that is holding you back. You never actually need approval. Figuring out why you don’t need approval goes a long way to building confidence to act on your own judgment. Every time you do this thinking, you develop some emotional resilience. Over time, you will no longer be afraid of a pseudo-threat like “disapproval.”

It can also be telling if you’re desperate for approval from a particular person. This is always worth introspecting further. Usually it means you want the other person to be different from who they are. That is always a mistake. You don’t have control over other people. It is freeing to realize that you don’t control the other person, and your choice is whether to have a relationship with the person as he or she is, or not.

Finally, as you do the analysis, you will see that approval can be a small legitimate positive. There can be times when you admire and respect someone else’s judgment. Thus, you ask them to judge your work, hoping for approval. But approval is just a fringe benefit in these cases. What you really want is to learn from the other person. Even if they disapprove of you, you can learn a lot from their feedback. It’s still worth it to get feedback, even if you don’t get approval. This, too, helps you untangle the hold that approval can have on your emotions.

The bottom line here is simple: Analyze the negatives. Identify them. Never ignore them. If they are part of the reality you are living in, then you need to know how to gain your values in this world. Carefully analyzing the negatives is critical to finding a value-oriented way forward in your life.