In a long post mostly about a different issue, Zvi Mowshowitz writes:
I also strongly endorse that the default level of reliability needs to be much, much higher than the standard default level of reliability, especially in The Bay. Things there are really bad.
When I make a plan with a friend in The Bay, I never assume the plan will actually happen. There is actual no one there I feel I can count on to be on time and not flake. I would come to visit more often if plans could actually be made. Instead, suggestions can be made, and half the time things go more or less the way you planned them. This is a terrible, very bad, no good equilibrium. Are there people I want to see badly enough to put up with a 50% reliability rate? Yes, but there are not many, and I get much less than half the utility out of those friendships than I would otherwise get.
First of all, I’d like to say that nothing in my post should be construed as saying Zvi’s desire for reliable friends is invalid or wrong. It’s disappointing to expect a friend to come over and then they don’t. If you’re a busy person, on vacation or otherwise limited in time, a friend’s canceled plans may mean that you’ve missed out on an important opportunity to do something productive and/or fun. It is very reasonable to want to befriend people who will reliably show up places they said they will on time. However, I do want to explain why I myself am quite unreliable and how I benefit from a social norm in which this unreliability is acceptable. (We should also note that I have lived in the Bay for the majority of my adult, actually-socializing life, so I may be unfamiliar with the benefits of a non-flake lifestyle.)
I primarily get places through public transit and Uberpool. The Bay Area’s public transit system is really really good compared to public transit in most of the rest of the country (for one thing, it is possible to get places on it). However, our public transit is certainly inferior to, say, New York City’s. One of the ways this works is that sometimes, based on the Inscrutable Whim of the Train Gods, the train will choose to show up fourteen minutes late. Uberpool also has high variance in time estimates, because they have to pick up and drop off other people. What this means is that when I say “I will get there at such-and-such a time”, I mean “there is a bimodal distribution of times when I could show up which is centered around this time and probably has a standard deviation of like five to ten minutes.”
So there are ways I can fairly consistently show up on time. One is that I could take UberX wherever I’m going and eat the extra expense– although doing that consistently would trade off against my goal of using money responsibly. Another is that I can plan to show up on average ten or fifteen minutes before I’m supposed to show up, and then most of the time I will be on time. (This is what I do for doctors’ and therapists’ appointments.)
There are two problems with adopting the latter strategy in general. First, my time also has value! If it’s bad for me to show up ten minutes late because the person is waiting around being bored, then it is also bad for me to show up ten minutes early so I have to wait around and be bored. Second, in many cases, showing up early is just as inconvenient for others as showing up late. For instance, if a friend invited me over for dinner and I show up fifteen minutes early, they might be still in their bathrobe and really counting on that fifteen minutes to shove the floordrobe into the closet and take the garbage out. That would be considerably ruder than showing up fifteen minutes late (at least if you keep them posted), because at that point the food is probably only beginning to get cold.
(I guess I could arrive early and then hang out on a street corner until it was time for dinner but see above re: my time has value.)
In general, instead of trying to always show up before you said you would, I think the best strategy is to try to be early about as often as you are late, unless it is something where being early is much much better than being late (a theatrical production, a doctor’s appointment, a job interview) or vice versa (a party with lots of other invitees).
However, Zvi didn’t just talk about being on time: he also talked about flaking. My local corner of the Bay seems to have less of a flaking problem than his corner. I, a diagnosed agoraphobe, still manage to make the majority of the social events I agree to go to, and many people of my acquaintance make as much as ninety or ninety-five percent. (Maybe I am particularly charming and people don’t want to flake on me, or maybe I’m proactive and flake on them first.) But I think it is very useful that no one gets angry at me for flaking as much as I do.
I’m scared of leaving my house. This means that when I make social arrangements a lot of the time I won’t end up actually going to them because I will be too scared of leaving my house. Whether I’m going to have a good mental health day or a bad mental health day is hard to predict even a week in advance, because it depends on short-term triggers like whether I’ve fought with a close friend, whether the assholes across the street have decided to set off fireworks, whether a person has said something unpleasant about me on the Internet, whether I’ve been doing a good job of remembering that in spite of what my brain tells me doing things will make me feel better and not doing things will make me feel worse, and so on. So the only way I can achieve any sort of reliability in social arrangements is by not making them.
I do not want to not make social arrangements. Social isolation makes my mental health worse. And doing literally anything tends to make me less depressed. I am also informed that some people would occasionally like to talk to me [citation needed]. So therefore I have decided to make plans anyway, and push onto my friends the negative consequences of dealing with my flakiness.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me that one would object to this state of affairs and choose not to have me as a friend. (This is one of many good reasons why someone might not want to have me as a friend.) But I think before advocating for a complete shift in social norms one should consider the benefits the social norms already have to those participating in them.
Thing of Things 
I think Zvi and others have experienced levels of unreliability *way higher* than what you’re describing.
Another friend has described to me inviting a friend over from another part of the Bay, getting updates every few tens of minutes on the day-of, including *what route they should take* (because they hadn’t bothered to think of that in advance), and (hours after the planned visit start time, because of entirely foreseeable travel time) the visitor decided to give up & try for another day.
Overall I haven’t perceived you as unreliable at all, in part because you are fairly clear about what level of precision / reliability you are promising.
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I think I sometimes act somewhat like your friend’s friend in situations where I either have trouble assessing my own current ability to do stuff or I don’t really feel I can do stuff but I also think it is Wrong to Flake so I keep trying and then fail anyway in a much more aggravating fashion than I would’ve if flaking-with-advance-notice had been a non-stigmatized option in my mind to begin with. So personally for dealing with this kind of flaking I think having less emphasis on You Must Not Flake would be better than having more. (Though of course it’s possible that something entirely different was going on with your friend’s friend.)
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Yes, I suspect I am significantly less aggravating because I have a mindset of “I am the person that I am, I am going to communicate this ahead of time, and if people don’t like it then they can exercise the option to interact with one of the seven billion non-me people who exist.” So I don’t have the incentive to try to pretend I can do things that I can’t.
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The increase in unreliability could be because of the Internet and cellphones. Before cellphones, and especially before smart phones and social media, making plans to get together with friends required a bit more work if it wasn’t some instantaneous thing. You had to contact people in person or over landlines and bowing out if you made a commitment came with costs unless there was good cause. Now getting in touch with people is fairly easy, you can contact everybody you want to do something with collectively via messenger or Facebook and people can say they are going or merely interested.
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SoCal was full of flakes when I lived there, before there were cellphones everywhere and everyone was on the internet. So an alternate theory is that the flake infection has been spreading northward over time.
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When my brother moved to Northern California from New York, he noted that the people were much less reliable than New Yorkers when it came to keeping social commitments. This was during the age of cell phones and the Internet.
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I don’t live anywhere near the Bay, but in my experience with flakiness, its WAY easier to deal with someone who tells you in advance that Flakiness is Likely. Like, I have friends who are chronically unreliable because of medical conditions, or because of young babies, and I find that quite easy to deal with, by not inviting them to anything I can’t deal with being flaked on. But that really requires a pool of more reliable friends, or it requires you severely limit the way you socialize, so its not easy if its everyone in your social group.
And yeah, I have dealt with people more like what benquo is describing. Like, being 5-10 minutes late because train I would not consider unreliable, that just happens, and so long as you build it into things like movies that have non-negotiable start times its no big deal. When you’re dealing with someone who just can’t be trusted so show up, or who might show up an hour or more late with no explanation, or suddenly attempt to reschedule it , where someone just can’t be trusted and its exhausting. Because you essentially can’t schedule anything else that day, especially since the same people who show up an hour late are often really baffled by the idea you might not be able to just drop everything and extend the gathering by an hour for their benefit. You have to have contingencies in places for if they don’t show up, or if they show up late, or if they’re miraculously on time. You can’t schedule anything afterward, you can’t do anything that would penalize you for shifting times (no reservations, etc), and you have to be able to cope with the sudden implosion of your necessarily singular plan.
Nothing about what you’ve described about yourself suggests your friends are doing that sort of mental math when they want to see you.
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(Quick note, his name is Mowshowitz not Moscovitz.)
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(as glaeberhoerl notes, my last name is Mowshowitz as alas I am not related to Dustin)
I feel the norms must change to make (quite high) reliability the default, especially for actions that need reliability to work. That does not preclude non-reliable arrangements and plans. There’s value in that too! But that really shouldn’t be the default norm. It shouldn’t be considered automatic or unremarkable and not requiring explanation or justification.
As others have noted, I was thinking less about ‘one might be 10 minutes late to a friendly meeting’ and more ‘one might be 1-2 hours late and think nothing of it.’ There are times when ‘mean time is on time’ is a good metric, and others where it isn’t; I think this is worth expanding upon another time as I think most (including here) overestimate the costs of being early versus being late, but certainly there’s zero wrong with ‘come by around 1’ meaning you are there 12:50 and 1:10 equally often – as long as you know when the word ‘around’ is and isn’t being used!
On that note, I think you handle your flakiness very well. If you tell me in advance, I’m 30% to flake here but let’s do this anyway, I think that’s totally fine, and if it’s not worth it I won’t make the plan. That’s totally different from default 30% flaking (or even 10%) that goes unstated, especially if the time you learn about the flake is often two hours after the meeting time. Flaking in advance is (usually) much, much less bad.
One could relate this to your previous post about attitudes. I basically want people to take the attitude that plans actually commit you rather than giving you a free option, flaking or being late imposes large costs and you should feel bad doing it for trivial/avoidable reasons, and have the attitude that keeping the other person informed is really important – you’re coordinating and cooperating here, so act like it. I think your attitude here is mostly good. You understand you’re imposing costs, you’re up front about it and make sure your friends are informed, and you impose them when you think it’s a good trade-off. When you think of ‘being late’ you think of train-was-15-late late, not oh-did-I-say-an-hour-ago late.
(On a side note, my instinctive solution to ‘I am visiting Bay and want to see Ozy’ is that I could just come to you, so I don’t have to risk afraid-to-go-outsideness, dunno if that would be a good solution or not.)
Our disagreement is more about what the trade-offs are on late/early than anything else, and a lot of that has to do with the norms: If the norm is, as it often is, ‘early means you’re being rude and even pretty late is normal’ then the costs can end up symmetric or worse (e.g. late becomes better than early), whereas if the norm is that the late is pretty bad and timing is real, early often simply means things get started a little early, and costs become asymmetric the other way even before you add a norm/virtue cost for lateness. It’s easy for such problems to snowball. Once 7 “really means” 7:30 or even 8, lateness and words lose meaning and no one can tell what’s going on or make real plans, costs go up, etc etc.
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I would like to respond to this comment more in the future, but in the meantime thank you (and thanks, glaebhoerl) for the correction on your name. I am sorry, I should have checked the spelling before I published.
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I’m not scared of leaving my house. I love walking around! But I’m scared/anxious of social interaction itself, which poses interesting problems because social isolation also worsens my condition. (I have paradoxical experiences where, say, the researcher’s after-work meeting on Tuesdays is the high point of my week and a relief from anxiety, and then I spend the rest of the week actively endeavouring to not talking to anybody else) . In general, often I will make an heroic effort to go see someone, or at least to call call and message them, and we’ll have a great time and everything’s good; but, since everything was cool, they tend to expect more social interaction, and the perception of this expectation itself is enough to terrify me into a bubble for six months. Usually when I finally come out there’s no one there anymore (understandably).
So I also benefit from/am wildly grateful for a degree of tolerance for unreliability. However, I myself think my own levels of unreliability are too damn high; I hurt people by shutting them out, and I’m trying to use therapy and learn to control my fears. It’s just that I can’t see myself aiming for perfection; so I hope there’s enough people who can tolerate, say, a week’s delay in replying to email, or a ~1/5 rate of missed appointments as long as they’re warned in advance.
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I organize social events at which people play board games. At these social events, we need to have four players. Three players is too few; five players is too many. If I arrange an event and only two guests show up, then I have to apologize to my guests; I tell them that board gaming is cancelled, but perhaps they would like to go get dinner somewhere instead?
I view this as a large cost, both directly (we don’t get to do the event) and indirectly (my guests learn that I’m a bad organizer and they shouldn’t attend my future events).
This imposes overhead on me in advance of the event, because I have to make sure that all of my guests are either 100% or 0% committed. This also restricts the set of people I can invite as guests, and that is regrettable. But if I want to have board game events, this is absolutely necessary.
I’m glad that you’re able to find social events that are more flexible about the number of attendees.
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@Dan
Can’t you have a 3-player board game as backup?
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Unreliability also places most of the pressure for about everything on people with a natural inclination towards reliability for just about everything and without much in a way of the benefit. The reliable will get take advantaged of and would be asked to be more generous to others than they receive. That doesn’t seem right.
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Probably a cultural thing. I think most folks just treat invites from bros the way that you treat doctor’s/therapists appointments.
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Hi Ozy,
If you don’t mind me asking, what do you do to help manage your agoraphobia enough to function in the world? I also have this affliction, and I haven’t left the house in several months now. I was just curious what coping strategies are working for you, because nothing I have tried has worked very well for me.
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While they don’t answer: I don’t have agoraphobia, but I have social anxiety, which is a cousin condition. I’m following Clarke & Beck’s Anxiety & Worry Workbook and it’s doing me real good (this same book also deal with agora, though it’s not really focused on anything). I’m working through the exercises as a self-help program, but it’s a fair bet that it’d work even better with an actual therapist. CBT is said to have an effect size between 0.78 and 1.34 for treating agoraphobia.
Perhaps you could buy, borrow or pirate this book or another like it, and give it a try from the safety of your home for a few weeks? If it works well enough that you manage to go outside, you could consider finding then a therapist who does what you want.
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