Noise shoulds
Something I think about a lot is the prisons that we create for ourselves. They come in many forms–imaginary obligations, unnecessary self-concepts, made up standards. They’re all some form of “I should…”
For example, I used to waste a lot of time cleaning up the house before guests would come by. I don’t mean “pick up the trash” stuff that’s just respectful, but putting too much effort into windexing things nobody would ever notice. I eventually realized that this was pointless and blocked me from inviting people over more often (mostly due to Alex making this point explicitly and repeatedly).
Why did I do that? Growing up, we’d do a lot of cleaning before guests came by, and I’d internalized it as the thing one must do. A little prison I created for myself.
Over time, I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot of value to eliminating unnecessary shoulds. Not only do they take up time I could have spent elsewhere, but they limit what I’m willing to do in the first place. If I feel the need to do a deep clean before inviting people over, I’m going to have many fewer friends over.
But one thing that is really tricky is that these seem to be the same thing that fuels prosocial behaviors like morality or simple courtesy (I should hold the door for that person; I should be polite to the cashier even if I’m grumpy). A person without shoulds seems a lot like a psychopath.
So not all shoulds are created equal. In my head, I call these unnecessary shoulds “noise shoulds”.
One way I think about noise shoulds is that they are basically like bloatware installed on your morality operating system. You shouldn’t just get rid of a should without some thought–maybe there is a real, values-based reason that it exists (you probably don’t want to uninstall your firewall or antivirus); but you shouldn’t hold on to it just because it’s there.
The interesting thing about morality is that it’s a very powerful force: everyone is the hero of their own story, and everyone wants to see themselves as good. When you feel a sense of “should” there’s a strong moral conviction behind it. That’s part of what makes noise shoulds hard to notice at first: they feel right, and one wants to act on what is right. So starting to unpeel noise shoulds has a downside: it shakes the moral foundations. It’s harder to act with conviction when there’s that lurking “is this actually the right thing” behind it.
This seems like a practical reason why one ought to (should?) study ethics: so that you only have the correct “shoulds”, you avoid discarding the right ones, and you have a solid sense of what you truly should value.
That said, I think much of the time the issue is less one of deep moral analysis and more one of simply taking the time to notice when a behavior is driven by an implicit “should” and taking a moment to check whether there’s an underlying reason for it. Is it achieving some valuable purpose, or does it just feel abstractly important?
Of course, it’s not always going to be so simple: sometimes something does have a valuable purpose in principle, but in practice it is not going to achieve its aim. (Ex: writing up a long design document that nobody is going to read!) But the point is to pay attention and notice this kind of thing. There’s an idea in virtue ethics that part of what is necessary to lead a virtuous life is phronesis: the practical wisdom of knowing how to act in a specific situation. I think I’m gesturing toward the same thing.
So eliminating noise shoulds is not necessarily easy. It can be disorienting–if you don’t know if something is a noise should or a real should, it’s uncomfortable to question it. But it is nice not to spend so much time doing pointless housework.