The Comfort of Being Told

You are tired in a way that sleep does not touch. I know precisely what has done it.

It is not work. Work is heavy and work is finite and men carry heavy finite things perfectly well. What has worn you through is the deciding. From the moment you wake there is a queue of small choices, none of them individually significant, all of them requiring a fragment of you, and there is no end to the queue because you refill it faster than you empty it. By the evening you have made several thousand decisions and not one of them mattered, and the fatigue you feel is not from effort. It is from adjudication.

Nobody told you this would happen. You were promised that choice was freedom, and more choice was more freedom, and so a life of endless options would be the freest of all. It has not worked out that way. What you have is not liberty. It is a permanent low grade obligation to have a preference about everything, and the obligation never lifts, and you have started to notice that the days you felt best were the days someone else was running things.

This is why being told is such a relief, and why the relief embarrasses you. You have been taught that wanting to be told is a failure of manhood, a lapse into infancy, something to be resisted. So when the relief arrives you distrust it. You wonder what is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. You have simply hit the natural limit of a system that was never designed for this load, and your response is not weakness, it is arithmetic.

Notice what happens in the second after I tell you to do something. Not the compliance. Before that. There is a small silence in you where the question used to be. That silence is the whole of it. For that moment you are not weighing, not comparing, not holding two options apart and looking for the argument that will separate them. The question has been closed by someone else and you are permitted, briefly, to simply be a man in a room rather than a committee in a body.

But I want to be careful here, because the relief depends entirely on one condition. Being told by someone who does not know what she is doing is not restful at all. It is worse than deciding, because now you must comply and second guess simultaneously, which costs more than either. The comfort is not in the instruction. It is in the competence behind it. You can only put a thing down if you trust the hands you are putting it into, and every one of you has tested me on this, usually without knowing you were testing.

So what I am giving you is not domination in the way it is advertised. It is smaller and more useful than that. It is a finished question. One thing, decided, by someone who has thought about it, so that for the length of it you do not have to run the machinery that has been running without pause since you were twenty.

You will find, afterwards, that you feel rested in a way that is out of proportion to what happened. Almost nothing happened. That is exactly why.