MYOB

Minding your own business was, not too long ago, a favorable behavior.  No one wanted you judging or advising or trying to do their job for them.  Now the opposite is true, at least the part about doing someone else’s job.  Now we are encouraged, sometimes even required to do many jobs we haven’t been trained for and don’t get paid for.

The other day when I was grocery shopping I found myself in line for one of four self-service checkout lanes, patiently waiting for the person ahead of me to scan her groceries, bag her groceries and pay the computer.  Soon it was my turn to do the same.  Those four lanes plus four self-service express lanes were overseen by two store clerks in case the computer got grumpy, a customer was puzzled or someone forgot to scan an item.  The experience at big box hardware stores is often the same.  They hire one person instead of four and let the customer do the work.

This is a far cry from the grocery stores at the turn of the last century when customers stood behind a counter and passed their orders through to a clerk, who would pick items off the shelves in back.  And Amazon Go plans to take it a step further, where the “checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.”  Just fill your cart and leave.  The computer knows who you are, what you bought and where to charge it.

The same is true when calling customer service or trying to work out a problem on line.  The typical phone call begins with a question about choosing a language.  Then you must “listen carefully as our menu has recently changed.”  After you have categorized your problem according to their definitions and pressed the appropriate buttons, you find out your position in the waiting line and must to listen to music and/or advertising about how important your business is to them.  As the wait goes on the computerized voice may remind you that you can always research your problem at their website.  At the end of the call you may be lucky enough to take a survey on how well you were treated either by pressing more buttons or speaking your answers so the computerized voice can tally and report your opinion and thank you for your time.

Suppose you lose patience and decide to try the on-line route.  I recently went to the Microsoft website with a question and was exposed to a robotic chat partner.  It presented me with categories and subcategories only to find that the problem was not one they anticipated, so I was given the option to sign on to a waiting line by filling out a form and requesting a return phone call.  While waiting for the call, I figured out the problem.  When the phone rang, I pressed the number to cancel the call.  Two minutes later the phone rang again.  I once again pressed the number to cancel the call.  When the phone rang a third time, I pressed the number to speak to a human.  I spent a full eight minutes on the phone with talking to a person trying to get their computer to stop calling – a problem they created (presumably because they care so much about my business).

It’s the same in banking.  This article from last spring tells of banks replacing tellers with ATMs and other automation delegating the work to customers.  In the Washington, D.C. region teller jobs have “dropped by nearly half in the past 10 years,” faster than the 17 percent drop nationally, with the expectation of losing another 30 percent by 2025.   It has become common for banks to charge a fee for not going paperless, requiring them to mail a monthly statement instead of customers going on line to retrieve their own statements from the website.

Many other industries are adopting this philosophy of virtual customer interactions or have been phasing it in for a long time.  When is the last time you have used a travel agent to book an airline or motel?  A new restaurant in San Francisco, called Eatsa, requires zero human interaction.  A Business Insider piece describes how cashiers’ work has been completely outsourced to customers.

As more and more laborsaving devices arrive on the scene, we have less and less time.  Everyone is rushed, and computers that were supposed to make our lives easier, following in the footsteps of indoor plumbing, vacuum cleaners and microwaves before them, just seem to be adding to the frenetic pace of life.

Compassion and Tolerance

One of the purposes (or maybe just a side effect) of my writing is to inspire readers to investigate or to think about the world in a slightly different way.  The entry last week about mindfulness and focus seems to have done the trick in at least one case.

I received an email with several embedded links and the conclusion:  “It is interesting that longer and deeper thinking tends to lead people to more compassionate and tolerant approaches.”  I dug deeper and began to think that ideas like this that we take for granted are not so simple.

The words compassion and tolerance have become very popular.  At least a couple research organizations are on a campaign to convince as many as possible that these two mental attitudes will combine to yield a more successful future for the world.  We need more, and mindfulness training for adults and children may be the key.

I am inclined to ask:  How do we measure compassion and tolerance, and more important, what are they?

Whenever I see words like more or better, I believe some measurement must be involved.  Finding metrics for mental activity can be deceptive.  Self-reporting is always suspect.  One way to identify compassion is to observe some behavior and label it compassionate, but such classification is impossible without a clear definition.  Someone must define what behaviors demonstrate compassion.  How do we know it when we see it?  As researchers report more positive brain scans on compassionate people, they still must have a definition that distinguishes compassion from other traits.  The same goes for tolerance.

The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education operating at Stanford says, “Compassion unfolds in response to suffering,” recognizing it, feeling empathy and concern, which “motivates us to take action, and help relieve that suffering.”  They promote compassion by saying, “With compassion, our empathy for the suffering of others can give rise to altruism – bringing immediate and long-term happiness and tranquillity [sic] to our lives.”  (But technically, if we are motivated to do it by the good feelings it gives us, that’s hardly altruism.)  A simple dictionary definition of compassion is concern for the suffering of others.  But, since no one can go into people’s head and actually see it, they must infer this concern from observing behavior – she did or said this or that, therefore, she is compassionate.  Then they can observe and classify the brain scans.

But here’s where it gets tricky.  When others are suffering, is it always wise or proper to step in and “take action, and help relieve that suffering”?  Is that always the best solution?  Sometimes suffering is the result of bad luck or natural disaster or birth defect, but sometimes suffering is the direct result of the action or inaction of the individual.

Behavior has consequences.  The purpose of those consequences is to encourage or discourage similar behavior.  In bowling, the feedback comes from the number of pins knocked down.  If you get a strike, try to do the same thing again.  If you get a gutter ball, make a change.  A coach can work with the bowler on technique and equipment as long as the bowler is dedicated to improving.  If the bowler is not interested and expects the coach to do the bowling for him, the consequences have failed; any lesson is lost.  If the bowler decides on a course of action that results in him being unable to roll the ball, no coaching will help.

Likewise in life, immoderate compassion, the taking action to relieve the suffering when the suffering is self-inflicted, crosses the line from aiding to enabling.  Yet so many people are motivated by that “happiness and tranquility” that it brings to our lives and fail to see the long term damage it does to others and to society.

Parents who give in to a child’s every desire or step in to solve every problem are not being compassionate, even as they believe they are recognizing suffering and taking action to relieve it.  They are robbing the child of valuable lessons on how to survive as an unselfish, responsible grownup.  Likewise a society that steps in to assist all adults who appear to be suffering regardless of the source of the suffering are, in some cases, negating the consequences (lessons) of poor decisions, encouraging a continuation of that behavior and possibly contaminating others.

Bad things happen when we get carried away by our emotions and our caring but are still rewarded by those feelings of happiness and tranquility.  It’s called unintended consequences. Compassion requires care as well as caring.

And what of tolerance:  The willingness to tolerate opinions or behaviors one does not necessarily agree with?  This too is difficult and will be taken up next time.