Please Stop Helping Me

 

There are few things more exhausting than having something mildly wrong with you in a family that cares very much. Because now you don't just have the thing, you have everyone's forecasts about the thing. Some people’s forecast chambers just happen to run hot.

Let’s say you mention that your back hurts, that's it. You didn't collapse in the driveway, you’re not calling from an ambulance. You just made the mistake of mentioning in ordinary conversation, "Yeah, I bent over and tweaked my back." Apparently this is enough to activate the Family Emergency Forecasting Network.

Have you called the doctor?

You should get that checked.

My friend's husband had back pain and it turned out to be—

Have you tried physical therapy?

What did the doctor say?

You haven't called the doctor yet?

Maybe you should call today.

Family concern received: 847% of recommended daily allowance.

Meanwhile, your own Forecast Chamber may have produced approximately two branches:

1. Don’t bend over to look out the doggie door again.
2. Where did I put the heating pad?

And this is where family concern gets mechanically interesting, because they're not actually responding to your back anymore. They're responding to their own forecasts about your back. 

And then the Commit Gates get involved. Nobody is sitting around consciously thinking, Quick, outsource liability! But their Commit Gates may strongly weight the future cost of not intervening and being wrong.

“We bothered him unnecessarily” is cheap.

“Something was wrong and I didn't say anything” is expensive.

Therefore, call him again.

This is the fascinating part about family concern. We usually assume that when someone is worried about you, their behavior is primarily regulating your problem. But their machine is inside them. They're the ones generating the forecasts and carrying the branches and pricing the possible futures. They're the ones whose Commit Gates have to eventually decide what to do with all of it.

And unfortunately, sometimes their cheapest available future is telling you what to do seventeen times. Calling feels better than not calling, recommending a doctor feels safer than waiting, checking again closes a little uncertainty.

This creates a lovely little human machinery problem, because now their regulation becomes your input. 

They call because calling reduces the cost in their machine.

The call enters your Antenna.

Your Forecast Chamber immediately produces: Oh dear god, are we discussing this again?

Now your Dashboard starts climbing.

They detect your irritation.

Their Forecast Chamber receives new information.

Why is she getting irritated? Maybe she isn't taking this seriously enough. I need to call her more often.

And now we've built a perpetual-motion machine entirely out of love.

Nobody is doing anything particularly mysterious. Nobody needs to be diagnosed with anxiety, control issues, codependency, poor boundaries, emotional immaturity, or whatever term the internet is handing out this week.

We have two machines trying to make different futures affordable. One is trying to reduce the possibility that something bad happens because nobody intervened. The other is trying to reduce the possibility that seven relatives turn a sore back into a federally managed infrastructure project. Both make perfect sense from inside the machine producing them. Which, by the way, does not make the seventh phone call any less annoying.

It just means that sometimes when your family is driving you absolutely nutso with concern, it helps to remember that you aren't only listening to your family. You're listening to their Forecast Chambers.