93. Bounty Out of Season and How to Preserve It (and How to Use Jam to Ease Friction)

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A bumper crop of fruit you weren't expecting. A downpour of rain on parched earth unable to soak it all up. A sudden windfall from investments coming when you're too tired to enjoy making use of it. This might be the most nice-problem-to-have complaint, but it's still worth thinking about - what do you do, when bounty arrives out of season? How can you hold on to some of those gains when you weren't prepared for them, weren't expecting them, and might not even be able to appreciate them properly?

We should first define our terms a little better, rather than hide behind poetry. By "bounty", I simply mean something unambiguously helpful or valuable - food, money, energy, and the like. "In season" means that you were at least loosely expecting that such a bounty might come. You had a bucket ready, or you had something you were saving up for, or you rolled the dice on some positive-EV decision where a windfall was a known possibility. By contrast, "out of season" means just the opposite - you weren't expecting to get anything especially valuable, and you've been struck by serendipity. It's not even like there's some opportunity you'd need to take up on in order to benefit - the bounty has already accrued to you, the default outcome is some amuount of gain, and most of what you need to do is figure out how to avoid losing some of that potential gain.

I want to carefully define two more important concepts. First, there's friction, in the sense of Clausewitz. In his writing on war and campaigns, Clausewitz uses friction to mean the way in which plans slowly go awry - gear gets lost or broken, supplies get spent or left behind, and people get captured or killed. Whatever plan an army had at the start, friction denotes the distance between that and what's actually possible or what actually occurs. I'll use it to mean something somewhat more peaceful but no less troubling on its appropriate scale - the ways in which daily life or month-to-month plans go awry, or are choked out by a lack of needed resources. Clausewitzian friction, in our sense, is the stuff of ripped pants, speeding tickets, and burnt dinners. So is a looming depressive episode, or just weeks of tiredness and burnout. The other concept is preservation. The picture in my head is of food storage: you come by a lot of food very suddenly when you're already full and your fresh storage is full, so you need to preserve it in order to store it. You cook fruit into jam, you smoke or dry meat, and you hang herbs and garlic from a rafter to dry. The story is similar for more general bounty, though naturally that differs by the precise nature of that gain. This implies in turn that a crucial capacity to prioritize cultivating in yourself is the ability to do just this - funge and amortize gains you come across, even if imperfectly; it's much better than not being able to do it much at all.

I promised myself a quick and easy post today, so I'll cut to the obvious-feeling chase: in order to capture the gains of bounty out of season, you need to employ preservation methods in order to ease friction. Store up as much of the bounty as you can. Sometimes this is easy - if you can trust yourself not to spend money the moment you get it, then you can stick it in a bank account and forget about it for a little while. Other times, this takes cleverness - time you notice you have saved when you're too tired to enjoy it much can be funged against time later; do laundry and deal with life bureaucracy now so that later on you won't have to. In a different vein, if there's a sale on something you know you'll want later but can't work yourself up to want right now, consider purchasing it anyway. The you that will exist later on with time and energy to enjoy it will thank you for your foresight. Still other times, there's nothing to be done but enjoy it as much as you can right now, for what little that means. A nice day is a nice day and the weather won't keep; if there's a friend in town, they'll be willing to accommodate your being tired and sad or they're no friend at all. On occasion, there's a reason not to preserve it at all but rather hand off the gains to someone else with the hope that they'll do the same for you; give them a concert ticket you can't make use of, or a recommendation to an excellent job you'd apply to if you had the energy and desire. Delayed gratification is the order of the day in all these cases; the silver lining here is that the metaphorical "seasons" of your life are likely significantly faster-paced than the literal seasons of the year.

Someday you'll be up for it again. Someday, you'll be able to enjoy the jam you set aside, even if you prefer fresh berries.

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