105. You Can Purchase Slack, Kid, But It'll Cost You

(With thanks for foundational conceptual engineering to ZM.)

Your day seems to be going fine. So does your week. But you find yourself constantly feeling behind, constantly putting out a fire right before having to dash off to the next fire to put out; in a fragile state, like if anything at all goes wrong, you'll break. You've got too many plates spinning. You're smart, you're competent, you're skilled, and you're motivated. So what's going wrong? What are you missing? There's something specific but elusive that you need, and the word for it is "Slack".

No, not the overgrown Discord-like that's metastasized into the way all communications in your company get run, the abstract resource, the rationalist term of art. Put succinctly, it's uncommitted capacity. It's the breathing room, the bit of extra reserves that let you keep slightly clearer of the edge of your safety envelope. It's the margin that lets you absorb a shock without crumbling, decline a bad deal without starving, notice and follow up on a good idea without an officially approved slot to fit it into. It's not quite savings, and it's certainly not a matter of laziness; it's the bit of springiness that lets you bend without breaking - and the space that you can bend into. I don't need to tell you whether or not you have it. Reading this right now - you know. You know whether you're at your limits, and don't have it; or whether you have just a pinch of it; maybe if you have loads of it, you've stopped noticing that plenty, because that constraint is not currently binding. Lucky you.

Here's the part that all the rationalist self-help prior art omits: Slack accumulates at an equilibrium rate, and that rate is set by the structure of your life. Your obligations, your margins, your defaults, your workflow: all of these, and the way that they change when you have more or less Slack, affect how much Slack you'll find yourself with by default, just as a reservoir fills at the rate its watershed allows, changing with the seasons and with usage patterns. And much of the time, you can live just fine on the inflow, never needing to touch the reserves. But demand for Slack is not smooth: it spikes, for good and for ill. Cross-country moves, rapidly approaching deadlines, sudden diagnoses, and even opportunities that come knocking just once: all of these are the kinds of things that can seize all the Slack you can afford to give them.

And when that means that your well has begun to run dry, you do what everyone does; what you have surely done many times without taking note of it: you purchase Slack, right then and there, at spot prices. And the purchase is real, and the invoice always arrives; the only question is, which currency did you choose to pay in? I count five major ones. I have paid, in my time, in all of them; so have you.

First, there's Face. If you buy Slack by selling off Face, you're withdrawing from social connections and obligations, spending down reputation. You cancel, you withdraw, you disappoint; you let balls visibly drop. You cash in a reputation for reliability that may have taken years to fill up. Much of the time, this is even the right currency to spend down; Face regenerates, and true friends forgive the ensuing mortgaging. The sting in the tail is, you don't control the price, and you don't control the market, and the exchange rate is worst exactly when you're already overdrawn everywhere else. An eleventh-hour cancelled dinner date from someone flourishing can be charmingly eccentric or forgivably flighty. The same short-notice cancelled dinner from someone struggling is data.

Next, there's Soul. If you buy Slack by selling off Soul, you're pawning your ambitions, deciding to accept less and dare less; you choose to live small to live at all. You lower your aspirations, accept the lesser version, un-want the thing, invest less in your goals and thus less in picking up new knowledge and skills. You bank the fires that power you so that you can siphon off the fuel savings. You quietly re-file hopes from "someday" to "never", and you tell yourself that that's what maturity looks like. This exchange looks dangerously good at point of sale - no one need see the transaction, nothing bounces, and your calendar even looks clearer and better in the short term - but there's no market for your particular fire, so you're always selling your Soul at scrap prices. (Think on how much that means your Soul is worth to you.) But it's also marked by having genuinely irreversible lots in the inventory. A word of caution: some wants, once sold, never restock. That inner flame can only be banked so much before it goes out for good. Read the contract carefully thrice: not for nothing is caution urged when so much as considering Soul for collateral.

Less direly, there's Mind. If you buy Slack by selling off Mind, you're squeezing your cognition harder, pushing yourself faster, and telling yourself just one more night-time hour spent, one more experimental run, one more paper graded or filed. You sleep shorter, do more with less, and might leap before looking. You run your machinery hot, and you skim the safety margin off of every check you'd normally run twice. (Once is enough, right? And nothing's gone wrong for a while... maybe you don't need to check at all?) The trade in Mind is always booming, the exchange-window open 24 hours a day and 25 on the occasional Sunday... but that's precisely why it's every clever person's most direly overdrawn account. At 3 in the morning when the Face-brokers are asleep and the Soul-brokers are out for a walk, Mind is there to be traded, and its brokers extend credit at rates you won't believe when the statement comes due. (That statement is called burnout; I've written elsewhere about the collections process more than once and I'll do it again.)

There's Order, too. If you buy Slack by selling off Order, you're cutting corners on the way your own life runs. You let the environment decay: dishes pile up, and so do unread letters - junk mail and precious invitations both. Your workbench clutters, and then piles high, in an archaeology of neglect. You take out a loan on your own future effort, and you service that debt with friction against every other action: decaying environments cost you more to move through, and overdrafting here means lowering the equilibrium rate. Paying in Order is useful in small doses and hazardous if allowed to go unchecked: it's the only currency whose overdraft attacks the watershed rather than the reservoir.

Lastly, and most innocuously-seeming, there's Life. If you buy Slack by selling off Life, you're spending your ordinary future outright; you spend time you'd rather spend otherwise. You spend health, you spend years, you mortgage your body and take jobs that pay excellent money and charge you decades for it. This is sometimes the right move! Money, after all, is remarkably convertible back into Slack, and that's much of what money is even for. An important note, though: your stock of Life has a floating, finite, and unknowable total supply, and you always spend it without knowing the balance.

A few notes on other currencies you can trade in to buy Slack. There's most obviously Treasure, but that's less a currency to trade in for Slack and more like Slack in its congealed, solid, grossly material phase. It powers the rest as best you can make it do. It doesn't count. There's Commons, too: drawing unduly on shared resources, straining your Face and maybe your Mind and Soul as well. You can sometimes get away with it without also spending down Face, if unobserved; the invoice comes addressed "care of your whole community", and that community will only suffer so much generation of negative externalities before it ejects you - or withers and dies. Last, there's Word. Don't trade away your Word. I might end up writing more on this later, but the short version is: every fudged status report, every white lie to dodge a hard-but-necessary conversation, every time you smudge a shared map of the world - all of these are akin to stripping copper wires out of your walls. You install a machine that must always be fed, a little leak in the reservoir itself, a standing maintenance obligation. You go negative-sum on Slack almost always and almost immediately.

Three maxims to close on before I quit spending Mind to buy posting-schedule and professional Slack:

First off, the currencies are only weakly fungible, and the very worst trades are cross-currency bargains struck under time pressure. Paying Soul to save Face is almost always a scam; paying Face to save your Soul is almost always a screaming deal. Learn your own habitual currencies and patterns of exchange. Everyone has a default, worn smooth by use, and it is generally whichever one your own upbringing taught you to price wrongly. At minimum, diversify.

Next, spot purchases are for spikes; structural deficits demand structural fixes. Buying Slack every now and again is a fact of life; even a good idea, even if it looks a little risky. But if you find yourself buying Slack every single week, the problem does not lie in any given week. The problem is instead the equilibrium rate, and that equilibrium rate is set by the shape of your life, and though you'll pay dearly to clear the technical debt and Clausewitzian friction you've accumulated by moving through the world, you'll pay so very much more by declining that overdue reshaping. Refactoring is about the only purchase on the slate that compounds in your favor.

Finally, and most painfully of all, Slack is cheapest precisely when you don't need it, and dearest when you do. It's not even especially a matter of anyone or anything out to get you, or even some nebulous supply/demand curve! The reservoir fills in the flat seasons: say yes to fewer frivolous things; automate the small things; bank windfalls out of season - do these sorts of things and when your inflows dry up and a Slack payment is still called for, you'll be able to weather the dry season. But too many people instead shop during that drought, at drought-stricken prices, paying dearly in whatever currency they're taking at whatever store still chances to be open... and that's how too many fine minds end up paying in Soul for what a bit of Mind or Life might have covered.

So... audit the ledger, kid. Not tonight: right now, you should already be in bed; sleep is Slack purchased at negative cost - about the only such deal in the catalog. (At worst, it's still bargain-basement pricing. I'm about to take that deal. So should you.) But audit it soon. Face, Mind, Order, Soul, Life, ranked by price and reversibility - figure out what you've been paying with, because the invoice always arrives, and the best you can do is choose the currency while the choosing's cheap.