Tradeoffs: Sustainability

Sustainability is a hot topic. When we hear the word, we immediately think about environmental science and preservation. While this explicit application of the concept has gained a lot of traction recently, the principle behind it has been around for a long time.

And unfortunately, this principle always comes with a sacrifice.

But before we get to this discussion, let's broaden what I mean by sustainability.

A closely related concept is conservation. This (again) is mostly used in the context environmentalism, but really ought to be applied to any situation involving a scarce resource or a perishable system. So while reducing our use of fossil fuels certainly counts as conservation in this sense, so would saving up your money or keeping your car clean. In each of these cases, you're holding back for some long term purpose. In other words, you're making short term sacrifices for some long term benefit.

My sense of sustainability takes this conservation idea as its core, but includes a particular motivation. More explicitly, conservation, when in response to sustainability, is for the sake of preserving future utility. In other words, the sustainability tradeoff lives in things where overdoing something now prevents us from doing the same thing later.

Let me illustrate. You're playing in a basketball tournament, and you know you'll have three (supposedly) short prelim games today and an elimination game in the evening. You're guaranteed to play in the elimination game, so you have a policy of only allowing your best players to play for a small number of minutes each game. In the second game, your opponents hit a last second shot to force overtime. What do you do? Do you keep your best players in? Or do you rest them?

The elements of a sustainability question are all here. Your limited resources are, in this case, your stamina. The activity you're seeking to preserve is to play basketball well. And the strongest link to sustainability in this case is that you have to decide whether to sacrifice now for later, or the other way around.

Situations involving material resources are even easier to frame as sustainability questions. Say you're cooking a fast food restaurant and you're boxing fries. You only have a limited amount that are already cooked; the more you put in each box, the sooner you have to cook another bag. You can't put the same fry in two different boxes, so you have to weather this tradeoff.

There are countless other easy examples. Running a marathon slower than a sprint, hiking even slower than that, even driving only limited amounts as a long-haul trucker. Sustainability is a constant element working in our lives.

So now that we're clear on what I mean by "sustainability," let's talk about what the tradeoff is.

Simply put, sustainability trades off with whatever you're doing.

In order to preserve your long term ability to do something, you have to sacrifice short term performance. There's just no middle ground. This tradeoff is incredibly strict, and rarely forgiving. Managing it can be tricky. So once you identify a situation as a sustainability tradeoff, you must know there's not a happy ending. You sacrifice now by choice, or you're forced to sacrifice later. The sustainability clock always ticks; the best we can do is reset the timer. Let's explore some examples.. to sacrifice short term performance. There's just no middle ground. This tradeoff is incredibly strict, and rarely forgiving. Managing it can be tricky. So once you identify a situation as a sustainability tradeoff, you must know there's not a happy ending. You sacrifice now by choice, or you're forced to sacrifice later. The sustainability clock always ticks. Let's explore some examples.

The first one, ever present in college and graduate school, is burnout.

Now burnout is problematic for plenty of reasons. It takes a toll on mental health, decreases your happiness, and overall just sucks. But an important part of it is the sustainability tradeoff: working too hard at one point, without taking enough time off (whether it be a walk outside or a week of vacation) cripples your future ability to focus on work. The biggest connection: there's not a clear way around it beyond working less at the beginning.

Another easy example is with physical exercise. One of the challenges of endurance sports is how careful the athlete must be in their pacing. Working too hard at the beginning, even to only a minimal degree, can sabotage the late stages of the competition. After you've completed your training period, there's nothing you can do to extend your energy but preserve it by starting slower.

These examples are simple and, for the most part, widely accepted. There are, however, some that are more nuanced.

Let's talk about capital. Though the most common form of capital is monetary capital, I'm going to make an extension to social capital. The phrase, in this case, applies to the sort of directional good juju that's built in a relationship. Social capital in a certain direction increases when one side does something good for the other (for example, my social capital with my roommates may increase when I vacuum the entire apartment). It decreases when one party does something the other doesn't like. Note that "rightness" doesn't matter here; if you do the right thing and piss someone off, your social capital with them decreases. This could be something you mess up (like spilling wine on a your roommate's white carpet) or an inconvenient request (like asking your roommate to vacuum the apartment). When you run low on social capital, it can be harder (or impossible) to make those kinds of requests.

So the sustainability tradeoff here comes in how you request things of others. Harping too much on the little things can make you less persuasive on the important ones. This example comes with another little barb: while what you're preserving is your ability to make future requests, you have to do a little more than not make those requests in the short term: you also have to make sure you don't mess up and piss off your roommate. In a way, your sustainability system isn't perfectly efficient; you have to do a little more now to preserve things for later.

You could make an argument that my previous example is actually pretty soft. It's true, but not because of the tradeoff. Quantifying and understanding how much social capital you have in a relationship is very difficult. The softness comes in with this uncertainty, more than with the tradeoff itself.

The key takeaway from all this is that scarceness in our resources forces a tradeoff. There's nothing we can do to avoid it. We instead have to face it head on, accepting some temporary discomfort for the things that come next.

I'll impact this with a personal example. This past week, I had an exam on Monday. Naturally, I spent a significant portion of Sunday studying.

The test came and went, and the rest of my week hit. I had heaps of assignments, hadn't done so hot on some optimization homework, and on Wednesday night I managed to cut a finger while trying to dice an onion (again) and stay wired in bed for a sleepless night. I was at the edge of my sanity. And despite all of the things I did in college, and all of the things that have happened this semester, I'd couldn't remember feeling as out of rhythm as I did just then. So like any mature, self-aware and functioning adult, I responded the next morning with the best therapy there is: calling my mom. So I explained how I was feeling: "out of rhythm, like I'm struggling to stay above choppy waters." And then I tried to figure out why: "I have so much and even though I've been working straight since Sunday, I feel like I'll never finish--" and there it was. I hadn't taken Sunday off. For those who don't know, I try to preserve my peace of mind by thoroughly putting schoolwork out of mind on Sunday. I'll buy groceries, meal prep, do laundry and all my other chores, but I refuse to open any schoolwork. The whole idea is to make sure I have a clear head and a full tank of gas for the week. It eventually became a sort of positive feedback loop; taking Sunday's off made me more productive, which gave me time to take Sunday's off. And in the meantime, it felt like I had could surf to survive the waves threatening to crash down on me.

And this week, I'd made a choice to shirk this usual habit, and I was completely out of steam by Wednesday. I had fallen to the sustainability tradeoff, choosing to over-invest in the present (studying on Sunday) and paid for it later.

And obviously, the reverse is true. In moments when I'm feeling very productive, it's important that I stay focused and get work done. I know that when I stop doing that, the jig is up and Sunday's will become workdays. The tradeoff forces me to choose between getting work done on Sunday and getting work done at another time. There's not really an option for me to do both.

Speaking of "next time": this tradeoff is really a particular form of a short-term versus long-term tradeoff. Where sustainability is all about what we refrain from doing in the short term, the more general tradeoff includes much more. Keep an eye out for that post coming (relatively) soon.