A dial, not a switch

In the early days of the pandemic I wrote a short article called A problem to solve or a tension to manage? The idea was simple. Some things are not problems to be solved. They are tensions to be managed. More like keeping a guitar in tune and less like building a house.

That idea has stuck with me ever since. And the more I chew on it, the more I realise it's actually three ideas wearing one trench coat. Each one is a trap that smart, well-meaning people fall into all the time. Me included.

1. Not every choice needs a winner

Most of us treat decisions like a boxing match. Two options climb into the ring, they slug it out and one of them gets its hand raised. The loser is declared weak, wrong or obsolete. Next!

A > B

For lots of decisions that's exactly right. Petrol or electric? Pick one and move on. But some priorities only work in pairs. Push one too hard and you don't just lose the other one. You end up losing both.

Economists have a neat way of writing this down. In decision theory, A ~ B means you're indifferent: neither option is strictly preferred over the other. The useful bit for the rest of us is this. When two options sit in that kind of tension, the choice comes down to your context and constraints right now. Not some permanent ranking.

Anyone who has led engineering teams knows this one in their bones. Speed versus stability. Go all in on shipping fast and eventually things break so often that you slow right down. Go all in on stability and you ship so little that the business starts to wobble. Over-index on either one and you end up with neither.

Here's an everyday example: frugality versus enjoying your life. Save every last cent and you get deprivation and burnout. Spend freely on comfort and you get financial instability. "Frugality > Enjoyment" is flawed. So is "Enjoyment > Frugality". The right balance shifts with your financial season and stage of life. A young family with a brand-new mortgage and a couple nearing retirement shouldn't have the same answer. But both of them need both.

So swap the greater-than sign for something better:

A & B

Both/and. Not either/or.

2. Weather, not a leak

The second trap is sneakier. We tend to treat every recurring dilemma as a broken mechanism waiting for a permanent fix. Solve it once, tick it off the list, never think about it again.

But many dilemmas are not problems at all. They are operating conditions.

Think about the difference between a leak in your roof and the weather. A leak is a defect. You call someone, they patch it and if they did a decent job it stays fixed. Weather is different. Nobody fixes the weather. You check it in the morning and decide whether you need a raincoat. (Living in Dublin, the answer is usually yes.)

Problems have finish lines. Tensions are terrain you navigate every day. A logic puzzle converges on one answer and stays there. A tension keeps oscillating. Health comes from active tuning, not permanent closure.

Here's the part that trips people up. When a tension resurfaces, we assume our original solution was defective. So we go looking for a better one. And another. And another. Each one "fails" for the same reason. We're trying to patch the weather.

Take structure versus spontaneity in your daily routine. Time-block every hour of your calendar and before long it feels like a straitjacket. Throw out the structure for total freedom and your priorities drift off into procrastination. You don't solve this once and for all. You turn the dial towards structure when there's a hard deadline and towards freedom when you need some creative recovery.

Solve(X) → Tune(X)

Or if you prefer pictures:

[ON/OFF] → [───●───]

A dial, not a switch.

3. Damp the swing, don't stop the pendulum

The third trap is overcorrection. You pick an approach and enjoy the benefits for a while. Then the downsides start to show. Friction. Frustration. Clearly, you think, I chose wrong. So you lurch all the way to the opposite extreme.

Here is the thing though. That backward swing is not proof that you failed. It's the system asking for the side you neglected. Maximise the upside of one side long enough and you will eventually expose its downsides. That's not a bug. That's how it works.

Chemistry has a lovely bit of notation for this:

A ⇌ B

It describes a reversible reaction in dynamic equilibrium. Neither side ever permanently consumes the other. Change the conditions and the balance shifts one way. Change them back and it shifts the other way.

What we forget is that moving towards B is the natural by-product of having harvested the benefits of A. Call it overcorrection amnesia. The two sides feed each other in a loop. Push too hard into one and you directly fuel an urgent appetite for the other.

Raise your hand if this one sounds familiar. After a messy week you do a massive weekend deep clean. Spotless surfaces. Strict new rules. Nothing left on the kitchen counter, ever. Within days, keeping up those museum-grade standards is exhausting. Annoyed, you give up on tidying altogether. The house slides back into chaos. Which triggers... another frantic weekend of cleaning. Rinse and repeat. (Pun intended, as always.)

The answer is not to freeze the pendulum. A house you're afraid to live in is its own kind of problem. Stasis creates rigidity. The goal is to shrink the swing with small, regular adjustments. A manageable baseline with a quick daily reset beats ricocheting between show house and student flat.

A vs B → A ⟲ B

Damping the swing, not stopping the pendulum.

So, leak or weather?

These three ideas are really one idea seen from three angles. Some priorities are polarities to balance, not competitions to win. They don't have finish lines. And the swing between them is not a malfunction. It's just how they work.

It's the guitar from 2020 all over again. Strings drift out of tune. That's not a defect in the guitar. You simply tune it again before you play.

So the next time a dilemma turns up for the third or fourth time, before you rip everything up and start over, ask yourself one simple question:

Is this a leak, or is this weather?

If it's a leak, fix it. Properly. Once. If it's weather, stop hunting for the permanent fix. Keep a hand on the dial, make lots of small adjustments and stop beating yourself up every time it rains.