Fri, 28 May 2010
Joy minus Drain
Start by picturing someone you know.
When you spend time with this person, how much joy do you get? It's okay to include sarcastic jokes, dreamy smiles, sharp political discussions, useful shopping advice, or drunken stupors in this figure. Do you and your friend share a sense of humor? Do you feel good about yourself by hanging out with this person? You can include anything that gives you a sense of fulfillment. Usually you feel this joy when you're actually spending time with the person.
Next, add up all the ways this person drains energy from you. Does she show up randomly late in a way that makes planning hard? Does he tell you sad stories that drain you past the point of sympathy and into boredom? Do your personalities clash, leaving you both frustrated and unable to understand each other?
Now, subtract: Joy - Drain. If this figure is negative, you're probably better off if you don't spend a lot of time with this person. (If the drain comes from the person's flakiness, there are some useful mitigation strategies: Simply tell the person where you'll be within a time range, and if the person shows up, great. Also, just stop believing the person when he says he'll be there.)
High joy, low drain people are a blessing. A relief. Treasure them.
There are some more interesting cases. Low joy, low drain people are probably safe to keep around. High joy, high drain people? Oh boy. It's probably okay to keep them, but it's probably also smart to balance them out with other high-joy people. (Relying too much on the high-joy, high-drain people might make your own happiness turbulent. For that reason, it recently occurred to me that it might be bad news to date such people.)
P.S. While it's sensible to order your own friends this way, it's probably low-joy, high-drain to imagine your friends calculating these functions on you.
P.P.S. This concept started out as "Joy - Effort," where Effort primarily represented the work needed to successfully arrange a meeting time with the person. Chris came up with the idea of generalizing it.
P.P.P.S. So long as I'm on firm emotional footing (like I seem to be generally this year), I want my friends to tell me how I cause drain so I can try to improve.
P.P.P.P.S. Maybe this "Joy - Drain" calculus is obvious to most people. I discovered it in mid-2008 when I was feeling weighed down. Before then, I didn't express a whole lot of intentionality on who I spent time with; a surfeit of high-drain people that summer made that necessary.
P.P.P.P.P.S. It might be productive to apply this to countries/cities/neighborhoods to live in, jobs to keep or quit, or companies to do business with.
