The expression is most often repeated as some form of, “You have made your bed, now go lay in it.”
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But has anyone ever said this to you after you had made a bad decision?
You picture that an asshole might say this to someone: depending on their positions and exposure to life, a proper asshole, for example, might devalue any and all homeless as drug addicts, and use this phrase loosely to say that they are all getting what they deserve.
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Let’s address the physical problems with the expression:
Laying in a made bed. Do you lay in your made bed often? I understand that some of you will say yes, so because it does not matter why, I will admit that it just happens sometimes. Maybe you enjoy watching your TV in bed midday and leaving the bed made makes you feel okay about it, or maybe you worked 18 hours today and you came home and passed out in your clothes on top of your sheets because you were just too tired. Whether you are the first or second person, I think we would all agree that: sleeping on top of a bed fully-clothed in your day-wear is going to be a worse sleep than being naked or lightly-clothed under a comfortable amount of sheets AND [this implies] that most often laying on the bed is meant to be a temporary act.
This is the easy one: why did you make the bed if you had to lay in it? Or better: why do you have to make the bed; who/what is it for? Or even better: why do you have to lay in the bed at all?
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In a public conversation at a casual event, mixed with a few friends and peers, my one friend, ‘C’, a few years (years!) after his wife had left him, used this expression on himself in search of pity.
Maybe he believed he was taking blame and to “take blame” here is what an “honest” “man” does… but to the observer, it’s obvious that these are not the acts of a man; they are distinctly boy in nature.
The boy who is innocent and special and knows “true love” only exists when they accept the worst of you (and then takes it as a challenge to make themselves worse everyday).
The boy who only ever sees this “true love” in his mother-son relationship, and/or for as long as they can keep/abuse their partner (which seems to be through marriage and multiple children for many).
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I told him the two physical problems with expression that I outlined above.
And then I told him what that expression says to me instead (it’s not as concise or meaningful, I admit):
You were laying in your bed, with your wife. She got up and made the bed with you in it.
Now you spend all day laying in your made bed, telling everyone that you hate that she made it this way, pleading for someone to lift up the heavy sheets and remake it for you.
People will tell you that you should just get out of bed, like she did, but you tell them that you would never be like her and that the bed is the right place to be.
You hope by committing to the bed she made, she might come back to it.
You hope that the sharp alternative comes; that the sheets smother you or you whither away without her.
But what you really hope is that she never comes back… so that you can stay in bed all day.
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The interesting thing is that neither of us “really” said the original expression. That same homeless-hating asshole that I created above is who said it; it was from a character in his head.
This is why the physical problems of the expression are so revealing. It is not because the person who first used the expression didn’t understand these issues, it’s that these issues are intended to be misunderstood. The fact that is used so often, especially in self-pity, means that it is of course not the truth, but is rather some sort of defense mechanism against it.
The physical problems reveal the underlying structure of the narrative that you want to hear: you made your bed, now go lay in it. The problem is you clearly.
If you begin to tell yourself that you are the problem, that invites the other party to at least comment to agree or disagree. They have to say, “yes you are” or “no you are not” and they may often write this off as someone looking for validation — they think you want them to tell you it wasn’t your fault.
But you don’t really care if they end up agreeing with you or not. Even if they called her all the names in the book, you were going to go home and blame yourself still. Maybe later it sets in and you meet in the middle; you realize some of the ways it was your fault, some of the ways it was hers, and then you see how it was just an issue of “communication”. Keep in mind, the only reason you are doing this is not for growth but to tally up the score. Which, you don’t realize is such a bad thing, since the scoreboard shows that you were an asshole and she is nice but always too easily tricked.
Which brings us to the second part: now go lay in it. Notice I didn’t use any emphasis this time? You’re supposed to notice that. You’re supposed to think of this second part as the consequence of the first and therefore because it is so inevitable, it gets rushed by and forgotten.
If you haven’t come to this conclusion yourself: the order of these events is actually reversed. It has become an expression because it is a comforting piece of rhetoric. Something did happen to you [the bed was made], and now you have to find someone to blame for it happening.
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Now you’re going to come back at me and say that any “logical” / “intelligent” / “rational” person already knows this, and while they are willing to concede that some events are caused by completely unpredictable forces, most human-level events are often the result of other human action, and still, all of these forces, human or not, produce start-to-end-state data, and that data can be applied using mathematics to create heuristics that can reasonably approximate those real-world outcomes.
Okay … so let’s work through the math and model as reasonably as we can: why do you make your bed in the morning?
it’s a mental trick to initiate productivity
aesthetically pleasing compared to mess
habit from military service (haha, yeah)
habit from when grandma lived with you
it’s better to come home to at the end of a long day
it’s more inviting to strangers (wink (haha, yeah))
the bed needs to be flat so it can be used for other practical things; clothes folding and sorting, pillow storage, etc.
the bed folds into the wall and without being made the stuff will all fall to the bottom (the top?) and it pushes the bed out a bit so it’s just easier
you lay in bed all day and you feel less shit about yourself when the bed is made
[insert whatever you want here, try to be funnier than me please]
I’m sure these are all reasonably probable explanations that people would provide for their behavior. I’m sure that we could run some experiments, or collect some data to show how much each these factors influence each other and how much they influence the outcome. It would look cool if we put it all together like a broad network of nodes, each idea a little circle, with a line indicating strength connecting those circles to all others that they influence or are influenced by (hey! maybe we add directional strength! yes, and reinforcement factors too!).
No matter what though, we’d make sure their was a big circle one the left-side of the diagram labeled “IN” and make sure their was a big circle on the right-side of the diagram labeled “OUT”. Then, we just use our vast [computing]power to to let the values associated with each circle and line sort themselves until our INs give us the OUTs we want reliably.
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I can only tell you one thing for sure: if you can come up with two or more different reasons for why you did something, then you don’t know the actual reason.
Single reasons can be additive (or subtractive, it’s the same thing), I get that. If you have pressures to perform conflicting actions from two conflicting sources, then you’re probably best to use a compromise, or pick whichever has the better pay off if you can’t. What I specifically mean by “additive” though, is that they are on the same degree of significance (If you have to choose between your boss firing you or your wife leaving you, then you’ve necessarily put those two things in the same degree, no further commentary).
If they are really additive that means that they are within the same reason still, and at least metrics could make sense there: Mom put a gun to my head and told me to make my bed, Dad put a gun to my head and told me to leave it a mess, and since Mom’s gun had bullets, and Dad’s gun did not, I made my bed.
The presence or absence of bullets is only necessary if they have guns but without this piece of information, there would be no choice. Therefore, reducing all else, you are making a choice based on who has bullets in a gun alone, a single reason.
If that same scenario repeated: Mom put a gun to my head and told me to make my bed, Dad put a gun to my head and told me to leave it a mess, and since Mom’s gun had bullets, Dad’s gun did not, and I hate myself, I left it a mess.
“Adding” that “third” reason really changes the message. Instead of this being a simple selection with clear payoffs and a presumed goal of not dying, we’ve become immensely more complicated and essentially nulled all the reasons altogether.
The I hate myself is not being weighted the same to the others as they are to each other. The “addition” of the I hate myself brings into question the value-measuring system that we were using to begin with. We had assumed we wanted to live and that was how we were measuring whether we should make our bed or leave a mess, and now we are changing that assumption altogether.
[What’s worse is I wrote, “I hate myself”, instead of “I want to die”, which means we death is not a clear correct answer, but I’m leaving it in.]
But if one of the “additive” factors that we are using in our equation (again, even if the equation is weighted) is now being used to determine the value of the other factors, the value of the entire equation is limited to that value-determining factor.
Now, you can see that it isn’t additive clearly — it’s a modulator; it’s a variable. Having “I hate Myself” in there feels more human, but it might as well be a big letter “M” where “M” represents everything that can make the inputs that are “logical” so that they “logically” Map to our “logical” outcomes [change “logical” for “rational” / “scientific”/ “traditional”/ “KPI-based” / “real” / “good” or whatever you please].
Having “I hate myself” is the only way to make sense of why someone would choose to make the “illogical” choice of disobeying the person who has bullets in their gun. But it isn’t the reason, it’s an excuse, with the goal of undermining premises and conclusions as a whole.
Essentially, if you add a factor “M” that both limits the value of the entire equation and explains its discrepancies from the answers you’re looking for: it’s all Madeup.
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It doesn’t matter if you are the “rationalist” using math and computers, or my abusive, divorced friend using boy pity-bait techniques, you have the same goal: to find comfort in being powerless. Before I go any further, I should quickly mention I used “power” broadly, but being mindful of its context, it usually means having agency over oneself and confidence in their actions to produce consequences as they have mapped them, or the ability to influence others to make actions you want.
In situation Abuse and Pity he pleads for anyone to assign fault to anyone else. Him or her, it doesn’t matter. If it was her fault, then he doesn’t have to do anything (but this is rarely the case, as no matter the objective scenario, no matter who tells him that it is her fault, he will assume they are telling him what he wants to hear, and that it really was his fault).
So, we arrive at it being his fault that she left. Which to him really means: HE had the POWER to make her leave. If the resulting mess, the pain or confusion he is feeling and she is feeling, is because of his actions, it means he has the power to hurt and confuse her, and himself.
In situation Logically Rational you model the world as best as you can. You know that the only way to understand a system it to break it down and scale it up again. Thankfully, the world can be measured and computers can scale those measures. Maybe you don’t ever use it meaningfully, but the ability to recognize these reductions is what matters: if you were given a closed system and assigned some high-level questions, you would know how to get the answers you need from manipulating the data and resources you have.
It’s the same story though, except maybe this time you get to be the narrator instead of the main character. Having an “understanding” of every system is enough to keep you from ever wanting to get involved with that system. Understanding and imagination is like experience without responsibility. But “responsibility” really just means “feedback from others” which is one large element of what the real world is.