What the yes buys

Go back to the pavement and slow it down.

At one minute to seven you're wheeling a bin and you feel fine. Your neighbour comes over and you still feel fine. She starts to ask, and somewhere around the words "eight till four" a small tension arrives. It sits in the chest or the stomach. It's made of several things at once. There's her hopeful face, the silence that's about to need filling, and a picture of how her face will change if you say the wrong thing. Then you say "Yes, of course" and the tension goes. She beams. You feel good.

So what did the yes buy? It bought the end of that tension. I'd like you to notice that the tension wasn't there at one minute to seven. You weren't walking around with a need that the yes met. The request produced the discomfort, and the yes removed it. At five past seven you're back where you were at one minute to, except that you now owe somebody a Saturday.

I don't want to push this further than it goes. Agreeing to things isn't a drug and I'm not going to dress it up as one. Your neighbour didn't set out to make you uncomfortable, and some of the good feeling afterwards is real. Her thanks are real. The small glow of having been generous is real too, although I'd say you were generous with a Saturday you hadn't looked at yet. But most of what you felt at five past seven was relief. Relief is pleasant, and it's also nothing more than the removal of something unpleasant. It gives you nothing you didn't have ten minutes earlier.

Now the price. The tension would have lasted, at a guess, ten or twenty seconds if you'd said no. There'd have been a moment of awkwardness, a "no worries" from her, a slightly stiff goodbye, and perhaps a few minutes of replaying it as you went back inside. Against that you gave eight hours in a church hall, plus the Sunday that had to absorb Saturday's jobs, plus the rest you didn't get, plus a fortnight of mild dread whenever the fair crossed your mind.

Nobody would make that trade on paper. If a stranger offered to spare you twenty seconds of awkwardness in return for a Saturday of unpaid work, you'd laugh. You make it on the pavement because of how the two sides of the trade appear to you. The awkwardness is here, now, in your chest, with a face attached. The Saturday is an idea. It has no feel to it yet. One side of the scales has a weight you can sense and the other has a label. My reading is that this lopsidedness explains most of the habit. You're not choosing the church hall over your free day. You're choosing the end of a bad feeling over nothing in particular, because the free day isn't in the room.

There's an honest objection here. "It isn't only relief. If I'd said no I'd have felt guilty all week, and she'd have thought less of me. The yes bought me out of that as well." That's a forecast, and it deserves a proper look. Chapter 5 is about how accurate it is. For now I'll only say that the week of guilt and the neighbour's low opinion weren't things you experienced. They were things you predicted, in under four seconds, with a face in front of you.

A second objection is fairer still. Sometimes the yes does buy something. Streets where people muck in are nicer to live on, and your help is part of what makes them so. I agree. But that benefit comes from willing yeses too, and it comes from smaller ones. You could have said, "I can't do the day, but I'll bring a cake and come and spend a tenner." That serves the street and costs you an hour you wouldn't have minded. The unwilling yes is an expensive way to buy something that was on sale for less.

I'm not asking you to change anything yet. The next time someone asks you for something, watch the order of events. You're fine, then you're asked, then the tension comes, then you answer, then relief. See if the relief arrives whatever you've agreed to. I'd bet that it does, and that its size has nothing to do with whether the thing is worth doing.