No Sense of Scale

I recently bought a desk. Before the buying there was the choosing, and the choosing ran long: leg grades, timber species for the top, whether the underside should be sealed as well as the face, corner profiles, sixty centimeters of depth against seventy, and — near the end — a two-centimeter difference in lift range between two nearly identical models. I decide things for a living; it is most of what my work is. At no point did the machinery doing all this notice it was pointed at a desk.

Comparable is not the same as worth deciding

The specs made it worse, not better. Everything about a desk arrives as a number — price, load rating, lift range — and when the differences line up in columns, each one reads as one more item you have not yet checked. Comparison feels like diligence. But a difference being measurable is not the same as the difference deserving a decision, and a spec sheet cannot tell you which kind you are looking at. I had in fact already settled the question once — a ¥24,000 fixed-leg table, chosen and closed. The machinery reopened it. There was always one more variable, and every variable resolved produced the next.

The arithmetic

What stopped it was one line of arithmetic — nothing exotic; the kind of check I would call obvious looking at anyone else's situation. I took the price gap between the two finalists and divided it by what an hour of my time is worth. The whole difference was worth a little over one hour of deliberation, and I was well past that. Most of what I had been treating as due diligence was, by my own accounting, noise. The walnut top I had been leaning toward held a smaller lesson: asked why walnut, I found nothing there — no thought about how it ages, no reason that survived the question. I had preferred it the way you prefer things when the preferring has gone unexamined. And somewhere past the two-centimeter comparison, I had stopped learning anything about desks at all. The research had become a way of not choosing.

It fails in the other direction too

I would distrust the machinery less if it only failed slowly. It also fails fast. The desk was in question at all because a house move set off a chain of reasoning — my tools now run in the cloud, so I hardly need the computer, so perhaps I do not need a desk, so perhaps the way I work should change — a conclusion about my whole working life, riding on the back of a moving van. That conclusion also happened to be exactly the one I wanted: fewer things, less spent, more lightness. Which should have been the warning. A conclusion that convenient is usually the conclusion arriving first, with the reasoning padding in after it. The same engine, then, with the same missing part: too slow on a two-centimeter question, too fast on a how-should-I-live question, and no internal sense of which question it was holding.

The missing part is external

The tempting conclusion is that the machinery needs fixing. I don't think it does. It is the same deliberation that runs the rest of the work, and I would not trade it. What it lacks it cannot grow on its own: a sense of scale has to be installed from outside, the way the arithmetic was — one line that asks, before the engine starts, whether the question in front of it deserves the engine. I have written about what happens when this instinct runs on the inner life; the desk is the cheaper, funnier version of the same discovery. Judgment does not come with a dimmer. Left alone, it runs at full intensity on whatever is placed in front of it — a company, a desk, a two-centimeter difference — and it will not tell you which of these deserved it.