Everything Or Nothing: A Principle For Observing Fellow Humans
Do other people actually know what they're doing?
Say you’re out for a hike. Say it’s one of those hikes where there’s a mountaintop or a waterfall or some clear destination that more or less everyone you encounter on the trail is either headed to or returning from. You’ve prepared appropriately, or so you think. You’ve got the right shoes, the right clothes, a modest water bottle.
But then you pass a fellow hiker who has a lot more stuff. Climbing poles. Bear spray. A big-ass pack with a bunch of supplies. Is it your imagination, or did he just give you a weird look as he passed? As if maybe he was thinking that you seem woefully unprepared?
You press on. Then a couple miles later you pass another guy, this one with way less stuff than you. He’s in jean shorts and a tank top. No supplies of any kind. As he approaches you hear the slap of his flip-flops on the trail. He looks like he took a wrong turn returning from the beach and just hasn’t realized it yet. But as you pass you’re almost certain he’s giving you a look like you are the day hike dork who thinks he’s climbing Everest out here.
In both situations you may find yourself asking the same question: Does this person know things that I don’t?
A very smart person I know used to refer this as a question of Everything Or Nothing. As in, when you see someone doing things differently than you’d expect for the circumstances, you might ask yourself whether it’s because they know everything about this or nothing at all?
Probably you are familiar with this conundrum. I’ve seen it in airport security lines, at the gym, at government offices of all kinds. It’s especially noticeable in certain outdoor pursuits – camping, hiking, backcountry skiing, etc. – where there might be a thin line between being just prepared enough and so underprepared that you’re actually risking death. That’s when you sometimes see people who appear to be very confidently doing it wrong.
Maybe it’s because they’re genuinely clueless. They don’t even know enough to know how much they don’t know. The kind of person volunteer search and rescue teams were created for.
Then again, maybe this person is an expert. Maybe they’re the first person the search and rescue teams call when it’s time to saddle up and go. They know so much that they know which of the usual rules and conventionl wisdom are actually bullshit. From a distance, they may appear as though they’re not taking any of this seriously enough, but it’s only because their expertise has altered their perception.
And so when you see some people out in the world you must ask yourself: Does this person know everything or nothing? Do they have such an encyclopedic knowledge of this field that they can make up their own rules? Or are they so totally ignorant that they don’t even know how badly they’re fucking it up?
We ask this in part because we don’t know what the hell is going on a lot of the time. Particularly in situations that introduce an unfamiliar element of danger, we turn into herd animals ready to bolt at the first sign of a stampede.
There’s a scene in the surprisingly funny novel “White Noise,” by the big homie Don DeLillo, where the narrator and his family encounter an ecological disaster (the Airborne Toxic Event) that might be a huge deal or might be nothing. No one is quite sure, so they’re constantly monitoring each other for clues, even as they’re all forced from their homes:
(A still from the film version of '“White Noise,” which sucks. Read the book instead.)
“We made it onto the road as snow began to fall. We had little to say to each other, our minds not yet adjusted to the actuality of things, the absurd fact of evacuation. Mainly we looked at people in other cars, trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be.”
If this feels familiar it might be because you recall the goddamn pandemic. Remember the very early days of it? When schools first closed and the volume on daily life got turned real, real low? I can remember going to the supermarket and seeing other people’s carts piled high with what had ceased to be groceries and now could only be described as supplies. If you got too close to them in the aisles they looked at you like you were threatening them.
I can remember walking into the supermarket feeling one way about COVID and another way walking out. I was only planning to buy a few things, but when I saw their bulging carts I wondered if I shouldn’t by more before it was all gone. This, of course, is exactly the kind of thinking that led to toilet paper shortages, which we must now admit was objectively hilarious.
The whole pandemic was a big experiment in Everything Or Nothing. There were so many people who were very confidently wrong, but simply by virtue of not personally dying they emerged more certain than ever that the expertise of doctors and scientists was nothing compared with the wisdom of their favorite commenters on the Jordan Peterson subreddit.
That is one problem with the Everything Or Nothing question, is that it can sometimes tend to be too results-based. Just because the mountain climber in Crocs doesn’t run into trouble this time, it doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea. Confidence is great, but it is not a catch-all substitute for actual expertise.
I’ll never forget when a man bought the vacant lot next to my house, determined to whip it into shape all by himself and build a house on it that he would then sell for a small fortune. One day he showed up with a chainsaw and zero protective equipment, then proceeded to climb the giant willow tree whose branches he intended to prune. I was alerted to his presence by my good friend Dan, who was watching him from my back window and called out that I absolutely had to stop what I was doing and come see this asshole.
We watched as he felled branch after branch, like he’d been doing it all his life. Just as we were about to conclude that we’d been wrong about him, he got his chainsaw stuck in a particularly large branch. Naturally, he left it there as he climbed down and went to his truck to retrieve another, slightly smaller chainsaw, which quickly got stuck in the same branch.
As we watched him frantically yanking at his chainsaws with both hands some twenty feet off the ground, Dan remarked that the world was full of people who thought of themselves as chainsaw masters.
“But a lot of them,” he said as we both wiped tears of laughter from our faces, “are really just chainsaw owners.”