Indulging social anxiety

I recently had to renew my license, so I made an appointment at the DMV. I showed up at the DMV within the time bounds they gave me, and I found an enormous line to check in. I did not know whether I could skip to the front of the line due to my appointment. I asked the guy at the front of the line what the line was for, and he said it was to check in. I was not convinced, but I went and stood in line. The line made me half an hour late for my appointment.

I’m trying to figure out whether I did the right thing. I stood in line getting nervous about the potential future in which I would be late checking in and they would throw out my appointment, but I didn’t want to annoy a bunch of strangers by cutting in front or by asking literally everyone who had been standing in this line for half an hour whether they had an appointment. I didn’t want to slow down the overloaded employees checking people in by cutting in to ask what I was supposed to do and possibly cause a scene with a bunch of annoyed people standing in line. There was a line. I would eventually get to the front of the line and see the people I needed to see. I boldly assumed that the DMV is a system which is designed to accommodate people much less informed than I am who can barely read English, so I had faith that me doing something as defensible as standing in line to check in would not get me punished by the system. I accepted that I might be wrong and then I would lose my appointment, but that bothered me less than the social anxiety of cutting in front of (or talking to) a line full of annoyed people. I made a choice.

On the one hand, my choice worked out great! I didn’t have to talk to a bunch of people and obsess over how poorly I handled those conversations for a week (it’s happened before, and it’s arguably happening right now about not having those conversations, but it doesn’t hurt). I didn’t cause delays in a line that was a product of an already overstrained system. The guy who checked me in made fun of me for being so late because I stood in line, but I got my license renewed. Everyone wins? On the other hand, if he hadn’t allowed me to check me in late, then I would have wasted nearly 3 hours of my life and a non-negligible amount of gasoline driving back and forth to this DMV and standing in line. I had a significant amount to lose. I indulged my social anxiety at the possible expense of probability that I would get my license. How should I grade myself?

The obvious way to figure out how to grade myself would be to go to the DMV five times acting bold and five times acting meek according to randomly assigned strategies per event. Then I could compare whether there was a significant difference in the number of times I got my license renewed. I don’t want to do that, because being at the DMV is bad for my soul. I can’t do that, because getting my license renewed is a thing I can only do once per decade. My next solution would be to keep track of every time I have a conflict of social anxiety vs nonconformity, randomly pick an action each time, and compare the results to see whether I get what I want more when I don’t indulge conformity. That sounds like a great way to make me really anxious! But it has the benefit of not requiring me to make a value judgement on grading my DMV performance. You see, I got the license. It goes in the sample set as a success. If I did the wrong thing for that class of decision, then eventually I usually won’t get lucky and the superiority of assertion will assert itself.

This does not feel like an ideal solution. It would probably work, which is a point in its favor. But shouldn’t I be able to learn faster than that? Do I need reality to beat me over the head with failure a statistically significant number of times to learn something? Surely there’s some model that could let me make an update on my past experiences. I could even frame it using Bayesian statistics and feel clever about it.

I just spent five minutes risking my spiritual health by digging through my remembered past trying to remember what happened in the times when I refused to do something that seemed like an obvious good idea out of sheer social anxiety. I came up with a few examples which were at least as bad as the DMV, all of those things basically turned out fine when I conformed. I came up with a few times where I did the “obvious good idea” that didn’t conform, and most of those things also turned out fine, but I can think of a few which I still think I would have done better on if I had chickened out. (Please forgive me for not sharing details here. I did some truly embarrassing things both in the direction of conformity and the direction of nonconformity. Sometimes the same embarrassing thing multiple times! Why am I doing this to myself?) I am clearly not an unbiased observer of my past actions, but you’d think I could come up with more catastrophes if this was a problem? A funny thing I just realized by typing the phrase “chickened out” is that I have a cultural bias I might be indulging just as hard as I’m indulging my social anxiety by getting anxious about getting anxious. The words which I identify with conformity are all basically insults. Maybe my vague feeling that I’m conforming too much relative to my desire to accomplish my goals is me trying to conform to a (possibly masculine-coded) ideal of society that I don’t naturally conform to. Maybe I should be ignoring that cultural bias and doing the thing which has worked for me in the past. Of course, I don’t know of any psychology experiments that say that people (except maybe teenagers?) have a natural tendency to be impulsive when they could obviously do better along their own utility function by conforming. I happen to know of two famous psychology experiments where people went along with the direction of a crowd even though it was obviously the wrong direction or flagrantly violated their own ethics in response to slight social pressure. The famous psychology experiments that I know are also subject to cultural selection, but maybe there is, in fact, a good reason why the most insightful writers I read harp on pressure to conform as a dangerous pressure on society. The fact that there is a cultural bias toward believing that the sky is blue does not mean I should doubt Rayleigh scattering.

I’m currently procrastinating on things from sheer anxiety when I’m almost certain that I’m going to do those things anyway, and I might have been able to convince myself to do them today if I had any evidence that indulging my anxiety is making me worse off. This is not where I expected this essay to go. Anyway, I’m going to post this embarrassing essay and see if it leads to better results than all of the times I wrote a bunch of stuff and didn’t post it.