When Not Acting Is Not Avoidance

Agency, deficit, and the distinction between “not yet” and “not now” After the article about systems thinking as a possible form of avoidance, I discovered a problem in the argument. If avoidance and anxiety are a plausible explanation, then almost any unfinished task can be explained psychologically. I did not publish the text — perhaps I am afraid of evaluation. I postpone looking for a job — perhaps I cannot tolerate uncertainty. I abandoned training — resistance. I did not answer a message — I am avoiding discomfort. A psychological explanation can almost always be found. But sometimes: I know, and I am not afraid of what needs to be done. There is simply no time, money, attention, energy, or organizational possibilities to do it now without taking these resources away from something else. The problem is not always avoidance or anxiety. Sometimes the problem is a deficit of resources. This distinction changes the idea of agency. Agency is the ability to meaningfully choose a way of spending limited resources: time, attention, energy, etc. It is justified to act and not to act if it is not a priority. To revise priorities when circumstances change. If delay is considered an inability to act, then a person with finite resources and several goals is doomed to failure in advance. Something will remain unfinished. Therefore, the useful question is not: “am I doing everything that is important?”. But: Why am I not doing exactly this? Delay is not procrastination Psychology gives a useful distinction. In a 2007 review, Piers Steel defined procrastination as voluntarily delaying an intended action despite being aware that the delay will make things worse. (Steel, P., 2007) Delay alone is not enough. What matters is the collision between the action that is necessary (in the person’s opinion) and the action that happens (that the person performs). This is how another kind of postponement appears. By postponing one task because another is more serious in terms of deadline, consequences, or results, with the same limited amount of resources required for completion, a person is not failing at self-regulation. He is exercising it. This does not mean that prioritization is always innocent. “I am too busy” can hide fear. “I need to think some more” can hide a threshold of confidence that keeps moving away. A task that received low priority may be the one that a person least wants to face. We are capable of explaining avoidance through prioritization. But this possibility does not eliminate the distinction. For myself, I distinguish 3 reasons for inaction. Epistemic limitation — there is not enough knowledge for a responsible choice. Affective avoidance — I know enough, but there is not enough confidence, certainty, or feeling of readiness that thinking will never provide. Resource limitation — I know what is needed, and I am ready to do it, but the resources are occupied. “It is not a validated psychological taxonomy.” The categories can overlap: anxiety can consume attention, deficit can create uncertainty, lack of information can justify avoidance. I use this distinction for a narrower reason. These 3 problems require different responses: Not enough information? — study. Anxiety moves the criterion of sufficiency? — test through action. Are resources limited? — prioritize. Confusing the type of limitation means choosing the wrong solution. The multiplicity of human goals Self-development advice often makes sense under the condition that a person has only one goal at a given moment: Health problems — get a medical check-up. Financial difficulties? — save more. No partner? — develop communication and invest in relationships. Want professional development? — study. Need social capital? — build connections. Susceptible to the influence of your environment? — improve it. Each recommendation separately is reasonable. If you put them together, the task changes. Research on self-regulation sees human behavior as a problem of multiple goals. Neal, Ballard, and Vancouver describe self-regulation as managing competing demands on resources: which goals to pursue, in what order, for how long, and when to change goals. (Neal, A., Ballard, T., & Vancouver, J. B. 2017) This view of agency seems useful. A person is not moving toward a single goal under the pressure of distractions, but distributes effort among several things deserving attention. The distribution changes over time. In a longitudinal diary study and two experiments, Louro, Pieters, and Zeelenberg studied how effort changes depending on progress, emotions, and proximity to a goal. Their work does not teach how to organize life, but it shows why “consistent effort in all directions simultaneously” poorly describes the pursuit of multiple goals. (Louro, M. J., Pieters, R., & Zeelenberg, M., 2007) There is evidence for what psychologists call goal shielding. In six studies, Shah, Friedman, and Kruglanski showed how commitment to a focal goal suppresses the cognitive accessibility of competing goals, helping the advancement of the goal that has become central. A price is built into concentration. Choosing one main goal means allowing others to become less visible. The alternative is not balance, but fragmentation. Commitments create opportunity costs An hour spent reading cannot be spent on training, sleep, or talking with a friend. Money put into a business cannot provide liquidity somewhere else. Attention given to one difficult task is unavailable to another at that moment. And there is no need to imagine willpower as a volume that is slowly emptied. Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, and Myers proposed another model of mental effort. They argued that part of the subjective cost of working on a task reflects the opportunity cost of limited cognitive processes not directed toward something else. (Kurzban R., Duckworth A., Kable J. W., Myers J., 2013) Their approach is not a fact, but it suits me as a theory, considering effort as allocation rather than only depletion. Later work directly studied prioritization under cognitive limitations. Alister and colleagues found limitations in available cognitive resources in people capable of changing prioritization between interdependent goals. (Alister M., Herbert S. L., Sewell D. K., Neal A., Ballard T., 2023) A laboratory task is not a model of human life, but it confirms a narrow thesis: the character of resource allocation depends on the resources a person has available for the allocation process itself. It is difficult to bring additional theory under the theory: Doing more in one means doing less in another. But many personal theories of agency silently remove this limitation. Info-businessmen, coaches, and mentors describe desirable states and then add them together. Be healthy, rich, needed, important, intelligent, literate, empathetic, informed, mobile, fresh, rested, and productive. I do not object to each of these goals separately. The problem is in their conjunction, where a person with finite resources has been given an infinite portfolio. Completion as a false morality By turning a necessary goal into an obligation, resource allocation fails. Half a year of stabilizing finances reduces attention to maintaining friendships and can be regarded as neglect of social life. Long-term care for a sick grandmother, and because of that slow professional progress, feels like a loss of ambition. Moving to another country, obtaining new housing, documents, language, legal status, and administrative load consumes resources that are needed for health or relationships. A year of recovery after surgery — and all other trajectories temporarily level out at the lower boundary of activity. A model requiring simultaneous optimization of everything declares each of these lives defective. A model based on allocation under constraints asks: What is most important now, if acting under my constraints? Prioritization can still be wrong. Resources can be spent on urgent problems while important ones are neglected. Work can devour relationships while being considered a necessity. What looked temporary can become permanent. These are errors inside the allocation process. They do not prove that the allocation process is an error. Unaccounted constraints turn a theory of agency into a theory of self-blame. There is a justified objection. If one sphere of life dominates, what prevents the others from degrading? Therefore, for me the concept of maintenance seems more useful than balance. Balance requires comparable attention for important spheres of life. Maintenance is a dynamic balance over time: What should stop developing for a while, and what should develop continuously? Relationships with friends can be maintained not especially deeply during an especially intense month. But minimal contact is required in order not to disappear. Savings may not grow during an expensive transition period. But liquidity must remain above the point after which one expense destroys the possibility of choice. Physical form may not improve during thesis work. But an endless sacrifice of basic recovery creates irreversible costs. There is no universal scientific threshold for such examples. Psychology does not give an objective score after which relationships, finances, autonomy, or health move from the state of “being maintained” to the state of “neglected.” However, there is a research tradition around the idea that resource losses can accumulate. Conservation of resources theory is used in stress research and allows for the possibility of loss spirals, when an initial loss makes further losses more likely. These constructs are broader than the ones I use. The theory should not be considered confirmation of my model. (Hobfoll S. E., Halbesleben J., Neveu J-P., Westman M., 2017) It supports a narrower thesis: the consequences of neglect may not be local. Persistence also cannot solve the allocation problem. Research by Carsten Wrosch and his colleagues showed that disengaging from unattainable goals and switching to others is associated with higher subjective well-being. (Wrosch, C., Scheier, M. F., Miller, G. E., Schulz, R., Carver, C. S., 2003) Later work also found an association between the ability to disengage from goals and some indicators of better health. (Wrosch, C., Miller, G. E., Scheier, M. F., Brun de Pontet, S., 2007) These studies do not claim that giving up goals is useful. But they weaken the moral equality in which persistence means agency and retreat means failure. Sometimes, having agency means continuing. Sometimes — switching. Sometimes — maintaining a sphere of life at a stable level without trying to improve it. And sometimes — not developing a necessary goal because, at the moment, something else is more necessary. Agency as management under constraints This changes the definition of agency that seems meaningful to me. Now we understand that agency does not mean simultaneous maximization of all valuable dimensions of life. By accepting this limitation — we get a difficult question: How to allocate limited resources? I do not see a clean optimization problem here. The input data are not defined. The future value of each investment is unknown. It is possible to make a mistake in assessing risks. Priorities change. People change. Institutions change. Illnesses, markets, relationships, and chance change the available set of options. Perhaps a stable optimum does not exist and cannot be found. Therefore, I think about personal agency not as control, but as management under constraints. Decide what to give attention to. Understand what can be postponed. Maintain abilities and resources that do not have to grow. Release resources from goals that do not justify them. Change the hierarchy if circumstances change. I compress this distinction into two similar phrases: Not yet. and: Not now. “Not yet” — some condition necessary for action has not been fulfilled. “Not now” — I decided to direct the resource somewhere else. The first describes a barrier that needs to be overcome.The second is itself a decision. Personal orbital model Here the argument becomes heuristic. ATTENTION WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN EMPIRICALLY NON-VALIDATED MODEL ATTENTION Nobody knows the exact number of spheres of life from which a universal objective personal model of human agency consists. There is no validated measurement instrument behind the distances in the model, there is no population norm, and there is no scientific reason why another person should organize life using the same categories. I even specifically do not recommend using it. I built this model for myself and about myself because I needed a way to represent resource allocation without turning life into a checklist. In my model, the person is at the center. Around the center are spheres that are currently useful for thinking about autonomy: functional capacity, economic resilience, legal autonomy, cognitive autonomy, social capital, adaptive mobility, reputational capital, and volitional agency. The taxonomy is preliminary. The number of spheres is not important; what is important is the orbit.When one sphere moves closer to the center, it does not become morally more valuable. It becomes strategically more important now. If economic resilience moves inward, income, liquidity, debts, or housing may require more attention. If functional capacity moves inward, health and recovery may dominate. If legal autonomy is under threat, paperwork that seemed like a small thing yesterday may occupy all free time in the month. If self-determination is going through a crisis, then volitional agency can quickly move closer to the center. The other spheres are also important, but move farther from the center. The model gives me a way to represent temporary asymmetry without diagnosing the system as malfunctioning. Rotation instead of balance The orbital metaphor, unlike the idea of “working on every sphere of life,” allows different spheres to be at different distances. Some actively burn resources, others are maintained, and some are waiting. Equal proximity of every sphere to the center is not important to me. What is important to me is that each sphere does not move beyond a minimum viable threshold, so that bringing it back becomes too expensive. This is a personal heuristic, not a measurable psychological quantity. Its practical purpose is to change the question. Instead of: Am I developing all spheres of my life enough? Ask: What deserves resources now, and what can simply be maintained until the next change of orbit? This question is less ambitious. It refers exactly to the resource allocation problem that needs to be solved. Framework as a form of avoidance There is a danger hidden in resolving excessive analysis by inventing a model. The orbital framework can be made more detailed and the number of orbits increased. You can give the spheres KPIs. And recalculate the sum of KPIs as a weighted average in points. Visualize the points in dashboards... In the end, decisions are no longer being made. A complex system is being designed to discover a theoretically correct decision. This will reproduce the problem I was trying to solve at the beginning. Therefore, the framework should not say “what to do.” It should say: Attention must always be directed somewhere If the model helps to visualize allocation better, it is useful. If maintaining the model consumes more attention than the decisions it clarifies, — it has failed. I do not want to measure myself more precisely, I want to stop considering every particular investment as evidence that something else (everything else) has failed. Three questions The previous article ended with the question: Am I waiting for information for action or for the feeling of confidence in action? Now I add a third option: Or am I not acting in a certain direction because something else deserves the resources more right now? From this come three necessary diagnostic questions: 1. What do I still need to learn? If additional information will substantially change the decision — research is needed. 2. What am I not ready to experience? If there is enough information for a limited next step, but I move the standard of readiness — the problem is avoidance. 3. What will this action displace? If the action requires taking resources away from something more important — the delay may be an allocation decision. None of the answers is permanent. A rational delay can become avoidance. A dominant sphere can turn into obsession. An abandoned activity can become important. New information can make rational an action that seemed irresponsible. A goal that justified sacrifices can stop justifying them. Therefore, agency cannot be a static hierarchy in which I discover the final and correct order of life. Agency is the continuous ability to revise the hierarchy. Not everything unfinished is a failure In social media there lives an attractive image of a disciplined person whose all spheres of life continuously move forward: Health improves. Career develops. Savings grow. Relationships deepen. Knowledge expands. Connections multiply. The home is put in order. The body is rested. The future is planned. Nothing is neglected. Nothing remains unfinished. But a life without a rejected alternative is a life without meaningful allocation. Every commitment creates an absence somewhere else. To write one article means not to write another. To love one person at a given moment means to be unavailable to another. To protect future financial freedom means refusing current consumption. Recovery requires suspending productivity. Trade-offs do not tell us which choice is good, but they tell us that discipline does not remove the necessity of choosing. This changes my understanding of agency. Agency is not the simultaneous maximization of all foundations of autonomy. Agency is the ability to allocate limited resources among competing tasks, preserve what cannot safely be allowed not to develop, and revise the allocation as circumstances change. Sometimes, this means acting without a feeling of readiness. Sometimes — admitting that I do not know enough. Sometimes — doing one thing while everything else waits. The opposite of avoidance is not continuous busyness and action. It is the ability to distinguish: I am afraid to act. I do not know enough to act. and I am not acting here because life requires acting somewhere else. A person possessing agency is not the one who keeps every sphere equally close. A person possessing agency is the one who is capable of keeping the spheres in orbit, deciding which ones to bring closer to the center now. Also available in Russian at t.me/bygigory Sources: Steel, P. 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