Bad Weather Without Promises

The social ritual of consolation requires promising that a hard period will soon be over and everything is bound to work out. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it passes a wish off as a forecast.

After the holidays it will get easier. In spring everything will change. After the election the uncertainty will end. A few more weeks and normal life can resume.

Sometimes the forecast comes true. Sometimes the bad period doesn’t receive the notification.

The danger of temporary thinking is that a person postpones necessary decisions:

• doesn’t rebuild the budget;
• doesn’t look for new income;
• doesn’t change their routine;
• doesn’t ask for help;
• doesn’t furnish the temporary housing;
• doesn’t build a sustainable order.

They endure for months conditions designed for a few days.

It makes more sense to hold two possibilities at once:

This may end soon.

This may go on.

Then decisions appear that improve life now without locking up the future: a minimal but comfortable domestic setup, a reserve, a temporary yet stable routine, short planning horizons, regular review of the conditions, and keeping documents, contacts and skills.

You don’t have to treat bad times as the new eternity. It is enough to stop building everything on the promise of a swift end. Hope is useful as a source of energy. In the job of a calendar it performs worse.

This is how people live in temporary housing. Someone moves in for three months and doesn’t buy a decent frying pan, doesn’t put up a shelf, doesn’t find a doctor nearby — it will all be sorted soon, after all. A year later he is still frying on a pan with the coating peeling off and doesn’t know where the nearest clinic is. Three months was an honest forecast. The trouble is that daily life was built on a forecast. A year of his life passed in full, not in standby mode, and it was spent on a discomfort that cost about four thousand roubles to fix.

The sensible insurance is to buy only what you wouldn’t mind abandoning — but to buy it. The bet on “it’ll be over soon” costs nothing right up until it starts deciding whether there is a chair in the house.