Lal Bihari and the Hard Truths Behind 21-Century Errand Paralysis
For 17 years, Lal Bihari did everything he could to prove he wasn't dead. First, he tried legal avenues, such as visiting government offices, the police, and the courts, filing paperwork to get his name put back on official records. But when legal methods failed, he started breaking the law in very public ways. He thought that if he was arrested under his real name, they'd have to recognize that he was alive and have to admit there'd been a mistake.
That's when his family declared him dead legally - a trick to claim his land. Lal Bihari tried filing paperwork, exposing the fraud that ruined his name and tried the local government and the police. And even after getting arrested, nobody wanted to recognize the corruption.
Nobody wanted to lose face and admit that something was wrong with the system. Nobody would even write his name on an official complaint because a dead man can't lodge complaints.
Years of not being able to own land or take a loan led to greater desperation. Eventually, Lal Bihari found himself kidnapping a cousin from the family who had faked his death. In 1985, he snatched the cousin as he left school, but Lal Bihari didn't know what to do with them. So, he took the young boy to the movies for 5 straight days. Day after day, Lal Bihari grabbed him from the school and took him to see shows, but the family refused to call the police. So, Lal Bihari asked the village butcher to sell him some goat's blood so he could stain the boy’s shirt to scare the parents, but the butcher wouldn't do it. Eventually, a journalist friend convinced Lal Bihari to drop the kidnapping plan altogether. That’s when he moved onto riskier crimes, like protesting politicians in a part of India that still regularly jails protesters.
Lal Bihari began bribing police officers to arrest him or file cases against him. He even interrupted the State Assembly, angry politicians who were mid-speech. As Lal Bihari did more and more to make himself a public spectacle, he began to gather a following. Nearly a hundred people would join him before he would be declared legally alive again. All of them were dead men and women. All of them were wronged by their families and taken off official records so their assets could be seized. This was how the associative dead man had started an association, something that could have been extinguished quickly and quietly if the local government hadn’t made the bureaucratic process of being declared alive an impossible errand.
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The term life admin refers to the office work it takes to run a household or just keeping track of your own health and finances. We're talking about taxes, insurance, rent, car payments, everything. It is also tracking how many points you have left on the Pizza Hut app before you get a free pizza or how many website privacy agreements you're forced to ignore. At some point, the blizzard of agreements we have to click, check, and navigate just becomes a wall of white noise. Life admin errands haven't become an isolated problem for medical insurance or billing or taxes life - it has taken over everything. Every business seems to have an automated answering system, rebates, or surveys to interface with the public for basic needs and it's all getting a bit much. So today, we're talking about errand paralysis, a very new term for a rapidly growing problem. And we have three myths we want to bust about this phenomenon.
Myth 1: Errand paralysis isn't real. It's a made-up Millennial term. Back in my day, we called it burnout and would just work through it. It’s not like it costs multi-billions of dollars in healthcare every year, right?
So, our subject today, we're covering errand paralysis, which used to be called burnout in the 70s. However, we are going to be putting a finer point on it. Lal Bihari was basically given the impossible errand of proving he was alive in a corrupted system. Now, not all errand paralysis comes from trying to prove you're alive to a corrupt government. Our government arguably is corrupt enough, but more importantly, businesses and independent systems are corrupt/utilize how much errand fatigue we have.
Joe: Todd, what is an errand or like a series of errands that almost (or did) cost you a bunch of money?
Todd: I own a construction company in Seattle and I delegate a lot of the paperwork, accounting, and payroll to an accountant. It was someone I trusted and who was in the family. So, in the state of Washington, there's sales tax. This means that on every job, they collect a percentage of sales tax. This accountant, who I assumed was taking care of this, didn't pay the taxes for about three years. With the gross sales tax being 8% to 10%, it ended up turning into $80-90K that we owed and didn't have.
Joe: Taxes definitely fall under our errand and fatigue. For me, I received a medical bill and assumed they billed me right. The services I got from a hospital were about $9K, and it looked correct. II even looked through the itemized list. But what I didn't do was check to see if they tried to bill my Union first. What they were doing was billing me directly. That one little mistake that I signed off on ended up costing me and took about 10 months of trying to get my money back.
So, we're going to start by talking about talk burnout. The episode title errand paralysis, but this really started as the phenomenon of burnout. Have you ever read the BuzzFeed article called How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation? Burnout was something that really started surfacing in the 70s and 80s, and is now making a comeback in the Millennial generation. Within the article, the author takes great pains to lay out what Millennial burnout is - diving into the term errand paralysis. We want to encapsulate this to find solutions to errand paralysis.
“The exhaustion experienced and burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demanding anxiety or distraction that can't be silenced.”- Josh Cohen.
Before this article was posted, Simon Sinek has made many harsh jokes on Millennials. He and others joked about and treated them as entitled dreamers, lazy, etc. Now, I will not take out the human factor from this. I will say there is always the chance that Millennials are actually lazy, but statistically, it's unlikely that an entire generation has been pampered or changed or something. If you go back to like ancient Greece, you'll see Philosophers and Senators complaining about the younger generation being softer and lazier and not holding their own.
This article jokes that it's called the inbox of shame, when you've done all the important stuff and what you're left with things to do that can be put off, like scheduling appointments, checking emails, etc. But one that the author brought up was how a partner was so hampered by the multi-step and purposefully confusing process for submitting insurance rebates forms weekly for therapy that they just stopped, even though it cost them $1K a week. That seems to be the perfect example of what systems like that are supposed to do - pile onto the stack and capitalize on burnout.
Now, do you think that older generations were better equipped to deal with this load of calls and things to remember? Equipped maybe, but in short, they didn't have as much to worry about as we do today. There was no internet, log-in set-ups, email, texting, cell phones. They were not connected or obligated to be connected 24/7 like we are now. The author then talks about on the BuzzFeed article that about how we ended up letting this errand paralysis take over our lives. She said that we didn't try to break the system since that's not how we've been raised. Instead, we tried to win it. She never thought the system was equitable but knew it was winnable for only a small few. She then said she believed she could continue to optimize herself to become one of them. This is what tons of Millennials do; they believe they can win if they are more efficient and work harder, thus leading to burnout.
For some more statistical data on this topic, two articles have some really good stats we would like to share. One of them came from Britain, which was pulled from a Guardian article that said the average adult carries out 109 Admin tasks per year. About half the people who did this said that they struggle to keep up with household paperwork. From Forbes, they stated that burnout costs between $125B and $190B annually in health care costs in America. Basically, anything that takes somebody out of work that isn't an injury, it's burnout. Researchers estimate that workplace stress accounts for 8% of all national spending within healthcare. If you want to look at this from an employer, burnout leads to disengaged employees and can cost their employers 34% of their annual salary. Burnout is also responsible for employee turnover. In fact, between 20% to 50% of turnover is due to burnout. But business to business, burnout is just a game to see how much they can get out of you before you crack.
Myth 2: To show we're not just whiners whining, we're going to reveal how long it could really take to answer every work email, read every website privacy policy, or how much you could lose on average by not paying close attention to your medical bill.
If we tried to do every admin errand we are faced, how long would it take? One would argue that reading a user license agreement for a video game might be a little bit less important than getting self-declared undead. But nonetheless, how long would it take to read all those emails? So, we’ll start with the emails; According to Adobe stats that can be found here, emails continue to be a preferred way to ask coworkers for quick questions, which is 39% of emails in the work setting, provide status updates, which is 57%, and feedback. When they combined the hours of emails, it was about 4 hours a day. That equates to around 47,000 hours over a career, not including emails from friends or family, strictly work alone. If mastering a subject takes 10,000 hours and answering all of your work emails is 47,000 hours, that is 4 things you could have mastered in that time.
Next, how much does errand paralysis and cognitive strain cost us mentally? I got this data from Science Mag-9, and they had a really good article called How Many IQ Points Do We Sacrifice by Being Poor? What it means is the lower you are in the financial brackets in America, the more hoops you're given. You have the most wait times on the phone asking for assistance. You have to double-check with Medical Systems. That doesn't seem fair, but it shows that money actually does free you up from processes. You can instead delegate things to other people or have a union managing your medical instead of you. If you don't have any of that, living in poverty is akin to losing 13 IQ points. To be poor is to have very little mental bandwidth to make decisions good. Your decision-making gets poorer because you're tired or fatigued.
As for those privacy policies (this comes from the Atlantic), the median length of a privacy policy from the top 75 websites is about 2,500 words. This means if you go with the average rate of somebody reading, it would take 25 days out of every year (76 work days) just to read website privacy policies.
Lastly, when it comes to medical bills, do you ever feel overpaid? There are so many times when people are scheduled unnecessary appointments and it ends up costing them thousands. Then the bills themselves could be wrong as well, but many people don’t dig deep and just accept it. So, we're going to read something from consumerreports.org and it's an article talking about how everyone is sick of confusing medical bills. They say in a national representative consumer report that surveyed 1K insured adults who incurred major medical bills in the last two years, two out of three said they had at least one billing issue such as higher than expected. They lack clarity and don't always say what your insurer is responsible for. Worst of all, we don't understand everything and we're busy with life, kids and work that we just let it go.
Medical billing is oftentimes the cherry on top of errand paralysis. Within the article, they also said that 20% of the group that paid more than $1000 said they still paid the bill because it was too confusing. They were concerned that not paying or delaying payment would hurt their credit score. The medical billing system is so inefficient and complicated that people don't even know how to make a dispute. They just throw up their hands.
Myth 3: Errand paralysis and burnout seem to be the favorite chew toys of self-help gurus. Self-help authors all have opinions about how you should just destress, take a beach vacation, and buy more of their books. Instead, we'll provide actual advice about burnout from real medical sources.
We don't want to get to the end of our podcast without offering a solution, and this is a problem that frequently looks like it doesn't have a solution. A lot of self-help gurus love to tackle errand paralysis and burnout. It's a thing they can talk about that doesn't require a degree, intense study, and they can basically just comment on guiltlessly. But we here at The Re-engineered You are not going to recommend a beach vacation or love yourself quotes. That’s not going to help you when you come home.
For this, I went through a hilarious PowerPoint from Stanford University School of Medicine, and this is what they teach their internist. But the thing we want to stress over and over again is that errand paralysis and burnout are real things. You may feel like you are a whining Millennial, even if you're not in the millennial generation. You may also feel like you are making up problems. The truth is that you’re not because burnout is real and has been announced for it has real physical consequences. Burnout comes with fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, substance abuse, heart disease, obesity, stroke, and much more.
Now one of the ways you can combat this is when you email people or meet new people, just let them know what your commitment level is. Set boundaries and let you know how often you are able to engage. It is completely honest and okay to look at somebody in the eye and say I will get back to you or simply say no. I'm going to quote Warren Buffett: “Really successful people say no to almost everything and that is what you'll have to feel comfortable doing and then also feel comfortable calling that person up later again and getting back into business with whatever you're talking about.”
Another way you can help yourself (from the same PowerPoint) is to avoid labeling yourself. If you get behind, slammed with a medical bill, or if you don't get a rebate on time and end up paying $1,000 for something you don't need, don't label yourself a failure or a loser. It's far easier to look at that thing for the value it was or wasn't. Don't discount positive things in life. We tend to look at this giant pile of things we haven't gotten done and we weigh that against the small pile we have done. Furthermore, don't catastrophize everything. If you miss something and it costs you money, or causes errand backup, understand that it is not a catastrophe. This isn't the odyssey. It is just another small thing you are going to step over, and then in the rearview of your life, it will look very small.
The last key one is never over-commit. Many people look at their job and say something like my reputation, raise, or resume hinges on me helping with this one small thing. They think if they don’t do it, they will let people down. You can only do so much at once, so try not to overload yourself. If you can't handle Pizza rebates or can't sign up for an email for one more service, don't accept it and let it pile up on you. Delegation on lower-level things is always another option to make life much easier. If you happen to be out of solutions despite this, somebody very smart told me to talk to yourself as if you're talking to a small child or a close friend. It is a much more compassionate way to deal with yourself when you feel like you're failing at life.
Final Thoughts
Millennial burnout used to be a myth until errands, automated systems, online applications, and reimbursement forms became the standard for businesses to recoup nickels and dimes. We didn't try to break the system either - we tried to win it with our American ideals of hard work and efficiency.
So now we have ultra-complex medical billing, and every receipt we get from a fast-food restaurant has a questionnaire on the back. Burnout at work can account for 20-50% of all turnover, and it’s 8% of the nation's health spending, costing us $125B a year. The more cognitive load you put on someone, like being poor or having to jump through paperwork hoops, the more it effectively lowers your IQ to the tune of 13 points.
If you receive the average number of work emails per day and actually stopped to read them, you'll burn 47,000 hours over a lifetime. Read every privacy policy on your favorite websites would be 76 days if you did it as a full-time job. Lots of surveys, rebates, polls, and statements that are given to us as free services are designed to blend into the background of errand noise. And medical bills can be designed to capitalize on our errand fatigue to charge us more money when we're not checking the right column or box.
So, if you feel stressed from adulting, feel like you're lazy, or feel like a failure because you can't bring yourself to read one more billing statement, understand that you're not imagining that you're fatigued. You're not alone. In fact, the system is designed to capitalize on that exhaustion. There are steps you can take to shake off that fatigue. But the first one is to recognize the errand trap we've all put in and decontextualize it. Besides, if you put off one online rebate, it's not as if you're legally declared dead.