On Slack
Handling exceptional circumstances with grace
Category: Mental models for living life. Implicit stoicism
Epistemic status: My own views, with influence from biology, Taleb etc.
The Queen is the only one1 that gets laid. This is good for social order.2 Evolutionary pressure makes sure that the worker ants carry genes that manifest in eusocial behaviour patterns.
Given this background, you’d expect the worker ants to work pretty fucking hard. Surprise! They are lazy as fuck. “However, various studies [sic] that have estimated the ratio of inactive workers in a colony to be approximately 50% of workers on average” -paper
The paper’s abstract lists the reason: “Inactive workers may represent a bet-hedging strategy in response to environmental stochasticity”. In non-academic terms: When things go to hell, it’s good to have spare worker ants.
If all the workers are busy, the eggs might not get cleaned. And we all know what happens when no one cleans the eggs. Bacterial infections happen. Involuntary mass-abortion.3 Bad juju.4
Now, what can we learn from ants? Or rather, what can we learn from evolution? We can learn the importance of slack. For Queens, slack is having slacker-ants. For you, slack is mostly unrelated to ants.
The nature of slack
So, if slack is not all about worker ants, then why did I start talking so much about it? Because I found it funny and illustrative, that’s why. But now we’re talking about you. And you are most likely not an ant.
Given your likely humanness, let’s think a bit about what slack is for humans. The first thing that comes to mind is money.5 The second is time. Also health? Psychological stability? Social connections/respect? Most likely, there are more things!
Let’s expand a bit here. I’ll go through my examples, and explain how they relate to lazy worker ants. Let’s start with money.
Money is slack only if it’s under-utilized. Unfortunately, most people use as much of their money as possible, even over-utilizing it by taking loans. This is like borrowing worker ants from other colonies. I wouldn’t trust those gals6 with the eggs. My take on money is a post on its own, so I’ll just give a very condensed version here: Avoid lifestyle creep by prioritizing saving. This will give you financial slack. Freedom to drop out of the job you hate to look for a new one. Ability to pay for the unplanned dentist visit without breaking a sweat. Freedom from spending your time fretting about money running out.
Time-slack is extra time that isn’t committed to specific activities. By leaving 10min early, you won’t have to run to the bus to make it in time.7 By leaving some spare hours in the morning, you get the power to write blogs about ants.
If you are healthy, you can handle bacterial infections better.8 You can run when you face an urgent situation. I'm not sure if people with better sleeping habits get better at handling occasional late-nighters. From my pov, it seems to be the opposite. This is yet another unwritten post.
Psychological stability allows you to expand your comfort zone by facing your edges. It allows you to handle turmoil and setbacks without going into depressive episodes.9
Social connections and respect allow you to influence the social contexts where you spend your time. If you’re in a shitty spot that you can’t handle yourself, it’s very nice to have relationships to fall back on.
Slack is the new Black
I’m a fan of Nassim Taleb. He has written a lot about real-life uncertainty and risk management. One of his core ideas is that of “black swans”, another metaphor from the animal kingdom.
Way back, people didn’t think (literal) black swans existed. Every time they saw a white swan, they got a bit more certain that all swans are white.10 Over time, the whiteness of all swans became common knowledge. And then, boom!
“Black Swan”-events are unforeseen and have large consequences. The black swans mentioned in the book are systemic ones, like financial crashes.11 Navigating a world where unforeseen events have outsized impacts requires slack.
As a person, you are affected by big global black swans. You are also affected by small, personal ones. These can be good, and they can be bad. Good black swans include: meeting someone with friendship potential, stumbling upon a beautiful sunrise, a job interview in another city, etc. Bad black swans include: sudden expenses, catching a disease, fire in your living space, sudden breakup, etc.
Slack is unused capacity that can be used to handle negative black swan events. Navigated skillfully, it’s possible to turn negative events into something that benefits you. Having high levels of slack will let you relax, trusting in your ability to handle whatever life throws at you. If you have no slack, you need to stay alert for potential risks, staying in a state of permanent high-alert/stress.
Slack also allows you to take advantage of positive black swans. If you have a flexible schedule, you can take your time to connect with the potential friend and enjoy the beautiful sunrise.
Over time, increased agency at pivotal moments will radically improve the trajectory of your life. So make sure you have some spare worker ants to use when the time’s right!
P.S.: This is related to stoicism, a way to increase your agency by acquiring a better world model. It’s also related to the rainforest vs desert metaphor, seeing as that shift in worldviews is intended to increase your emotional slack.
Except when there are multiple. And let’s not even talk about Cataglyphis, wtf is up with Parthenogenesis.
Let’s pretend things are this simple. I must admit I made an informed guess at this point, and when I looked it up there seems to be a lot of controversy. People really care about ants. Not enough to help clean their eggs, but still.
There is no metal song with the title “involuntary mass-abortion”, so I asked chat-GPT to make up lyrics for one. It didn’t understand what I wanted. Stupid AI.
This reminds me of children that get attachment issues because their parents are away travelling due to work.
For those of you that don’t know, money is a bit like the liquid food stored in worker ants’ gasters. They literally have a second stomach. Selling stocks is a bit like getting your workers to “regurgitate” their precious nutrients.
Workers are sterile females. Male ants mostly laze around and fuck the Queen.
Or worry about traffic jams? (If there are car-people reading)
I’m not saying that the eggs are unhealthy. The eggs are great.
As I’m writing this, I really need to pee. But my roommate is occupying the bathroom. At first, I thought of bathroom access as pee-slack. Then a friend told me that if you don’t pee immediately, then you will get a more robust bladder (another kind of pee-slack). So I guess the optimal strategy is a combination of bathroom availability and bladder endurance training.
This is known as inductive reasoning, where confirming evidence is used to strengthen your hypothesis. Compare this with Popper’s falsifiability, stating that we should focus only on disproving things. Nowadays we know that we should put things into Bayes' theorem, and that both positive and negative information is helpful when calibrating priors. Ok, a joke:
Why should we prefer falsification to inductive reasoning? It’s been working out this far…
Part of the success of the book can be attributed to the fact that it was published in 2007, and that Taleb then earned a lot of money from the big crash in 2008. Ethical? I’d say so. He didn’t cause the crash, warned everyone repeatedly, and even put his money where his mouth was, to demonstrate how serious he was about his warning.