Parkinson's Law of Worry

Jakub Halmeš

This is a linkpost for https://unpredictabletokens.substack.com/p/parkinsons-law-of-worry

Parkinson’s law says that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." I think that a similar observation can be made for people worrying about stuff. To paraphrase: "Problem salience expands so as to fill the capacity available for worrying.”

Suppose a person is worried about several problems. Let’s visualize the mental state of this person, where each problem is represented by a colored circle, and the size of the circle corresponds to how much this problem occupies the person:

This person worries about 5 things, with the yellow and green ones being the most important ones.

Now, when one of these problems is resolved, one would expect that this problem simply gets removed from the ‘mental space’, making the person less worried in proportion to the size of the resolved problem:

Naive expectation: The person now worries less, because the big problem was resolved.

However, I don’t think this accurately describes what actually happens! Instead, it seems that the unresolved problems become more salient to the person, as if to fill the available space in the person’s mental state:

Or, new problems pop inside the freed space — the problems which weren’t important enough to worry about as long as there were more pressing ones:

The upshot is that in the beginning, the person would be wrong to think that they will worry much less or be much happier after the most important problems are resolved. They will just worry about different things!

What could help to prevent this scenario is to try to periodically recall some of the resolved problems and the amount of worrying they caused before they were resolved. By remembering this, the importance of other problems can shrink again (it’s relative, so they should still be less important than the yellow problem was!).

Related concepts: Adaptation level theory, hedonic treadmill, gratitude, negative visualization.

This is a short but decent articulation which strongly agrees with my own observations; good job.

With my ex, it was a common-knowledge-to-the-two-of-us phenomenon that she would always find something to worry about. So when she felt worried or anxious about relatively minor things, I would sometimes jokingly respond "Oh good! If you're worrying about that then there must not be any serious problems right now.".

Related: the faction most worried about building superintelligent AI evolve from the faction most worried about not building superintelligent AI.

I agree about the tendency of smaller worries to expand so as to fill the available space. And it works the other way around too, doesn't it: newer and bigger worries tend to crowd out older and smaller ones.

When it comes to habitual worrying, I have a pretty hard-line stance; basically, I advocate stopping it altogether. I wrote a post to this effect on Substack a while ago, although, to be honest, it doesn't really even argue why you should stop worrying but jumps straight into how. I do, of course, recognize there is a value to being vigilant and on guard against unnecessary risks, but I see this as subtly different from worrying.

My first thought was “it would be cool to add to journal entries some little number when I am worried about X thing”, and then I could see that number potentially change by day or be able to measure how something felt in hindsight months later

Then I wondered if that number itself, that weight, somehow needed grounding, but now I’m wondering if it actually doesn’t: does the immediate act of both intuiting a number and learning not to stress about the precision of that, actually provide a benefit itself? Feature vs bug

I wonder if someone has studied journaling with a mechanism for this, and it feels like surely there has been a study. But I don’t know if enough for a meta study. I’ll peruse

I had a similar thought. This could be especially useful to feel better about seeing the past resolved problems. Would be curious if you find something related.

I'm not sure about the weight, but I imagined something like percentages which do not have to sum to 100% (if intuitively there's still a bunch of capacity left.)