The appointment you keep not making

There is something your body has been doing for a few weeks. A twinge that comes and goes, a mark that was not there before, a tiredness that does not lift. You have noticed it, and you have not made the appointment.

You suspect it is probably something. Making the call means a waiting room and, worst of all, the chance of hearing the thing you fear said out loud. Doing nothing asks nothing of you, so you keep doing it, while the thing itself goes on unattended, getting no better.

Everyone has done this, with a car, a tooth, a relationship, a symptom. It pays to understand why, because the same reflex governs how people guard their wealth, where the cost of looking away can be steep.

The wiring

We register costs unevenly. We feel a loss roughly twice as sharply as we feel a gain of the same size; it is one of the most studied patterns in behavioural science.¹ That asymmetry should make us fierce protectors of what we have, and it does, as long as the loss is immediate and concrete. A bill today. A pain we can feel now.

Set the loss in the future, make it abstract, and the same wiring works against us. A threat that is real but not yet here gets discounted to almost nothing. We tell ourselves it will not come to that, or that we will deal with it when it does, or that cleverer people would have acted already if it were serious. Underneath all of it sits an unexamined assumption, that tomorrow will look much like today. It is the most comfortable belief a person can hold, and the most dangerous in a system that is changing.

One more turn of the screw. Acting carries its own small, immediate discomfort, the effort and cost, the faint fear of looking foolish or paranoid. Inaction carries only a larger, distant pain. So we trade the bigger future loss for the smaller present comfort, every time, and we call it being sensible.

Faced with a danger too large to take in, people tend to split two ways. A few overreact, bolting for the extreme, the bunker and the stockpile. Most do the opposite and look away. Underneath both is one very human move, bending the truth to fit what we wish were so. The danger does not care which way we lean.

The reflex that protects you from a hot stove is the same one that lets a slow, distant threat run unchecked.

The symptom under the money

Now consider a different symptom. Money that can be made programmable. Accounts that have been frozen, in countries that thought themselves immune. Rules about what you may do with your own savings that did not exist a few years ago. For most of us the sign is there to be seen, and the response is identical, to leave the appointment unmade. Acting on it would mean admitting the threat is real, and that admission is the hard part. It turns a vague worry into a duty, and the mind would rather it stay vague. It also forces a darker thought, that the institutions you have trusted all your life could one day turn this power against you. Easier, then, to assume they never would.

The reflex that protects you from a hot stove is the same one that lets a slow, distant threat run unchecked. Understanding it does not make it go away; you will still feel the pull to wait. Even so, you can now catch yourself in the act, reaching for one more reason, and ask what you are really avoiding. The sensible move is the dull one. Decide without pressure, while it is still early, what part of your wealth belongs somewhere a rule change cannot reach, and put it there. It asks far less than you fear. The discomfort of acting is small and over quickly. The discomfort of not acting is that the thing you are avoiding never goes away. Having read this far, you have seen it plainly, and clear sight is hard to give back.

Perhaps this has nagged at you for years. Perhaps it began recently, and reading here has confirmed what was already gnawing at you. The worry is real now, and it is the appointment worth keeping, the one to stop putting off.

Footnotes

1. Loss aversion: people feel a loss roughly twice as intensely as an equivalent gain, a central finding of prospect theory. Sources: Kahneman & Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk” (Econometrica, 1979), https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185 ; Tversky & Kahneman, “Advances in Prospect Theory” (1992), which estimates the loss-aversion coefficient at about 2.25. ↩