In Defense of Half-Assing It
Maybe those of us who just kinda muddle through are happier?
I don’t even quite know what I want to say here, so the decision to write about the vague theory clanking around in my head is peak half-assedness. But as they say, the medium is the message.
Looking back, I’m beginning to realize I may have half-assed it my entire life. I’m not saying I didn’t try — I did — just not very hard. This strategy led to a few close calls: there was a D in high school calculus, but I had already been admitted to a college that didn’t seem to care. I have a vague memory of some sort of remedial math situation in eighth grade, which consisted of a woman with chunky jewelry getting frustrated with me because I couldn’t understand how to calculate probabilities. (Little did she know that probability = the importance of it happening ˗ how much you want it to happen × how much control you have over the situation).
But all in all, things have worked out okay. Are there things I want that I don’t have? Yes. But I have friends who never half-ass anything, and there’s a lot of stuff they don’t have either. This fact hits them harder than it hits me, and that, in a nutshell is the argument for half-assing it: you’re less disappointed when things don’t work out, and thrilled when they do.
