My first encounter with Accounting was in business school and it was a rude and traumatic one. At the core, Accounting is about balancing debits and credits, of course with a lot of other random jargon thrown in to induce an adequate level of awe and fear in a lay person. But what I’ve been increasingly realizing is that, consciously or otherwise, we are all top notch accountants in real life!!! Stay with me while I explain…
Once during my younger days, when I used to be a smoker, my friend (a co-smoker) suggested that we try Yoga to kick the habit. In a rush of young blood, off we went and signed up for a Yoga class at 6 am. It did a few good things; we were up by 5 am, we enthusiastically did the Yoga things and were done by 7 am with endorphins sloshing around our insides and an exhilarating feeling that we were ahead of the world. Which led to so much euphoria that we got into the habit of having a tea in the stall nearby. Which inevitably led to a cigarette with the tea. And soon, we were dealing with the fact that we had already had a couple of cigarettes by 8 am, which used to be our waking up time. Normally, one would have expected a bit of guilt to go with this realization; an emotion that was brazenly absent. Bizarrely, the Yoga session had given us a sense of doing something good to the body and therefore the license to ruin it a little bit with a cigarette or two. You get my point? Debits and Credits; it balances out, see?
Emotional accounting is a constant, 24 X 7, running theme in our lives. Everytime I’m at a breakfast buffet and order an omelette, the accompanying hash brown will induce some concern, which I usually offset by grabbing a fresh juice! That levels it out, right? The salad plate at the start of a lunch gives me the sanction to go ballistic at the dessert bar!!
Food is actually where this seems to play out so visibly. Thanks to mother nature’s perverse logic (I’m referring to the perfect inverse correlation between anything that’s tasty and anything that’s healthy), it’s distressing to indulge in any sort of guilt free dining – unless there is a way to balance the books, even if notionally. And that’s why marketing managers randomly add the words “fortified with …” or “rich in…” and provide us poor souls an escape door to bite into the unhealthiest of things with not a pang of worry…
But the Debit-Credit theory goes way beyond food. Ever thought about who your favorite singer is? Or your favorite actor, politician, whatever. Here’s the thing – I’ve realized it’s impossible to actually be a fan or idolize any personality unless you hate someone with almost equal vigor!
Show me a CSK fan and I’ll show you an RCB hater. How many people do you know that like Sachin and don’t hate Saurav, or vice versa. Ditto Modi and Rahul. Or Federer and Djokovic. The list can go on, but surely the point is made.
Why do we need to hate one to like another? Does our admiration for one increase because we put down the other? Does idolizing someone create so much dissonance that we need to hate someone else to level things out? It would appear so. Clearly, the contradictory emotions of love and hate stabilize our minds, leaving us in a state of salubrious equilibrium!
This also intrudes into our behaviors at home. Most often, the reason you get an affectionate ruffle of the hair is that you have just been hauled over the coals a short while prior. If that is not the case, you better bolt – because my theory would postulate that the “hauling over coals” bit is just around the corner. The book will not be denied – it has to be balanced…
Or take the work place. There’s a high chance that the team is taken out by the boss for a meal after an especially violent meeting? And you can bet that the boss’s demeanour and cheerfulness over dinner will be the inverse of his or her deportment in the meeting earlier in the day!
Moving on, do you recall the post Covid travel frenzy? Revenge tourism, it was labeled as. A very clever name for the same old book balancing. The cooped up nature of our existence was accumulating as a massive entry under the “martyrdom” ledger and it provided us an opportunity to balance it with a similarly huge, contra entry in the “Let’s Go Nuts” ledger.
“OK, big deal, so what?!” I can hear you say. But don’t trivialize this insight as some philosophical rant. It can be applied cleverly to manipulate that part of the universe that is in close proximity to you. Allow me to demonstrate the value of what I’m saying…
Let’s assume you want to go to on a stag trip to Goa. Or Singapore. The place isn’t germane. Unless we’re talking Thailand or Kazakhstan, that’s a whole other ball game! The unthinking fellow will put on a sheepish face and will meekly ask for permission that will be invariably denied. Further, he will probably face retaliation of some brutal kind for possessing the temerity to ask. In fact, the uninitiated will wait for the wife to get into a good mood before asking, with scant knowledge of the fact that the good mood is driving your wife off centre and is screaming for a bad mood to quickly intervene and restore balance. Mostly, you’ll strike out. Now, let’s apply the book balancing technique. The way this counter intuitive method works is that you accumulate debits. Ruthlessly. Keep doing harmless things that you know will make the wife mad to the point that she keeps berating you constantly. At some point, your wife is going to get the feeling that she has been very harsh on you. This is the point where you cunningly slip in the stag trip. Trust me, your probability of obtaining permission will improve from the erstwhile 0.2% to about 25%. I’m not kidding…
As a clarification, while this example involves a man and a woman in specific roles, the book balancing axiom is actually gender agnostic. It works for males, females and all the burgeoning genders in between…
See how kids have instinctively figured it out. When I see my son or daughter wolfing down their greens, fibrous foods and other perverted creations of mother nature with gusto, I know they are building one side of the book. And sure enough, later in the day or the next day, there will be the inevitable “we’ve been good, let’s order in some pizzas” demand.
There is actually no limit to how much you can exploit this truism. For instance, conventional wisdom would have you think that you need to make the boss happy before the performance appraisal. So tell me, has that ever worked for you?? Now try it my way. Engineer things so that your boss cannot help but behave extremely rudely with you for an extended period of time before the appraisal and watch with amusement as your boss’s book balancing leads to that handsome rating for you…
I hope you now know how it is. Life is a never ending search for behavioural equilibrium. I offer this insight to you with no ulterior motive. If you are the manipulative kind, you would be able to put it to very effective use and obtain all kinds of desirable outcomes. For the others, you would hopefully find solace in the thought that where you would have once blamed yourself for events in your immediate vicinity, you can now objectively discern that somebody is balancing their books and you just happen to be caught in the crossfire.
And if this brings happiness to my readers, that would be my good deed for the day – which would help me immensely. For, I’ve been wanting to indulge in a couple of mildly mischievous things and this goodwill entry will help me execute these tasks with a breezy insouciance…
*****
