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Upset
3 min read · 643 words
Upset is the system’s configuration when something has occurred that the inhabitant’s model of how conditions should be did not include — the disturbance arising from the gap between expectation and what actually happened.
The hardware was tuned to register violations of expectation. The system that detected when conditions did not match the model could update the model or act to restore the expected configuration; either response was adaptive. The modern inhabitant inherits this circuitry, with upset now arising in response to a wide range of expectation violations — the email that received no response, the delay in the schedule, the other person’s behavior that did not match what the model predicted, the outcome that arrived differently than the model had assumed.
TREATING UPSET AS ONLY ABOUT THE EVENT
Upset is produced by the gap between event and expectation. Both sides contribute.
The event was what it was. The expectation determined how large the gap was. The inhabitant with a different expectation would have experienced a different magnitude of upset from the same event. Not addressing the expectation side means the inhabitant continues to be upset at the same magnitudes by the same kinds of events repeatedly — endlessly surprised by patterns the world has been showing them for years.
DISMISSING ALL UPSET AS UNREALISTIC EXPECTATION
The opposite failure mode.
Some upset is reporting on conditions that warrant attention — the person who repeatedly fails to do what they said, the configuration that genuinely violates the inhabitant’s reasonable expectations, the outcome that the inhabitant had reason to expect would have gone differently. Dismissing all upset as the inhabitant’s problem prevents them from registering signals about what is actually happening. I shouldn’t be upset about this sometimes blocks information that needed to be acted on.
EXAMINING BOTH SIDES OF THE GAP
What occurred? What was the expectation? Was the expectation reasonable given available evidence? Was the occurrence within or outside what could have been expected?
The honest examination often surfaces specific information about which input warrants attention: sometimes the expectation needs adjustment, sometimes the conditions warrant response, often some combination. The point is not to decide who is right. It is to identify which lever — internal expectation or external conditions — is the one that actually moves the situation.
ADJUSTING CHRONIC EXPECTATIONS
The inhabitant who is continuously upset across many domains often has expectation calibrations that do not match the conditions they are operating in.
Expectations about how other people will behave. How systems will respond. How outcomes will arrive. These may be calibrated to a configuration that does not match current reality. Adjusting the expectations does not eliminate all upset. It reduces the upset that was being produced by expectation mismatch rather than by conditions actually warranting response.
RUNNING THE RESPONSE THE SIGNAL WAS FOR
When conditions genuinely warrant response, run the response operations rather than only experiencing the upset.
The upset is the signal. The response is what the signal was supposed to motivate. The inhabitant who continuously experiences upset without ever running the response operations the upset was supposed to generate accumulates the experience without producing change — and trains the system that signaling is the end of the process rather than the beginning.
UPSET AS PERFORMANCE
Some inhabitants display upset to produce a response from others — the upset that demands attention, comfort, or concession.
The performance of upset can become a pattern that runs even when the underlying signal is small. The configuration is observable to the people on the receiving end, and it produces effects the inhabitant may not have intended — withdrawal, irritation, dismissal of even genuine upset signals when they later arise. The cost of performed upset is that real upset eventually stops being taken seriously.
The signal arrives from the gap. Examining both sides produces better operations than examining only one.