Everyday Paradoxes, and the Essay That Became One

The everyday paradoxes I live with, and the essay that turned into one

The end

This essay ends with me going back to fix something a machine wrote, and not being able to tell you whose essay it is.

I’m starting at the end because the first version of this essay did. That part was my idea. Most of the rest wasn’t.

Christmas Day, 1988

My first paradox arrived on Christmas Day 1988, when BBC1 showed Back to the Future on television for the first time. The whole family sat down to watch it. I was twelve.

Marty McFly goes back to 1955 and accidentally stops his parents meeting. That puts his own existence in doubt. In the photo he carries of himself with his brother and sister, they start to fade. If his parents never meet, he’s never born, so he can’t go back and stop them meeting. That’s the grandfather paradox, the classic time-travel problem.

So Marty has to get his mum and dad together, or slip out of existence. What I loved was what happens next. The version of his parents’ story that he fixes is better than the original. His dad stands up to Biff, the bully, and that improves the present. When Marty gets home to 1985, Biff is waxing his dad’s car.

There’s a second paradox in the same film. At the school dance, Marty plays Johnny B. Goode. Marvin Berry, who’s leading the band, rings his cousin Chuck: “You know that new sound you’re looking for? Well, listen to this!” So Chuck Berry hears the song from Marty, who learned it from Chuck Berry. In the film’s version of history, nobody ever wrote it. That’s the bootstrap paradox: a loop with no beginning.

A paradox is something that seems to contradict itself and still turns out to be true. Time travel is the fun kind, and you’ll never need it. The paradoxes you need are the everyday ones. Here are mine.

When more gives you less

Too much choice

There are thousands of films on Netflix, and I can’t choose one.

I usually find something, then keep looking for something else, just in case. Then I can’t find anything else, and I’ve forgotten what I’d already chosen. Some nights I give up. Some nights I put on something I’ve already seen.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz called this the paradox of choice, in a 2004 book of the same name. The research is less tidy than the book. A 2010 review of dozens of experiments found that, on average, more options made little or no difference. Too much choice does seem to hurt when the options are hard to compare and you don’t really know what you want. That’s Netflix exactly.

What helps is a word the economist Herbert Simon coined in 1956: satisficing. A satisficer takes the first option that’s good enough. A maximiser keeps looking for the best one. Schwartz found that maximisers tend to be less happy and feel more regret, though later researchers have argued over how to measure it.

So pick the first film that’s good enough, and press play before you can keep looking. If you can’t manage that, add it to My List, so it’s still there when you forget.

Better cars, more driving

Making something more efficient can make us use more of it. A car that’s cheaper to run makes driving cheaper, so people drive more.

That’s the Jevons paradox. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question. Better steam engines hadn’t cut Britain’s coal use. They’d made coal worth using for more things, so the country burned more of it. “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption,” he wrote. “The very contrary is the truth.”

Cars need a caveat, though. People do drive more when driving gets cheaper, but the extra miles usually eat up only part of the saving. An efficient car still normally burns less fuel overall. Researchers generally agree that the full paradox, where efficiency makes things worse overall, is uncommon today. It’s real, just rarer than the name suggests.

If you’ve bought an efficient car to cut your fuel use, the saving only counts if you don’t spend it on extra miles.

When trying makes it worse

Trying to sleep

The harder I try to fall asleep, the more awake I feel. As someone with insomnia, that’s its own kind of hell.

Most nights I toss and turn and overthink why I can’t sleep. So I get up, come downstairs and watch TV for a while, or have a glass of milk. What usually works is not going to bed until I start yawning.

I worked that out for myself. It turns out to be the NHS’s advice for insomnia almost word for word: “only go to bed when you’re sleepy”. The TV is another matter. The NHS says not to watch television or use your phone right before bed. So I’m half right.

If it keeps going, talk to your GP. The NHS recommends a talking therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, for insomnia.

Trying to be productive

Trying to be productive at work can make you less productive. I often become blind to an obvious solution because I’ve been buried in the weeds for too long. Many times, going out for a coffee has helped me solve a problem.

Psychologists call this incubation. A 2009 review of the research found that putting a problem down for a while really does make people more likely to solve it. It works on problems you’ve already wrestled with, though.

So when you’re stuck, go and get the coffee. Just get properly stuck first.

There’s a third paradox that belongs in this section. I’ll get to it.

When we fool ourselves

Effort

At work, I’ve seen people value something they’d done simply because it took them ages. Whether it was fit for purpose never came into it.

Someone where I worked once made a set of training videos. The content was good. The production quality was very poor. I offered to help, but they didn’t see the benefit of having someone experienced, who knew the methods and the tools. So it never happened.

There’s a name for this: the IKEA effect. In a 2012 study, people who’d built IKEA boxes or Lego valued what they’d made much more than people who hadn’t built it. They rated their clumsy efforts almost as highly as an expert’s, and expected everyone else to agree.

Before I get too pleased with myself, I should admit that photographers are notorious for it. Plenty of photographers I know think the story behind a picture improves a bad picture. I’ve caught myself doing it too, trying to rescue a bad picture because I’d had a good day when I took it. My mind was hijacked by the prejudice of a good memory, over whether the picture was actually any good.

The answer is to show it to someone who wasn’t there. All they get is what’s in the frame.

For what it’s worth, this essay has taken more than two and a half years and two different AIs to make. None of that makes it any good. If I think it’s good because of all that effort, that’s the IKEA effect talking.

Privacy

People say privacy matters enormously, then give away personal information for convenience without a second thought.

I accept all cookies out of habit, without reading the option for necessary cookies only. This annoys me.

Researchers have called this the privacy paradox since at least 2006. Knowing better doesn’t seem to change what we do in the moment. Part of the reason is that the cost is invisible, and the cookie banner is in the way right now.

The fix is to take the choice out of the moment. A free browser add-on called Consent-O-Matic, made at Aarhus University in Denmark, answers cookie banners for you, using choices you set once.

The turn

The liar paradox fits on one line: “This statement is false.”

If it’s true, then it’s false. If it’s false, then it’s true. The Greek philosopher Eubulides was playing with a version of it in the fourth century BC, and nobody has fully put it to bed since.

The trouble is that it talks about itself, and an essay can do that too. This one has been doing it all along. It started with its own ending, and it has been putting something off for several sections.

So here’s a sentence for you to deal with. Every sentence in this essay is true, except this one.

The one I kept putting off

I’ve left this one until the last minute on purpose, because that’s exactly what it would do.

I have ADHD. I was diagnosed at 49. This is the ADHD paradox. I can’t get up and do something because it’s unpleasant, so it never gets done until it’s urgent. By then it’s more stressful than it was when it was just unpleasant. That makes no sense to me.

I once left cleaning the kitchen for a few days, until about half an hour before guests were due. Then it got done. A few days of avoiding a job that took half an hour.

If you’re hoping for a tip, I haven’t got one. Nothing works.

Not every paradox comes with a fix. Some just need a name.

The guests are at the door. Time for the ending.

The beginning

In February 2024 I published an essay on this site called “Demystifying Paradoxes: Why Contradictions Lead to Clarity”. I didn’t write it. ChatGPT did.

I asked it to, as an exercise, to see how it thinks and writes. The structure was mine: it started with the conclusions and ended with a twist. Explaining that took some time. ChatGPT’s formula seemed fixed, and it wouldn’t budge. It wouldn’t put conclusions before explanations, so I structured the essay myself and gave it all the information up front. Then I had it write each section separately, out of sequence.

What came back promised “a definitive guide” and delivered sentences like “in the realm of paradoxes, the only certainty is uncertainty itself”. It asked readers to imagine critics who would “laud the article for its clarity”. Then it claimed to be an earlier draft, accidentally released. It wasn’t.

I thought it was funny. I knew it needed an explanation, as a writing experiment with AI, and in the end I published it without one, for fun. It was a joke nobody was in on.

So, like Marty, I’ve gone back and fixed the origin story. This time a different AI, Claude, interviewed me one question at a time and drafted from my answers. Then I rewrote most of it. Not one sentence of the old essay survives, apart from the ones I’ve just quoted.

The old essay itself has gone too. Its address now sends you here, so this essay is the only thing left that remembers it, the way Marty is the only one who remembers the family he grew up with.

Which leaves the question I can’t answer. The idea has always been mine. The first words were a machine’s, and these started as my answers to another one. If you replace every plank of a ship, is it still the same ship? Philosophers have been arguing about the Ship of Theseus for nearly two thousand years, and I’m not going to settle it here.

I’d tell you what I’ve concluded, but I already have. It’s at the top.