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On Having Yourself Committed

If we chose always to be wise we should rarely need to be virtuous.

—JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, THE CONFESSIONS

Here’s a burning question. Do SpongeBob SquarePants and Samuel Taylor Coleridge really have anything in common? Besides multisyllabic names, a Romantic sensibility, and some strong aquatic associations, there may well be collegiate English departments where both are equally esteemed. But even these amazing connections—practically spooky, aren’t they?—don’t tell the whole story.

Start with Coleridge. Opium was a huge albatross for the poet who gave us The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; for a while he even tried paying strong men to keep him away from the stuff. The problem was that later, when he was determined to get high, his flunkies had to figure out how to comply with the wishes of the prudent Coleridge without getting themselves fired by the one who was dying for some drugs. In Thomas De Quincey’s telling, one of the men gently reminded his drug-addicted employer that, just the day before, Coleridge had insisted on being barred from the druggist’s at all costs. “Pooh, pooh!” the poet replied. “Yesterday is a long time ago. Are you aware, my man, that people are known to have dropped down dead for timely want of opium?”

If abstinence could kill, clean-living SpongeBob would have croaked long ago, yet here too there is more in common with Coleridge than meets the eye, for the squarest cartoon character around once found himself in the same situation as the poet’s hired men and suffered the same sort of confusion. It happened when SpongeBob’s cheapskate boss, Mr. Krabs, fell in love and spent a fortune lavishing gifts on the object of his affections, one Mrs. Puff. Horrified by his lack of self-control, Mr. Krabs enlisted trustworthy SpongeBob to take charge of his money and keep him from spending any more. Predictably, when the time came, Krabs begged and railed for his boxy yellow trustee to go against his orders. SpongeBob thus was cast into the same unfortunate position as the porters and coachmen who depended on Coleridge for five shillings a day to stand between him and his high.

Now, if you think this sort of thing is just ancient history or cartoon fantasy, you aren’t keeping up with the tabloids, which tell us that celebrities no longer need rely on mere porters and coachmen. Professional sobriety minders, often former alcohol or drug abusers themselves, charge considerably more than five shillings nowadays to keep well-heeled addicts away from their favorite high. A firm called Hired Power, run by a certified drug and alcohol counselor, reportedly employs nearly a hundred minders in nineteen states, and a competitor, Sober Champion, has branches in New York, Los Angeles, and London. The adventures of one real-life minder, however embellished, even became the basis of a TV show, The Cleaner.

We all know what it’s like to ask someone else to keep us from doing something. Sometimes the stakes are modest, like when, on the way to a restaurant, you ask your spouse not to let you order a second or third drink later in the evening. And sometimes they’re a matter of life and death, like when the writer Andrew Solomon, battling depression, buys himself a gun—and then gives it to someone else lest he turn it on himself. “Isn’t that ridiculous?” he writes. “To be afraid you’ll end up using your own gun yourself ? To have to put it someplace else and instruct someone not to give it back to you?”

The best-known example of such behavior is from one of the greatest stories ever told, and like so much in our inquiry into the problem of self-control, it comes to us from the Greeks, who were obsessed with the subject. Wily Odysseus, on his way home by ship from the protracted nightmare of the Trojan War, orders his men to tie him to the mast and stop up their ears so he can hear the seductively lethal song of the Sirens without quite literally going overboard. Thus did our hero inoculate himself against his own predictable (and potentially fatal) desires—and thereby demonstrate his wiliness, for a person with less self-awareness might have trusted willpower alone. Odysseus knew that no one is immune to temptation, which is why he’s a crucial figure in the history of self-regulation. His encounter with the Sirens could not be more momentous because the technique he used remains the foremost weapon in the human arsenal against temptation.

Advancing on the Enemy

These Odyssean techniques for constraining our own behavior— paying men to keep us out of opium dens, giving away the guns we fear we’ll turn on ourselves—are known in the self-control racket as forms of precommitment, because we use them to constrain ourselves in advance against the foreseeable strength of some later desires. Precommitment is about limiting our own choices while we’re safely distant from the temptations we suspect we can’t otherwise handle.

Why should we need any of this clanking self-control paraphernalia, with which the future haunts the present like some rattling ghost afflicting Scrooge? The answer is in the bedeviling problem known to self-control cognoscenti as time inconsistency, which describes the frustrating way our preferences change along with our state of desire. Think of Coleridge’s conflicting views of opium: When the poet was clean and calm, he hired men to keep him that way, on the basis of a strong preference for sobriety. But when he had a hankering, he demanded that the men stand clear, because, crucially, his preferences had reversed.

It happens to all of us. How often do we awaken with the best of intentions in favor of work, diet, exercise, temperance, fidelity, or some other such virtue, only to succumb later on, when temptation is immediately at hand? John Cheever struggled daily with these competing priorities, as he made plain in his journal. Cheever’s tenacious alcoholism vied with his desire to be a good husband and a productive writer. On many mornings he resolved not to take a drink until some reasonable hour later in the day. Yet day after day he broke down and, in some sense against his own will, hit the bottle before noon. “There is a path through the woods that I can take this rainy morning,” he writes. “But instead I will take the path to the pantry and mix a Martini. Look, look, then, here is a weak man, a man without character.”

If Cheever had really wanted to stop himself from drinking, he might have taken some steps to put the bottle out of reach—enlisting his wife, for example, or checking himself into a rehab center. Most of us have done the same sort of thing, in our own mundane way. We make like Odysseus, even if a tad less heroically, whenever we decide not to buy any potato chips (lest we fail to eat just one), or have the name Joan tattooed on a biceps (lest we take up instead with Barbara). Joining a gym might get you in shape; joining the marines certainly will. Cutting up your credit cards, getting married (and wearing a hard-to-remove ring), depositing money in an IRA (which penalizes early withdrawals)—these are all examples of precommitment in everyday life.

It’s what Gene Wilder does in Young Frankenstein. Wilder plays Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, who at one point asks to be locked in a room with the monster.

Frankenstein: Love is the only thing that can save this poor creature, and I am going to convince him that he is loved even at the cost of my own life. No matter what you hear in there, no matter how cruelly I beg you, no matter how terribly I may scream, do not open this door or you will undo everything I have worked for. Do you understand? Do not open this door.

Inga: Yes, Doctor.

Igor: Nice working with ya.

Frankenstein, after entering room with monster: Let me out. Let me out of here. Get me the hell out of here. What’s the matter with you people? I was joking! Don’t you know a joke when you hear one? HA-HA-HA-HA. Jesus Christ, get me out of here!

Addiction problems practically cry out for precommitment devices, which is why Coleridge and his celebrity descendants hired sobriety minders. But there are simpler techniques. Alcohol abusers, for example, can take prescription drugs such as disulfiram (brand name Antabuse), naltrexone (ReVia), and acamprosate (Campral) to combat their addiction. Antabuse is the most interesting from a precommitment standpoint because it interferes with the way alcohol is metabolized in the human body so that you’ll be miserably sick if you drink even a little. (Antabuse-induced symptoms that result from drinking include nausea, vomiting, sweating, and palpitations.) Antabuse is effective— if you take it. But you have to take it every day, which means a new act of will is required every twenty-four hours—and which is why Antabuse implants were invented. (They are used mainly in Europe.) One quick procedure and you’re covered for a year.

Drinking presents a number of subsidiary self-control problems. Some people, for example, have a tendency to make regrettable phone calls when drunk—sometimes sobering up to realize they aren’t even sure what they said to a boss or a former girlfriend when under the influence. “To alleviate the drinking-and-dialing problem,” the economist Tyler Cowen reports, “a phone company in Australia started offering customers blocked ‘blacklist’ numbers, which they select before going out to drink. In Japan they sell a mobile phone with a breathalyzer, to see if you are really fit to drive home or, for that matter, to make a phone call. If a bus driver fails the test, his location is sent immediately to his boss by GPS.”

More prosaic examples of precommitment are easy to find. One of my favorites is on display in the world’s most sophisticated treatise on temptation—The Seven Year Itch. In this Billy Wilder classic, Tom Ewell plays a mild-mannered publishing executive who tries to control his smoking by locking the cigarettes away and putting the key out of reach on a high shelf—even though, when his beautiful upstairs neighbor (Marilyn Monroe) appears, he easily retrieves it with a stepladder.

The socialite Anne Bass played a similar game with herself. When thugs invaded her Connecticut home in 2007 and forced her to open the safe, they found that it contained a few valuables—and a bunch of chocolate. She kept her chocolate in the safe because she really, really loved the stuff and wanted to keep herself from eating it too fast. But of course, she knew the combination all along.

Frog and Toad, endearingly lugubrious characters from Arnold Lobel’s children’s stories, learn just how flimsy self-commitment arrangements can be. In the story “Cookies,” Frog and Toad can’t stop themselves from eating a mass of freshly baked cookies, so Frog tries putting them in a box, tying it with string, even using a ladder to place the box out of reach. But each time, Toad points out, they have the ability to undo these weak forms of precommitment—just as Tom Ewell did when confronted with Marilyn Monroe. Finally, Frog takes the cookies outside and gives them to the birds, who eat every last crumb.

The moral of the story is that, ideally, a precommitment should be binding. If it’s going to work, it has to be genuinely coercive—but the coercion is one that we impose upon ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein understood this when, after his terrible combat experience in the Austrian Army during the Great War, he determined not to allow himself to slip back into a life of comfort and ease. The philosopher’s industrialist father had put all his money into American bonds before the war, an act of extraordinary foresight that made his son one of the richest men in Europe—and would have spared him the privations suffered by other affluent Viennese, including Freud. But Wittgenstein was determined to be rid of all this money and insisted on legal arrangements to transfer it irrevocably to his siblings, despite their objections. “A hundred times,” his sister Hermine wrote, “he wanted to assure himself that there was no possibility of any money still belonging to him in any shape or form.”

Modern law takes account of such desires. You can set up an irrevocable trust, for example, which is just what its name implies. Or you can go for a spendthrift trust, specifically designed to keep capital out of the hands of an untrustworthy heir. (A spendthrift trust forces the beneficiary to live on only what the trustee doles out.) The travel writer Rudy Maxa tells of a wealthy friend who was so irresponsible with money— and so chastened by the experience of blowing through at least one fortune—that he set up a version of a spendthrift trust with his remaining wealth to keep the bulk of his assets out of his own hands. Instead of carrying an ATM card, which he might abuse, the man would call his mother and have her wire him a small sum so he could go to dinner. It was costly and inconvenient, but that was the point.

The psychologist Dan Ariely has collected precommitment anecdotes, among them the story of one person who placed her credit card in a container of water in the freezer, thereby requiring a cooling-off—er, that is, warming-up—period before use, and the story of another who, before a date with a guy she knew she shouldn’t sleep with, wore her “granniest” underwear—presumably to make her feel less attractive and deter herself from disrobing. In this she was unwittingly following the advice of Saint Jerome, who argued that the determined virgin “by a deliberate squalor . . . makes haste to spoil her natural good looks.” Jerome’s friend Paula, who ran a convent near his monastery in Bethlehem, evidently took the same view of cleanliness and chastity, warning that “a clean body and a clean dress means an unclean soul.”

Historically, emigrants precommitted to their new lives when they embarked for some new land without enough money for a return ticket. Immigration is different today; it’s easier to go home and easier still to stay in touch with home. This may or may not help; some evidence suggests that people are happier with choices that are irrevocable, perhaps because such finality slams the door on regret. (“Maximizers,” as Herbert Simon called those who are always shopping for a better deal, are a notoriously unhappy breed.)

People are often warned about burning their bridges, but sometimes armies destroy their ships after landing on some foreign shore, as Cortez did in conquering the Aztecs, or otherwise arrange things so that, as Ed Harris proclaimed in Apollo 13, “failure is not an option.” The economist and Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, who has written of his own self-control problems with tobacco, recalls just such a case from the ancient world: “When Xenophon, pursued by Persians, halted against an almost impassable ravine, one of his generals expressed alarm that they would have no escape. Xenophon . . . reassured him: ‘As for the argument that . . . we are putting a difficult ravine in our rear just when we are going to fight, is not this really something that we ought to jump at? I should like the enemy to think it easy going in every direction for him to retreat; but we ought to learn from the very position in which we are placed that there is no safety for us except in victory.’ ”

As Schelling pointed out during the Cold War, when deterrence was a hot topic, whole countries can engage in precommitment—and can make themselves more credible to their enemies by doing so. An example: say your enemy knows that a nuclear attack on your soil will automatically launch massive retaliation that you have no power to halt. Nations also engage in much less ominous forms of precommitment, even if, on reflection, they might not be altogether democratic. The fledgling United States did just that more than two hundred years ago in making it difficult for subsequent politicians (and the nation’s vastly more numerous subsequent voters) to change the Constitution.

The Social Security system is a form of precommitment against geriatric destitution whereby Americans force themselves to turn over a portion of their earnings to the government in return for a pension. Could we do better saving and investing on our own? Maybe, but the voters support Social Security, perhaps because they have a healthy skepticism about how much financial discipline they could muster if left to their own devices. (In precommitment circles, this makes them “sophisticated” compared to people who assume they have vast willpower—and are therefore “naïve.” Humans have a predisposition toward overconfidence and so tend to be naïve about their willpower. In one interesting study, the psychologist Loran Nordgren found that, among a group of people trying to quit smoking, the ones who gave especially high ratings to their own willpower were most likely to fail.)

Once upon a time, greenbacks could be exchanged for a fixed amount of gold, which was an effective precommitment device. But after a while, maintaining a fixed exchange rate proved untenable, and soon it took more and more dollars to buy the same quantity of precious metal. Nowadays other countries that can’t trust themselves with money will peg their currency to the U.S. dollar so they don’t have the option of printing too much money. Some nations have even adopted the dollar as their legal tender, since you can’t debase a currency that you don’t issue.

Nations can also precommit by adopting the gold standard, scrapping weapons (to head off future battles), or, if engaged in a nuclear standoff, building a doomsday system to blow up their enemies— absent human intervention—when the bombs start falling. A doomsday arrangement is a species of “poison pill,” familiar in politics from the tactic of attaching a distasteful amendment to some unwanted legislation so that even proponents can’t vote for it. Similar tactics are used in business to ward off unwanted takeovers; corporate directors might decree that the acquisition by any outsider of more than a certain percentage of the firm’s shares will trigger some massive stock issue or other event that would be hugely disadvantageous to the would-be acquirer.

On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the famous Eldridge Street Synagogue (which opened in 1887) used a poison pill of sorts to assure congregants who ponied up that it would remain pure. “When you bought a seat to pray at Eldridge, the contract promised that if the congregation ever allowed organ music, or men and women singing together in the choir, you’d get double your money back,” says the synagogue’s historian, Annie Pollard. “It was a strong anti-Reform statement.”

Like a banana republic that can’t trust itself with its own money, sophisticated precommitters enlist the help of others. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the profligate Fred Vincy gives his mother £80 in a fleeting outbreak of self-awareness, solely to prevent himself from gambling the money away. And in The Fountain Overflows, Rebecca West’s masterpiece, Claire Aubrey rejoices at the chance to pay her rent in advance: “It was a delight for her to snatch this money from the mysterious force that acted on all money in our family, annulling it as if it had never been; it was such an indulgence as she had not enjoyed for years to make a payment and prevent it from being even for a moment a debt.”

Committing to Print

It’s fitting that literature abounds with these episodes, because if people never did these things in real life, there might not be any literature, given the preference that most writers seem to have for doing almost anything besides writing. Georges-Louis Leclerc, better known as the Comte de Buffon, was a furiously productive eighteenth-century writer and naturalist who nonetheless liked to sleep in. “He had to order an elderly servant named Joseph to wake him at dawn,” Richard Coniff reports in the New York Times, “promising payment if he succeeded in rousting him out of bed. One morning, other measures having failed, Joseph dumped a bowl of cold water in Buffon’s face and duly collected his fee. ‘I owe 10 to 12 volumes of my works to poor Joseph,’ Buffon wrote.”

And then there was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who turned his own self-control problems (with gambling) into art by writing a novel on that very subject. How this work came to be is itself a classic tale of precommitment and, to my mind, a better story than the one he actually wrote. Always desperate for money, Dostoyevsky’s contract for this book, with the publisher Stellovski, contained a draconian failure provision: the writer would get some money up front, but if he didn’t deliver by the due date, Stellovski would get the right to publish all the author’s works for nine years without paying him anything. Human nature being what it is, Dostoyevsky somehow allowed himself to slide toward the drop-dead date—November 1, 1866—without getting the book done. With less than a month to spare, he hired the young stenographer Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, to whom he dictated The Gambler—and got it in just under the wire. Better yet, he married his amanuensis a few months later.

Deadlines seem to benefit everyone. Dan Ariely has tried letting his students write short papers over the course of a semester with no deadlines (beyond term end), with deadlines of their choosing, or with deadlines that he imposed. Ariely found that students got better grades when given hard and fast deadlines spaced out across the semester. Students with no deadlines, who presumably had the most time and flexibility to work on all their papers, actually performed worst, while the performance of students who were allowed to set their own deadlines was only middling. The problem was that some students in the self-imposed deadline group underestimated their tendency to procrastinate—sound familiar?—and so set deadlines that weren’t well spaced, leading to rushed, poorly written papers.

Seen in this light, perhaps Stellovski performed a service to literature. Onerous as Dostoyevsky’s publishing contract was, it also served as a useful form of tough love—one that the author embraced in full knowledge of its terms. The critic John Leonard might have been speaking for all of us when he said of himself, “Deadlines are my spine.”

Written on the Body

Since the human body is the battlefield of our conflicting desires, it shouldn’t be surprising that it has also been the locus of any number of precommitment techniques. Tattooing is probably among the oldest forms of body alteration for precommitment, a function it fulfills by its very nature. The permanence of body art, after all, commits the many future selves who might inhabit your skin to live with your choice of decor for their home—and it is their home, even if it is not one they can escape. But often tattoos represent a more specific kind of individual precommitment. Young men who get Maori face tattoos in modern New Zealand are doing their best to prevent themselves from assimilating into white society.

Or consider the Hong Kong physician Tao Chi’en, in Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, who loses all his money playing fan-tan and promptly has the word NO tattooed on his right hand—his betting hand—as a form of precommitment against gambling. Modern Americans who find themselves in similar straits can, in some states, enroll in a registry barring themselves for a specified period from that state’s casinos. Of course, you can go out of state and gamble all you want.

Having the name of a significant other tattooed onto your body is a particularly romantic act of precommitment, but one that unfortunately often goes awry. Such a tattoo may make you stick it out a little longer when the relationship hits a rough patch, yet there are an awful lot of cases in which it was far from sufficient to keep things going. For Hollywood celebrities, in fact, tattoos are about as binding a form of precommitment as marriage. Geena Davis, for example, is said to have had the name of one of her husbands tattooed onto her ankle; after their divorce, she reportedly had it turned into the Denny’s logo. Pamela Anderson changed the Tommy tattoo on her ring finger into MOMMY after a breakup. Johnny Depp’s WINO FOREVER tattoo originally had to do with Winona Ryder, evidently, but was later edited.

In an example of the way technology can undercut precommitment, tattoos can be erased by a series of laser treatments, although they hurt. (New ink technologies may permit tattoos that can be removed in a single laser session, further weakening the binding force and signaling power of a name written in the flesh.) There is so much demand for undoing tattoos that at least one chain of tattoo-removal centers has sprung up. It’s called Dr. Tattoff, and most of the clients are young women like Kelly Brannigan, a model who had her boyfriend’s name inscribed on her wrist. (He did likewise with her name.) A year later, after the relationship ended, she had the tattoo removed at the Dr. Tattoff outlet in Beverly Hills, which charges $39 per square inch. Erasing a tattoo is painful and time-consuming, yet by one estimate (admittedly that of a laser manufacturer) Americans have 100,000 of them removed annually.