“We didn’t need it, therefore you don’t need it, so don’t do it.”

⚠ Caution. ⚠

When someone posts this, they might mean well and they might be very misguided. When you read this, I encourage you to look beyond the words to what might lie behind them.

I can think of at least two very different possibilities:

  1. They are falling prey to damaging “Best Practices” thinking.
  2. They have recently discovered that they could freely and safely stop doing something, because it was no longer necessary, and they want to remind the rest of the world to be aware of such opportunities in their context.

I find it difficult to tell the difference from here, outside their mind.

(I should mention now that if we spent another 15 minutes, we could probably find a few other ways to interpret those words, but I think these two interpretations make my point well enough, so I stopped.)

✅ Try this instead: ✅

Pretend they said or wrote this: “We didn’t need it (any more), therefore you might not need it (any more), so consider not doing it (any more)!”

The word “consider” stands out most to me.

We build habits in order to reduce the cost of helpful behavior. Unfortunately, habits often work best when they become autonomic, which means that we stop thinking about doing them. And we always risk habits becoming empty rituals. When the ritual becomes empty, the behavior stops helping us. At best, it merely gets a little in the way; at worst, it actively hurts us.

For that reason, we remind ourselves to inspect our ways of working every so often. Doing these inspections, we reconsider what we need to do, so that we can stop doing whatever has become unnecessary. And that’s how these words can become helpful: “We didn’t need it, therefore you don’t need it, so don’t do it.”

You can think of them as a somewhat unskillful way of saying “Do you really still need to do that? Does it still help you? Has it outlived its purpose? or did it never live up to its promise in the first place? What would happen if you stopped?” By interpreting those words more generously, we’ve turned them from apparently-mindless “Best Practices” thinking to a helpful reminder not to fall into the Grace Hopper trap: “We’ve always done it this way.” Even unskillful acts can help, if we remain open to how they might help.

Whenever you read or hear advice outside its context, I encourage you take it seriously without immediately assuming that you ought to follow it. I also encourage you to join me in resisting the impulse to tell them how wrong they are, because they’re often (but not always!) right in their context, even if they’re wrong in your context. It works even better to interpret their possibly unskillful act as a well-meaning attempt to help you. At some point in the future, you’ll probably wish that they’d interpreted your unskillful act that way.