A business exec told me that he thinks of consulting firms a bit like Charlie Sheen thinks about prostitutes. When I asked him to explain, he said that when Sheen was being sentenced for using a prostitute, the judge asked him why a man like him would have to pay for sex. And Sheen reportedly replied: “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave.” The exec went on to explain that he prefers hiring business consulting firms that also do their jobs and then leave.
I’m repelled, but fascinated, by Sheen’s reasoning.
This story got me thinking about the demand for non-relational contracting. Ian MacNeil, my former colleague at Northwestern, was famous for claiming that most contracting is “relational” — or extends the duty to perform contracts through time and repeated transactions. But Sheen’s (possibly apocryphal) quotation has me thinking that there may be contexts in which people would pay a premium to avoid a relationship.
Some people may at times prefer A.T.M.’s to tellers in part because they don’t want to speak to tellers. Some people may prefer Merry Maids to a regular housekeeper (or may prefer to be absent when the cleaning is done). Or some people may prefer buying at Amazon.com in part because of the lack of human contact.
Indeed, what’s scariest to me as a professor is that part of the student demand for “distance learning” may come from students who don’t want to have relationships with their teachers.
A rising demand for non-relational contracting seems of a piece with Robert Putnam‘s depressing Bowling Alone thesis that we are becoming increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and neighbors. I remember the day when you might have had a conversation with the person sitting next to you on an airplane. Nowadays, if you say more than a perfunctory hello when you initially sit down, you are trespassing into your seatmate’s personal space.
Of course, there are other ways to spin the demand for non-relational contracting. Restricting and regulating our contractual relationships allows us to control and concentrate our limited relationship energy on those people who matter most to us. Surely this is sometimes the case. But conserving our limited relationship energy may backfire. Our capacity to interact with others may atrophy if it goes unused.
Moreover, some of us may be healthiest and happiest when we interact with a variety of people on a variety of levels; it may not be good for us to concentrate all of our social energy on the most intense or important relationships in our lives.
I worry that there’s too much Charlie Sheen in the modern condition. Part of my revulsion is in the glimmer of self-recognition.
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I certainly agree that as a society we are moving towards less personal contact. When I started working from home my contact with the outside world dramatically decreased and I found myself awkwardly uncomfortable when I’d go out to lunch and have to deal with a cashier or waitress. It passed after a few months and I now force myself to leave the house once a day to not slip into a hermit-like existence.
With regards to Mr. Sheen’s comments about paying prostitutes to leave, I am not speaking from personal experience, but I feel that only a small percentage of people that hire them do so out of a desperate need for sexual contact. I suspect that the impersonal exchange of cash for sexual favors is a completely different and independent experience than ‘normal’ sexual activity. I know of a few former co-workers that had no problem swooning woman that would regularly hire prostitutes simply because it was ‘different’.
In MBA school, my professor of organizational behavior related that he had been asked by a fortune 500 company to come up with a way to legally get rid of new employees as they approached the end of their six month probation. Then the company could hire even newer employees, at the starting salary, and forever avoid the mandatory six month pay raises. My teacher refused the offer. But the company did find somebody else to do it.
As for me, I felt an uncomfortable glimmer of self-recognition with every example in this blog.
“[T]here may be contexts in which people would pay a premium to avoid a relationship.”
More so than “contexts,” I think there are segments of people who would pay a premium to avoid relationships, while other segments pay premiums to have such relationships.
Come to think of it, maybe “I pay them to leave” justifies the executive golden parachute.
As to long distance education, wouldn’t “I pay them to leave” imply that internet courses would be more expensive? Are they?
In Charlie Sheen’s case, he assumes that he can have sex without needing to pay for it, which I think is a pretty safe bet, making his quote truthful. For others, prostitution is the ONLY way some people have sex.
Perhaps there is this false dichotomy regarding emotional energy. Who says that it really is limited? Also, who says that we have a good handle on how to quantify those kinds of things?
People who say that they pay to not have meaningful social contact with other people sound to these ears as someone complaining about being fat and then not wanting to work out because it will make them sore and tired.
I find that the level of disconnect to strangers in public is not so much due to a lack of human interaction but an over abundance. We are constantly in contact with those closest to us via email, social networking websites, cell phones, text messaging, im’s and what not, that we don’t need to supplement this with interaction in public.
Granted you could argue, and I in fact would argue, that human face to face interaction is better. As a computer scientist I find it distressingly hard to have face to face conversations as many of my peers prefer things like WOW to actual human interaction because of it’s lower risks.
Here in America there is no free lunch and getting a hoe to put out requires a fee to be payed. For Charlie Sheen it might be cheaper and less headaches to have a fixed contract with a pre-agreed upon price. Just think about the cost of divorce and how you really pay to get them to leave. “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave.” I have never seen an exception to this all women expect something in return and a big payout if you want them to go. A lot of this is a natural reaction to the onerous divorce laws and family court, a place no guy wants to be, that is how most guys end up broke. As far as an analogy to ATM’s I don’t think so, ATM’s are about 24 hour convenience. Distance learning is about cost and limited time. “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave” is about minimizing risk and cost controls. The risk reduction is keeping the state “divorce court family court” out of your life and cost, which is small to someone who has a lot to loose is actually a safe bargain.
I moved from the Midwest to California, and I’m now a religious user of the self-checkout lane anywhere it’s available. I use the self-checkout lane not because it’s faster (some people are unbearably slow at it), but because my interactions with the cashiers invariably fall between neutral and unpleasant.
I never did this in the Midwest, because the cashiers were pleasant to talk to and most shoppers were so technology-impaired that the self-check lanes were never faster than a good cashier and a good bagger.
I think it’s cultural — it’s not as though the people in the Midwest liked the jobs any better.