Pretty Number Syndrome

I’ve discovered a bad habit of mine: I always want to round numbers to whole integers.

$9,998. This number looks very uncomfortable. Rounding it up to $10,000 makes it seem much more organized and straightforward.

My brain is susceptible to this type of pattern matching and I use it in all the wrong ways, providing endless excuses for me to procrastinate further.

It’s like listening to a chord on the piano that doesn’t sound pleasant until moving to a dominant chord that sounds resolved.

For example, losing $760 in a casino allows me to lose up to $1,000 just because the latter looks more complete. If I have already lost $760 then I might as well lose $1,000 since they are roughly the same. But they are not. There’s a $240 difference in these two numbers!

The same happens with time. No one sets up a meeting at 2:07 p.m. Even 2:15 p.m. seems a little weird. 2:00 p.m. or 2:30 p.m. just seems so much more comfortable. But there’s also so much time and potential wasted due to this natural habit of wanting to round everything to a pretty number.

If an appointment starts at 2:30 p.m. and it’s 2:04 p.m., my brain will just tell me I won’t be able to accomplish anything in this period of time and I should just waste my time until the appointment starts. But 26 minutes is plenty of time! When I meditate, 26 minutes seems like forever. How is it not over yet!? It’s completely irrational to think it’s not long enough just because it’s not pretty. One pomodoro unit is 25 minutes and I have wasted so many pomodoros throughout my life.

I have been struggling with sleeping early my entire life and part of the problem also has to do with this illusion. A typical train of thought on a random night goes like this:

• 11:00 p.m.: “I want to sleep before 12 a.m. There’s still plenty of time for me to fool around and relax. I will stop at 11:30 p.m.”
• 11:23 p.m.: “Oh! It’s near the time. I will just watch this last 7-minute YouTube video until 11:30 p.m., take a shower and go to bed.”
• 11:30 p.m.: “Okay, time is up but I just want to Google this last thing for 1 minute.”
• 11:31 p.m.: “This number doesn’t look pretty. I might as well just wait till 11:45.”
• 11:45 p.m.: “12:00 seems more organized. I might as well finish everything at 12.”
• 12:01 a.m.: “12:15 seems prettier…”
• 2:06 a.m.: “OMG, I better go to sleep, RIGHT NOW!”
• 5:00 a.m.: “Why am I still awake!? I might as well watch a few more episodes and have breakfast before work.”

The same pattern goes for snoozing the alarm clock in the morning, gambling, playing video games, bingeing Netflix series.

The thing I need to realize is that this is just my brain acting weird. To help me remember, I gave it a name: Pretty Number Syndrome, or PNS for short.

All the hours, minutes, seconds indicating a point of time were just invented by people. I shouldn’t care about whether a number is pretty or not, and I can’t keep using PNS as an excuse to lose more money or waste more time.

Next time I encounter the same situation, I’ll just tell myself: this is PNS acting up.

Instead of trying to stretch my budget and schedule indefinitely, I should focus on spending every predetermined dollar and minute mindfully. That’s the point.

The rule to escape PNS is actually very simple: when deciding to start or stop doing something, whether a number is pretty or not should be completely out of the equation. If it’s above my budget or past my schedule, stop immediately. Now. Right now. Immediately!

P.S. This was originally written in English in my journal during the pandemic in 2020, thinking that if I ever had a personal website, I’d publish it. Then I completely forgot about its existence, and forgot that I had written something this decent. Since I’ve been trying to post daily lately and needed some inventory, I suddenly remembered it today and dug it out to translate to Chinese. I still really like it. Classic me. This makes me even more certain that I really do enjoy writing. Now that I have kids, I don’t binge-watch shows or play video games all night like I used to, but I still constantly fall into the trap of pretty numbers. Need to be careful.