The Ethics of Flakiness

Is it immoral to abruptly cut people off?

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Our Lives Consist of Pure Luck

The late moral philosopher Derek Parfit in his last book On What Matters talks a fair bit about luck. Luck isn’t just a constituent element of our lives, but it is also a consistent element of ethics.

What matters to us, fundamentally, is a matter of luck. The way we act in the world and the way the world reacts to how we act, are both matters of luck.

You can't help but be the way you are, and the world can’t help but react the way it reacts. There is far less in the way of freedom in the world and in its ethical domain than traditional modes of thought would like to say there is.

The people we meet are no exception to this rule of luck. Whoever we end up encountering out in the world is a matter of sheer luck. When these people end up being our friends, acquaintances, and lovers, that is good luck. Even when these people end up being a small positive interaction, that is good luck. We have all encountered what bad luck looks like.

Sometimes, We’re Just Not Feeling It.

Thankfully, such bad luck often doesn't amount to much. We are swift to shut it out of our lives and move on, hoping more good luck comes our way.

There is, however, a subtle form of bad luck that often goes quite unnoticed. We often meet people who are genuinely nice and might even be well suited to be in our lives, but we are simply not feeling that person.

Whatever it might be — either about them or about us — their presence is simply something we do not want in our lives.

Neither party is evil in this circumstance. It is simply an unrequited feeling of desire, whether at the level of romance, friendship, acquaintanceship, or even at a professional capacity.

Our reaction to such people is not the same when explicit bad luck in encountering others befalls us. For instance, if we come across someone who is straightforwardly a bad person — say, they’re abusive, harsh, judgmental and generally mean — we can easily just say “get away from me,” and proceed with blocking them on all platforms, and moving on with our lives.

But if the person you meet takes the form of bad luck more implicitly, this becomes much harder. Say, if someone you meet at school wants to be your friend, and they are a genuinely good person and shares interests with you, but you simply aren’t looking for a friend, it is the rare person who would be brash enough to say when they ask you to hang out, “no thanks, I don’t want any new friends.” Rather, the process of dragging this person along ensues.

Instead of telling this person, you are not interested in them, you might agree to grab a coffee, but when that date arises you’ll push seeing them ahead in your calendar. And when this new date in your calendar arises, you’ll push it ahead again, saying that something else came up, and do so on ad infinitum.

When you see this person again, you’ll put on your best face, but in doing so, hope that you can escape their presence as soon as possible.

On the part of the individual who is dragging along the person who is interested in them, there is something profoundly inauthentic about doing this. Such a person might rebut, “well, they should take a hint.”

One might suppose in some cases that they might very well take a hint, and halt all new attempts at relations, but ambiguity in interpersonal life tends to be far more complicated than this.

Quite often, people simply don’t get the hint, and this is because the person being dragged along sees that the person dragging them along is still speaking in manners that suggest that they are still interested in relations with them.

Stringing People Along Isn’t Nice

Even so, the person being dragged along will begin to notice.

Despite this, they will likely roll with the punches too. They might even confront the person who is dragging them along, asking for the truth, only to be met with, “oh no, I wanna hang out, I’ve just been so busy.”

In reality, what would truly remedy this would be for the dragger to tell the dragged.

In not doing this, all the dragger ends up doing is prolonging the pain of the dragged.

For the latter, it feels as if there is something wrong with them and that is why they are being avoided. And for the former, they feel like they are sparing their feelings by lying to them when in reality they are slowly immiserating them.

A slow misery, whereby the person who is being dragged along feels as if they are wasting their time, growing more and more lonely and all the while holding on to an illusion of hope that the person dragging them along actually does like them in the long run.

If you’re not interested in someone, whether or not they are explicitly good or bad people, you must be upfront.

Flakiness is a route to causing harm while feeling as if you are sparing someone harm — a recipe for long-term misery. The acute pain of being told “I am not interested in you” is far better than the long-term pain of knowing deep down that a person is not interested in you, but continues to act in ways that suggest that they might be interested in you, keeping you along for a ride of pain. It isn’t nice to pretend you’re interested in someone when you’re not, thinking that you’re sparing their feelings.

Rather, it is unethical, because doing this for long enough can cause the person you are dragging along a lot of deep mental anguish, through your pseudo-virtuous lies, which can be remedied almost instantaneously with the truth: “I am just not that interested. Sorry.”

The semblance of moral superiority that dragging someone along generates by “sparing someone’s feelings” is truly egotistic in nature: it serves the vanity of the person who is dragging another person along; a vanity which states, “I am not selfish,” when in reality, egoism is truly what is driving this desire to not perceive oneself as selfish or mean.

It is truly so you don’t feel bad about yourself for being too disagreeable, not because you’re worried about hurting someone else's feelings.