Custodianship does a flawless impression of ownership.
Two years ago, TMT and I spent ten days minding two Bernese Mountain Dogs in a mansion on the Gold Coast. Infinity pool, guest wing, somebody else’s everything. By that pool I wrote that I was dog-sitting a life I hadn’t built yet.
I meant the mansion. Looking back, the line fits my Berlin years better – the flat, the job, the routines – all of it functioning, none of it chosen, me taking someone else’s arrangement for a walk and calling it mine.
You feed the job. You water the houseplants. You keep the routines alive. The maintenance is real work, which makes it so convincing – surely nobody would work this hard on something that wasn’t theirs.
Samuelson and Zeckhauser named the mechanism in 1988: status quo bias, the finding that people disproportionately stick with default options they would not otherwise choose.
The real-world evidence came from pension plans and health insurance, but the finding generalizes viciously.
Nobody picks the dog. The dog is simply there, already named, already fond of you (because of course he is “a good boi”), already needing his walk.
Attending to what’s already there feels like living, right up until you ask the question: if this were offered to me today, empty-handed, would I take it?
I’ve run that question on my own life a few times. Berlin failed it first: in 2024 I quit the job, gave up the flat and sold everything else. I’d love to report the rest came out as clean.
Sike! Some arrangements I audited and kept, and keeping them made them mine. Others I’m fairly sure I’m still just taking on a walk.
The problem is the two states feel identical from the inside; the leash sits the same in the hand either way.
The dog-sitter’s tell, if there is one, is the calendar: he always knows, however vaguely, when the owners come back.
The custodian of a life keeps a version of that date too – the someday when the real thing starts.
I had a date like that for years. But I’ve stopped setting one.
Related: Escaping Plato’s Cave – where the line comes from.
Sources: Samuelson & Zeckhauser, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 1:7–59, 1988
Please, do play fetch with Rumba already.
somebody should ask the dog for his take...