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I know what you are thinking. It is bound to be something like, “We need to talk about Brexit.” “Vladimir Putin really admires your granny annexe.” “Thames Water wants to look at your drains.” “Young people would benefit from a spell in the military.” Or, “Should we fit a heat pump?”
And these are all indeed very frightening. The Brexit question just reopens all the old wounds among friends and families. The kids in the military question is a licence for someone to bore on about the entitled generation, as if their having no prospect of a home of their own, no stable career path, a planet that’s heating up and having to work at least until they are 75 is some kind of golden ticket. And, anyway, the answer, obviously, is that other people’s kids should go into the military but yours should go to university. And as for the heat pump, well, yes, in principle, but, you know, with luck we can cling on with a boiler and leave it to the next owner.
Other terrifying terms include: it’s business-casual. What’s the worst that can happen? Should we see Dune: Part 1 and Part 2 back to back? And, have you got a minute? The latter always the prelude to two and half hours of manual labour.
These are all strong contenders. Close, but no cigar. My friends, the most frightening words in English, or indeed any language, are “We might as well.” Four little words that seem so innocuous, so collaborative, so designed to imply that you have some say in this matter or that some degree of consent is being sought ahead of what can surely be only a small disturbance. I feel there ought to be some polysyllabled German word for it; you know, something like kleineunannehmlichkeitentrauma. No phrase has done more damage since the founder of Pompeii observed that “The town even comes with its own thermal heating system.”
The important thing to recognise is the difference between the first person “might as well” and the second. The first person might be saying things like, “might as well have one more”. It is the equivalent of, it seems wrong to leave that one doughnut uneaten; that last bottle of red unopened. This is the “might as well” positive. But then we come to the “might as well” negative, the second person “might as well”. This is the one where someone else, quite probably the love of your life, is telling you that you should do something you know you do not want to do.
I have spent much of my life paying the price for the “might as well” negative. Most recently, I fell victim to it having agreed to my wife’s argument that the kitchen floor needed resanding and varnishing. It was only when the decorator came round I discovered that we might as well do the rest of the downstairs. A valiant rearguard action saved the living room, though so much clutter had to be moved into it that it looked like a survivalists’ bunker. But I had to surrender the hallway in a tactical retreat.
Previous examples have seen me trudging round museums which did not interest me, but which we might as well see as we are here. And paying for the whole house to be painted, because, once the guy’s coming, we might as well get the lot done. On at least one empty bank holiday, we concluded we might as well go to the Notting Hill Carnival. I’ve even seen Jethro Tull live because they were playing a feted venue in LA when we were there and we thought we might as well see them. None of these decisions is rational.
In fact, almost any decision that is preceded by the phrase is, by definition, a bad idea. Even the doughnuts and the last bottle. And this is not just the trivial things, although the horrors of Jethro Tull are not to be underestimated. You just know that there are warlords and gangsters across the world bringing misery and destruction because they have concluded that they might as well take that extra bit of territory now they are here, and it’s not as if a bit more condemnation makes any difference.
But even those matters which are not quite so life or death have the same genesis. From the savage sanders to the desperate decorators, at the start of every trail of human misery is a person uttering “might as well”. So look out for the might-as-wellers. They may seem reasonable. But suffering follows in their wake.
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