When I was in law school, I was taught to keep my answers brief and concise. When I did just that, I was told that my answers were too short and that I needed to "emphasize" more.
Story of my life: I'm told to do this and then do that. But I digress.
This wasn't new to me. As far back as high school, I was taught that sometimes you had to pad things out when writing an essay. It had nothing to do with the content of the material itself but with its appearance. You could give the most well reasoned and brilliant answer to a question as you possibly could but if it only filled half the page, it wasn't considered convincing. It had to look right. People feel mistrust and even anxiety when things seem too short or too lacking. Hence, there was always a need to add superfluous details and redundant statements. There was always this need to show that you were making the effort.
Effort and Money's Worth
A doctor once told me something interesting which I think is related. He said to me that sometimes, he gets patients who believe they have the worst illnesses imaginable but in reality have only minor ones that could be easily remedied. Hypochondriacs, they're called. He told me that even if the patient's illness would go away on its own or if simple changes in behavior would be sufficient treatment, he would always prescribe some harmless painkiller or vitamin so that the patient would get peace of mind and feel satisfied that they got their money's worth. It was a win for the patient and a win for big pharma. Everybody's happy.
I think back to my friend's anecdote when trying to explain people's aversion to short essays and laconic answers. Perhaps this aversion is because people feel they aren't getting their "money's worth". Money isn't necessarily involved, of course, but it's more of a feeling that the other isn't meeting you halfway or making an earnest effort to do the job asked of him. Now there's the rub. If the problem is one of appearance (the answer looks too short) , then what exactly is it that people want to see?
People want things to be "worth it" and it is most unfortunate that the worth of a thing is equated with the effort that was made to produce it. Therefore, a five page essay is better and worth more than a two page essay. Worse still, effort itself is understood in terms of raw manpower or man-hours spent to produce it. A momentary stroke of genius is incomparable to marathon mediocrity. The teacher/boss wants to see you hunched over your desk and sweating. That's when he knows you're really working and earning the money's worth.
Did your asshole classmate write five paragraphs? Well your dumb ass better write ten.
Awful Examples
When you think about it, this attitude is everywhere. There are many very weak criminal cases filed in court. Whether it's from a lack of evidence or a procedural flub, it's clear that these cases would never lead to a conviction and are a waste of time. These are cases where you wonder why the prosecutor even bothers at all. Yet they do.
I asked a friend of mine who's familiar with the prosecutorial service and the answer was depressing. There is this concept called "prosecutorial discretion". What it is is that prosecutors have to power to decide whether they should prosecute a crime based on their assessment on the likelihood of a conviction. In sane countries, prosecutors don't bother filing cases unless they're sure that their chance of securing a conviction is high. In the Philippines, prosecutors, I'm told, are loathe to exercise this discretion. They would rather file a bum case than do nothing since doing nothing means they're not doing their jobs. If the list of cases filed is too short, there's a need to pad it out to show they're making an effort.
The government wants its money's worth.
To the prosecutors, filing these cases is no skin off their nose. It's the courts that have to deal with the cases anyway It's more important to be seen doing your job and making the effort. Did you know that whenever there's an automobile accident that results in a death, it's government policy to file a case against the other driver immediately regardless of the circumstances? The police also immediately detain the other driver too. It's important that the government is seen to be doing its job, that it's making an effort, and that you, dear citizens, are getting your tax money's worth.
Speaking of police, there have been instances where they just arrest people for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. This was a thing during Duterte's drug war where they would do "one time big time" operations and do mass arrests. If you happened to be near a drug den during their operation, they might just haul you in.
I've always suspected that the police have a quota of arrests they have to make. It's a stupid thought but terrifyingly plausible. Who's to say how many crimes happen a month such that there would be a quota for arrests to make? Well, if the police aren't out there arresting people, they aren't doing their jobs, right? If the list of arrests is short, then they must be getting lazy. We need to pad out that list, no? Lengthen it a little to show you made the effort.
The government wants its money's worth.
The Mistake
I think where it all goes wrong is when we equate volume with substance. But in this modern, digitized, algorithm-based hellscape, nothing is real unless we have a number to measure it with. Hence, the obsession with word counts, actions taken, cases filed, arrests made, and other metrics. It's about the view counts, the likes, the dislikes, the comments, retweets, shares, etc. How will we know if there was an effort? How will we know if anything means anything unless there's a number that says it does?
Write more words. Make more content. It's not worth it if it isn't long enough. YouTube won't let you do mid-video advertisements if your video isn't at least eight minutes long. You need to make the effort. They need to get their money's worth.
So we have all this disdain and suspicion over things that don't seem big enough. Is it any wonder that AI came to be the next big thing in our time? What is AI nowadays but a means to pad things out with oppressive walls of garbled text and ugly uncanny images?
Finally, there is meaning to our lives. After all, there's so much shit around us. We've padded things enough. We have our money's worth.
The Empty
Another way of looking at it.
There's this superstition in some parts of the Philippines that empty rooms in one's house will come to be inhabited by something. It will be "natao-an". An entity will make its home in uninhabited rooms. It is the way of nature to make use of space for nature abhors a vacuum.
It is my belief that people, Filipinos perhaps especially, have a fear of emptiness in both the physical and metaphysical sense. Most can't stand to be alone. Many can't stand the silence. That's why there's so much noise. So many words. So much effort. The vibrancy and commotion of life is a comfort. Life must be filled in every sense of the word. Anything to banish the void.
The more content the better.
Two men approached a philosopher and asked him, "Sir, what is the meaning of life?" The philosopher gave a simple reply, no more than a few words. One man frowned and asked, "That's all?" The other smiled and said, "That's all."
I think this is long enough.
