Book Thoughts: I Just Want This Done, by Raiford Dalton Palmer

This is supposedly the best book about getting a divorce.

I am extremely not-getting a divorce, but

1) I saw two uncorrelated references to it as a Best In Category book, which usually gets things onto my book-list regardless of what they are (e.g. this is also why I'm reading a book about Call Center Management).

2) I think we should all probably spend more time doing "disaster preparedness" like this? If you ever do get a divorce / go to hospital / get sued, you will suddenly be trying to learn about a complex Systems Problem at the exact same time that you're extremely stressed and emotionally fraught. And frankly, for most white collar professionals, these are higher-probability prepping situations than stockpiling food and water, but I know far more people who do the latter. (I think the food-and-water prepping is also worth it, though! Life hack if you're in America: find your nearest LDS home storage center).

3) I am (to reiterate) extremely not-getting divorced but I do get into various situations where someone is mad at me and I am mad or sad at them, and I want to do a better job of navigating those situations, and I suspect that a good divorce book would have useful lessons about this. I think one useful life-strategy in general is to get the "professional grade" version of things even though you're only using them at an amateur level, e.g. mountaineering jackets are going to be really water-and-windproof, and this is helpful to me even though the only mountains I go near are metaphorical. So I figured a divorce book might be helpful in dealing with other kinds of contentions.

Anyway, thoughts from this book:

• Divorce is a difficult problem because you have exactly 1 counterparty; if your counterparty is being uncooperative, you can't pick someone else to divorce instead, you just have to deal with it. Your entire option set is "stay together", "come to an agreement outside court," or "go to court and do whatever the judge mandates."
  
  I feel like a lot of the biggest problems I have in life are like this (to different degrees or over different timescales), they basically boil down to "there is only one counterparty and you can't work around them and if they want to make your life miserable then your life will be miserable": your ability to negotiate a good outcome is really harmed when there's one other party you must deal with, no matter how they behave. This can happen with next-door neighbors, family members, bosses/employees (on some time scale). But marriage has the extra element of a very restrictive legal contract that's ultimately backstopped by some un-appealable judgements from a judge.
  
• More generally: I feel like one of the most important truths to make peace with as an adult is that a sufficiently motivated person can (for some amount of time) ruin your life. I originally wanted to write they "can ruin your life, if they're willing to ruin their own", but I'm not even sure that's true: I think sometimes someone can ruin your life in their spare time and at no cost to themselves. And this genuinely fills me with horror, but maybe also I should be grateful that in practice most people don't do this, even thought they could?
  
  (Edit: I guess they can't exactly ruin your life, but they can create conditions that for many people will be all-consuming and miserable. Potentially if you're zen enough, you will be able to sing through it anyway; happiness independent of conditions, baby.)
  
• One of the big game-theory problems for this book is that lawyers are very expensive, so you should be willing to give your counterparty a generous share of your combined assets in order to avoid going to trial. I.e. it's better to concede 55% of your combined $X assets up front than to go to court and each get 50% of the $0.8X you have left after paying lawyers.
  
  However, if your counterparty knows you believe this they can squeeze you pretty hard – it's not exactly a slippery slope, it's not like they can escalate from 55% to 60% to 65% to 70%, you do always have the option of going to court once the expected value of the unfair split vs the trial outcome gets bad enough. But if your ex knows you've read this book, they could rationally demand a fairly unfair split in their favor, and know that you're likely to take it.
  
  I do think the ideal would be for your ex to think you're willing to go to court when actually you're willing to give them 60%, and I don't think this book really wrestles with the strategic implication of its advice. The author is right, you're STILL better off getting rinsed but saving your sanity!, but you're even better off saving your sanity without getting rinsed, if you can manage it. It's a classic surplus-division problem, and there's no good answer to figure out who gets how much of the surplus.
  
• One of the author's big contentions is.... don't try to teach your ex a lesson, no matter what they did to you, it's not going to happen and you need to accept that. Just Get This Done, as the title tells you, and move on.
  
  This feels so hard, in so many fallings-out I've had the thing I most desperately wanted was for the other party to just understand or even acknowledge my perspective, and it's genuinely painful to just have to walk away while the other person seemingly refuses to even see what I'm aggravated about.
  
  It's probably the right advice, I get that, but man is it hard in practice.
  
• In divorce, teaching your ex a lesson is double-stupid because divorce costs are paid out of shared marital assets, so you're actually paying for both of your lawyers, whether you like it or not.
  
• You should really, really be organized with all your documents (bank statements, wages, assets etc), it will make your life easier. Of course the implication here is that you should be organized with your documents all the time, so you don't have to do it retroactively. Man I hate this point but that's probably why I need to do it.
  
• Keep a diary: I am surprised how often this comes up in legal and quasi-legal situations, having a contemporaneous written journal seems to count for a lot. If you're ever in a situation of interpersonal dispute, start keeping an (unemotional) diary of what they said to you and when.
  
• The author talks a lot about the "meta case": not the legal case itself, but e.g. how the judge feels about you for extra-judicial reasons based on vibes and how you behave. He says his first boss would always ask (before all other questions about a case) "who's the opposing lawyer?" and then "who's the judge?"
  
  This is so uncomfortable to me. We want to believe in an impartial judicial system, right? This is one of the core principles of liberal democracy, right? And yet nobody behaves like this is actually true: people hire expensive lawyers and go judge-shopping (where possible) and behave in certain ways that (they think) will make the judge more sympathetic to them, none of which is consistent with The Majestic Equality of the Law.
  
  The author of this book presents this tension as "if the case is on the bubble, and you've been a jerk, that could nudge the judge to rule against you," but... I don't know, I think in practice it's much stronger than that. It's not "the meta case will make the difference if literally everything else is tied," it's more "the meta case makes a significant difference even in cases that aren't anywhere close to ties, it just violates our shared pretense to admit that."
  
  I feel like I'm breaking some kind of rule even by talking about this?
  
• Relatedly: a wise man once told me: "social factors dominate human interaction and what actually happened only matters in extreme cases." That is, if you get mad you will be seen as losing almost-every argument, regardless of what the other person did that led to you getting mad, again excepting really extreme and explicit evidence.
  
  I really need to practice this. "If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and/or provoking you" is one of the most important life skills, and I'm not even really sure how to get more practice for it outside the bad moments when you need it most and also it's hardest to summon. Meditate more, I guess?
  
• When people ask my advice about writing books, I often tell them to spend inordinate time on designing the cover + picking the title: I suspect that 50%+ of your book's outcome will stem from the title and cover rather than the contents.
  
  In this case, I Just Want This Done is a banger title: it's emotionally resonant, clear and concise, it's not a phrase I'd actually heard before but it's immediately clear what it means, well done.
  
• You can't win a divorce, only lose less.
  
• It's clear that having you and your ex's lawyers being on good terms and communicating well is ideal. So maybe the ideal setup would be to collaborate on hiring sets of lawyers who have a history of working together: the author says he does this sometimes in Alternative Dispute Resolution setups, he recommends a copacetic lawyer to his client's ex and that makes the case go smoothly.
  
  But you could imagine how, for the client, this could get you in a situation where both lawyers are biased against you, if your ex or their lawyer are manipulating you.
  
  I don't know what to say exactly, principal-agent problems are ridiculously hard, you want your lawyers to fight the other set of lawyers iff it's worth fighting, and otherwise to get things done as collaboratively as possible. And it sounds like most often you want your lawyers to be conciliatory and not spend $10k of billable hours to solve a $5k problem, but you're not in a position to tell the difference and they are. Tricky!
  
• Re: kids, in many jurisdictions the term "custody" has been replaced with "parental responsibility", because "custody" sounded like jail. "Visitation" was replaced with "parenting time" for same reason. It's pretty funny to me that I've heard these terms for years and never made the connection, but now I see it....
  
• If you own a small business, the component of your business value that is "personal goodwill" belongs just to you, not to the company, and therefore isn't counted as a marital asset.
  
  This kind of makes sense to me – in lots of small businesses, the owner is the company, if she quits then the company's value would quickly round to nothing – but it feels like an interesting valuation problem.
  
• I feel like one problem with divorce law is that kids are treated as both obligations and assets? Like, often the outcome of a divorce is that the high-earning parent has to provide funds for the child-rearing parent to continue raising the child, which I think implicitly assumes that child-rearing is a burden that neither parent wants to do, but simultaneously in many cases I think both parents would prefer to have custody (sorry, I mean Parental Responsibility) whether or not they got paid for it? I don't know, this thought isn't fully baked, but I think there's something about how we do this currently that's kind of weird and maybe based on outdated assumptions.
  
• The author says that you shouldn't shout at your kids or use any kind of corporal punishment while the divorce proceedings are happening, even if that was normal during the marriage.
  
  I feel like this is pretty weird, when you think about it? Either it's ok to shout and smack children or it's not, why does the parents divorcing affect that?
  
  I think this actually gets at a fundamental tension in modern society, where we're societally ambivalent about whether kids are ultimately under the control of 1) their parents, 2) the government.
  
  For most of human history, I think, this just wouldn't have been a question, obviously kids were controlled by their parents, but recently the government is asserting itself more heavily, with more willingness to assert what parents can and cannot do with their own kids.
  
  So the resolution of this one is just "the government would like to ban all parents from shouting at or spanking their kids, but mostly it can't (so far), but during divorce cases they can, so they do."
  
• You legally can't retire / reduce your income in order to reduce your alimony. That is, if you have a high-paying job and you think to yourself "well, if my effective income from this job is now 1/3 lower, it's not really worth it to me, I'm going to quit and become a gardener / cook / acrobat like I always wanted to be," then the court will say.... no, you can't do that. Or rather, you still owe alimony as if you were working the high-paying job, so in the long run you can't afford to earn less.
  
  (The author says that reducing your income after a divorce is cutting off your nose to spite your face, because you're still keeping 2/3rds of your income. But idk, I think lots of people would change their jobs if it suddenly paid 1/3 less overnight, no spite required! Maybe that seems crazy when your income is millions of dollars a year, but also... maybe the crazy part is that people keep working for so long when they have so much money in the first place? Maybe the divorce is just a wake up call that they have enough money already, and also a wake up call about how they should have put more time into their relationships?)
  
  I don't know, I think I understand the motivation for this rule, but also... this is an incredible level of state intervention in people's life-choices that I don't think we would accept in other circumstances? Like, one of the things that liberal democracies say is bad about authoritarianisms is that in Those Places the government can command you to do a particular job whether you like it or not, and then... it turns out that, in our current liberal democracy, in at least one context the government can (approximately) command you to do a particular job whether you like it or not?
  
  An example I heard from outside this book is that air traffic controllers 1) make a lot of money, 2) don't really have skills transferable to any other high-paying job, 3) aren't allowed to do drugs, including some very normal medications, including some antidepressants. One guy got depressed about his divorce, started taking antidepressants, got fired from his air traffic control job, and then had to keep paying alimony as if he had the high-paying job which he was no longer eligible for, and the judge didn't believe him that he really had no way to earn as much money any more.
  
  My takeaway here is roughly "getting married is signing yourself up to lose some basic rights that you might not have thought about" – e.g. if you have kids, you can be compelled not to move outside a certain radius, so you're potentially giving up both freedom of work and freedom of location, in a legally-enforceable way.

So, there you go. Everything you hopefully won't need to know about getting a divorce. If you have other books I should add to my pile, let me know.