Make Life Explicable

I basically believe that humans find most pains and inconveniences more tolerable if they understand why they're happening, and (conversely) that one of the cruelties of the modern world is big institutions not-telling us why things are happening.

For example, calling tech support for most big companies involves a variety of humiliations and aggravations, but one of the big ones is that a customer asking "ok but why did you do this thing?" is so often met with "I understand your frustration and apologize for any inconvenience" or some other non-answer to the basic question.

(I actually want to positively commend Amazon here – for whatever other flaws they have, it's normally possible to reach a human there and when you ask why are you doing this? they'll give you an answer that makes you go hmm, ok, I feel like this could be done better, but at least it's not totally capricious).

I feel this a lot with apartments and other buildings, where I have to live with the consequences of some unknown previous constraints and simply do not understand why. Why is this electrical outlet placed in a spot where you can't actually reach it? Why does this apartment have a random additional wall cutting an otherwise well-sized room into a smaller room and an unnecessary corridor? Why does this otherwise-nice building have hollow metal doors that feel like they belong in a fallout shelter?

There are probably always reasons for these things, either structural or financial or regulatory, and it would be so much easier to live with the weirdness if I knew why it was like this. Relative to the thousands of hours that developers spend on the building, an hour or two to write a Letter To Future Tenants is nothing. When I rent a new apartment, alongside the keys could be a letter from the architect saying "I wanted to put the window at a normal height of course, rather than have it start 1 ft off the ground. But there's actually a regulation that each room must get at least 1.5 hours of sunlight at noon on the day of the equinox, and given the orientation of the building the only way to achieve that was to give you this crazy low-slung window which you can't easily look out of but where the neighbours can see you naked from your knees to your chest. Sorry!"

I fear that in a litigious society this can never happen: providing any kind of explanation for anything gives someone an opening to challenge that explanation, and probably just saying "it is what it is" is always safer. This is why interacting with bureaucracies is like trying to climb a smooth wall with no handholds, and I guess it makes sense but it also drives me nuts. (See! At least it's an explanation).