What You Get

From Menletter December 2008

By Tim Baehr

"What you see is what you get." Flip Wilson started it all in the late '60s on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In": One of his characters, Geraldine, used it as a repeating comic catchphrase to describe her outrageous behavior.

Software companies picked up this phrase to describe computer programs that could display text that was formatted as it would appear in print. Modern word processors and desktop publishing programs have this feature. In the early days it acquired the acronym WYSIWYG ("wizzy-wig").

WYSIWYG

We all know WYSIWYG people. Whatever they say or do, however conventional or unconventional, they lack artifice. These people rarely, if ever, hide behind a presentation that isn't true to themselves. This can be refreshing or maddening, sometimes both at the same time. The maddening part comes about when we create a mismatch between their behavior and our expectations. And sometimes WYSIWYG people are just assholes.

We may tend to cut some slack for the WYSIWIGs of the world. The Red Sox, for instance, put up with Manny Ramirez's antics for a couple of years before they traded him. "Manny being Manny" was all right as long as he kept getting hits and as long as his behavior didn't cause problems with team coherence. Ultimately, he got the boot.

WYGIWYD

A few years ago, I had a gig doing software and hardware technical support. User error or confusion is the most common cause of distress with a product, but the product and we tech support folks are usually the targets of a user's wrath. Most of the time a user was installing a part incorrectly, clicking on the wrong menu item, or expecting the product to do something it wasn't designed for. One story among my colleagues had a user putting the mouse on the floor and trying to use it as a foot treadle.

I called this WYGIWYD ("wiggy-wid"), or "What you get is what you deserve." (The term isn't unique to me; it was too good and useful not to have had multiple origins.)

WYGIWYD can be applied to a broad range of human behavior. In more common terms, we call it "just desserts" or even "Karma." If we enjoy witnessing really unpleasant people whose luck has turned bad, we call it "schadenfreude," as when the speeder who has cut us off is pulled over by the state police.

Do we always deserve what we get, both the good stuff and the bad? Some might argue that, in the largest, most cosmic sense, we do. The lottery winner deserved to be relieved of her poverty because she was a good person. Or the lottery winnings turned out to be a curse because she foolishly spent everything and was plunged back into poverty. The cancer was a payback for smoking; good health was a reward for healthy living.

Often, however, the idea of WYGWYD simply doesn't make sense. Patently innocent people are sometimes victims - children and babies killed as "collateral damage," infants with cancer, for instance. Or when some people are "blessed" with good fortune they had no part in creating - being born into a family that can afford college tuition, inheriting an uncle's estate.

Even the simpler and cruder notions of Karma are inadequate in explaining WYGIWYD. How many generations back do I have to go to find some misdeed in a previous life that explains why lightning struck my house? How much karmic merit must I accumulate to ensure that some future incarnation will lead a better life than mine?

WYGIWYG

Let's take all this a step further, to WYGIWYG ("wiggy-wig"): "What you get is what you get."

To me, WYGIWYG means that whatever befalls us, good or bad, doesn't involve merit. If I win the lottery or enjoy excellent health, it's not because I was a Good Person, or that some Good Person in a previous generation accumulated good Karma. Whatever is, is.

That doesn't mean that there's no such thing as cause and effect. If I drink a bottle of booze and consume 4,000 calories every day, I'll end up as a fat drunk. But do I deserve that result, or is it just a result? If I work out and eat moderately and stay away from tobacco, drugs and booze, I may end up quite healthy. But do I deserve that result, or is it just a result? In both cases, there are too many factors involved, and assigning blame or merit is way too simplistic. Some fat drunks lead long, happy, mostly harmless lives. Some health nuts get hit by buses.

Cause and effect get even more complicated on the cosmic level. Several billion years ago certain cells began to divide, and all sorts of events intervened through an incredibly long chain of cause and effect, eventually leading to two other cells that joined and then divided, creating - me. Other "accidents" of my birth - my particular parents, my twin brother, our older sister, the location and time, the simultaneous existence of a World War, and a myriad of other things - were at the ends of incredibly long chains of cause and effect. Did I "deserve" to be born a US citizen in the northeastern part of the country, or any of these other accidents? Of course not. In every way, in every aspect of my life, good and bad, what I got is what I got - effects of many causes but not what I "deserved."

What do I do once I know that what I get is what I get? I have a choice. Not about what has come to me but where I am to go and with what attitude. Constantly ruminating about what I may or may not have deserved keeps me imprisoned in the past and has the potential to poison my future. So I can relax about benefiting from or missing out on some piece of fantastic good luck that I might have deserved, and I can look on misfortune as something neither deserved nor undeserved.

Good events happen. Bad events happen. I will feel appropriately good or bad about them - just long enough to change my plans accordingly: What am I going to do now?