The Toilet Brush Paradox

Almost ten years ago, my friend Carlos had an issue — he could not, for the life of him, get up in the mornings. He would set many alarms just to turn them off half unconscious and go back to sleep. He tried everything: putting the phone a few meters away from his bed, math alarms (he didn’t really like those), anything to wake up on time to start the day.

Until one day, he found the app. The one that was gonna make it all work.

This app had one special feature to turn off the alarm: You have to take the same photo, every day. Choose one object, a corner of your house, anything you want, and do that every day.

Carlos considered how finicky it might be in reality. At the very least, one would have to match angle and light. He found that the AI (not an LLM, the regular pattern-recognition algorithm AIs we had back then) was smart enough that it did not have to be exact.

He chose the toilet brush by the WC.

The logic was sound. Every day he would have to get up, take his phone, get out of bed, exit the bedroom, cross the hall to the bathroom and take the photo. By then, he would be right next to the shower. Get undressed, jump inside, start the day.

Did it solve his problems? Let’s see.

The following morning the new alarm went off for the first time. It went off full volume blasting through the house.

Carlos did not live alone, he had a couple of roommates.

Obviously, he tried to lower the volume, but the alarm just wouldn’t let him; every time he muted the phone, the app would set the volume all the way up on its own. Carlos quickly figured out he could keep the alarm suppressed if he just held the volume scroll on the screen down with his fingers while covering the speaker. It was a tricky maneuver to say the least.

He would then get to the bathroom, take the damned picture and be done with it.

Did he then jump into the shower and start his day?

Well, I think he did at least for a couple of days. After the novelty died, he would go through all that hassle just to take the picture of the toilet brush and zombie his way back to bed.

To be fair, the picture matching capabilities of the app were pretty good, he never complained about that. In fact, when I showed him this piece, he commented that there was a day he got early to the office and completely forgot about the alarm, which had not gone off yet. And then it did. He found himself at work, unable to turn it off, frantically searching toilet brushes on Google Images. He managed to find one that more or less looked like his, and took nearly a hundred pictures of it (phone fully blasting) until the app was finally satisfied that it was the exact same not toilet brush he had.

I was not one of his roommates (thankfully) but he did keep me up-to-date with his alarm shenanigans. After one month of the insufferable toilet brush alarm, I was like: dude, all you have to do is get up when the alarm sounds! Stop the torture and just 👏 do 👏 it.

He did. And it worked. Kinda.

To this day, he wakes up (more or less) on time every day. I asked for his permission when writing this story and an update on his alarm usage, and he reports having four alarms and getting up on the third one, so I would say that is a win. He is getting up when he is supposed to.

What it taught me⌗

Sometimes, you just have to do the thing and be done with it. We spend more time and effort trying to get a workaround that will make it “easier” than actually just doing the thing. A classic over-engineering of our daily problems.

It has been almost a decade now but I keep coming to this story again and again. If you have worked with me, you have probably heard me say “that’s a toilet brush” at some point. My friend Carlos has put up with at least a once a year reminder that he did this once, and has found other souls like him who fell into the trap of the magical alarms.

The Toilet Brush Paradox :: noun :: The phenomenon where an individual exerts more energy, creativity, and effort trying to make a “fail-safe” solution work than the effort actually required to solve the original problem.

So if you catch yourself with a “toilet brush”, let it go. Just 👏 do 👏 it. You don’t need to build a toilet brush system for a “get up” problem.

It will be better in the long run, trust me.

PS: Thank you, Carlos, for letting me tell your story to the world once more ❤