Memorandum on Haircut Threshold Debate
The decision to cut hair has acquired a deliberation timeline that the hair itself did not request.
I.
The subject wakes and assesses. Length. Weight. General comportment. The assessment yields no conclusion. The subject proceeds to work.
This happens again the next day. It will happen the day after that.
What is being assessed, technically, is whether hair has crossed an invisible threshold from acceptable to overdue. The threshold moves. Nobody moved it. It relocated during the night, or possibly during a meeting, or while the subject was doing something that did not involve looking at their own head. The threshold is, in this sense, a living document.
II.
There is a moment, distinct from all the previous mornings, when the subject looks in the mirror and announces that it is overdue. Not long. Not even too long. Overdue, with the bureaucratic confidence of someone who has located a violation on a schedule that was never written down.
How many days ago was the threshold crossed? The subject does not know. The subject never recorded where the threshold was. The threshold was assumed to be findable through observation, and observation continued every morning for some number of weeks without finding it.
Then it was found, retrospectively. The subject had been past it for some time. The subject is not certain by how much. The estimate is probably wrong but is stated with authority.
III.
The maintenance itself takes thirty minutes. The deliberation process, conducted in daily five-minute increments across fourteen or more mornings, takes longer in aggregate than the action it precedes.
This ratio is considered normal. This ratio is, in fact, invisible as a ratio. It does not appear as inefficiency. It appears as appropriate caution. Haircuts are irreversible. One does not rush toward irreversible things without first establishing that they are overdue. Establishing this requires time.
The governing principle is that the cost of cutting too soon exceeds the cost of cutting too late. The evidence for this principle is the behavior itself. The behavior exists because of the principle. The principle and the behavior have been co-sustaining each other for as long as the subject has owned a mirror.
The subject books the appointment. The hair is cut. The subject leaves the salon and, within approximately four days, begins assessing again.