Progressive Snapshot and Accountability in Virtue

That sounds so sales-y but I promise this isn't a sales pitch?

Howdy, friends, I’ve got a fun thought experiment for you today where we take a mediocre-at-best analogy and then run with it way farther than is reasonable. BUT I hope that, if you welcome me into your inbox twice a week, you trust that I’m going somewhere with it that’s at least somewhat cogent!

Flo from Progressive; image from Thought Catalog

James and I recently switched car insurance—you know how it goes—and as part of the package, we were offered the chance to participate in the Progressive Snapshot program. They send you a little gizmo to plug into your car, and it beeps at you when you hard break. Then if you’re a “good driver” you get a discount on your car insurance, and if you’re a “bad driver” I guess maybe you have to pay more?

And ooh boy howdy, y’all, the first few days this thing was beeping at me, I was mad about it. It was so frustrating to be told that I was a “bad driver”. Didn’t Flo know that someone just cut in front of the car in front of me and we all had to slam on the breaks because of how inconsiderate that driver was being? Didn’t she know that the big truck in front of me was blocking the stop light so I couldn’t see that it was turning red until I was right at the intersection?

Have you ever heard that old saying, “When you go to Confession, it’s time to confess your sins, not your husband’s or your kids’ or your neighbors’ sins.”

Yeah… catch me confessing other drivers’ sins to Flo from Progressive.

But, like any good confessor (I told y’all imma take this way too far today, bear with me!), Flo redirected me and reminded me that I am responsible for my own actions, regardless of the actions of others. And surprisingly, over the next few days, as I became more adept at avoiding the little beeps, I started reflecting a lot on the way minimizing my hard-braking as a driver mirrored or mimicked the experience of trying to minimize vice and grow in virtue.

So here are a few things I’ve learned from Flo about growing in virtue:

It’s not a value judgment.
Because the device is trained to recognize one thing, it is only telling you one thing. You can choose to extrapolate or project some sort of dramatic self-worth issues onto the information, but all you’re being given is information. Which leads me to…

Accountability is good.
Automated, impersonal, immediate accountability is best. It leaves less room for getting defensive. It’s just data. If only there were a little pocket device that would beep at us every time we chose not to come to prayer, not to stop eating when we felt full, or not to keep that snarky comment to ourselves.

Choose a metric that is objective, not subjective.
The Progressive snapshot does not care if someone just cut you off in traffic. It does not care if a big rig was keeping you from being able to see that the light was turning red. It cares if you hard-brake. That is all. We are notoriously bad at collecting information about our own behavior, so the more you’re able to rely on objective data or, perhaps, a neutral outside observer, the more likely it is you’ll get an honest picture of your behavior.

Choose to pursue virtue, rather than just other vices, to “win” the game.
You can’t run red lights, recklessly change lanes, or cut people off in traffic and be a “good” or “safe” driver, even if doing those things keeps you from getting beeped at. Likewise with virtue—even if you’re not technically committing the vice you’ve resolved to avoid, if you’re just indulging in other bad habits instead, you’re not actually growing in virtue.

Virtues work together
In other words, choosing to focus on one virtue will necessarily impact other choices and allow you to grow in other virtues. If you’re committed to avoiding getting beeped at, you’ll have to start leaving a lot of space between you and the car in front of you. You’ll start having to pay more attention to the speed limit or how long that light has been green. You’ll need to allow fewer distractions and keep a heightened awareness of the behavior of the cars around you. As a result, you are likely to become a safer driver all around, even if technically you are only focusing on avoiding one action.

Two steps forward, one step back
Habituating a new virtue, like building any new habit, will take time and will inevitably include “regressions”. You will find yourself falling back on old habits, especially if you choose to get rid of the accountability factor. The principle of entropy states that the universe is all tending towards disorder, and in many ways, concupiscence leads us as people to tend toward disordered behavior if left to our own devices. This is part of why we need accountability to keep us on the straight and narrow.

To take the analogy further, we all know that, as a driver (at least as a driver in a big city), you will inevitably hard-break. There will almost certainly be situations where you will “need to” hard-break because of situations that you put yourself in or that someone else put you in.

For example:

• I recently had to hard-break because I let myself get too close to the car in front of me while putting Chick-fil-a sauce on my sandwich.

• Or see the above-mentioned scenario of a car cutting in front of the car in front of me, where there were several of us who had to slow down because of that.

• Maybe you’ve got two screaming children in the car, or you’re sleep-deprived, or you’re really hungry, or you’re trying to play “Baby Shark” after the forty-fifth demand in five minutes… and you lose focus for a moment.

In other words, when we’re not operating at full capacity, we become more likely to place ourselves in situations where we will commit vicious or sinful actions. This is what the tradition of the Church refers to as a “near occasion of sin”—an action that isn’t sinful in and of itself, but disposes us to sinful actions.

But because we have an intellect and a will, we can choose to avoid those circumstances. To not put sauce on our sandwich while we’re driving, no matter how hungry we are. To prioritize that cup of coffee if we’re driving drowsy. To put “Baby Shark” on before we put the car in drive. Of course, when we do find ourselves in difficult or distracted circumstances, we always want to act prudently, to “leave ourselves some space” if you will… but the preference is always to avoid those situations when possible.

All this to say, I was 100% certain that I was going to hate the beepy thing, but Flo from Progressive has really gotten me thinking lately… and has weirdly had me inspired to building in accountability for myself in other areas of my life where I’ve been saying for weeks months years that I’d like to make a change, but haven’t been able to figure out the why or the how, so I just haven’t even gotten started.

Be honest with me, was this analogy just way out of left field? Was it helpful? Do you have vices that you’re just not ready to let go of yet? Or virtues you want to grow in but you don’t quite know where to start? How could building in some sort of accountability system help overcome that obstacle? What might that look like?