On Sunk Costs

Last updated on 2023-08-26

We put a lot into things we imagine will go our way. These resources can be time, attention, or money, but they're finite resources all the same. Somewhere along the way, things stop going according to plan and we have to choose whether to abandon the plan or continue—Fate be damned. This pressing forward even in the face of looming failure is known as the sunk cost fallacy. It's when you go, "Yeah, I know I've lost $300 playing blackjack, but I might be able to win my money back if I just buy in for a little more…". There are versions of this that play out over longer timeframes too. You might continue trying to fix a car that you've put a lot of time and money into instead of giving up and buying a new one. You might stick it out in a destructive relationship because you've got too many years in it to give up now. These are things that snowball over time and are the more insidious version of the fallacy.

I started looking at places my time slipped away from me. It may seem silly to you, dear reader, but TV shows, books, and movies can steal so much of your time, attention, and money—even though it may not feel that way before deeper reflection. This is most apparent when you think about the series you take an interest in. Any form of entertainment where the story is told throughout several volumes, episodes, or seasons can quickly add up to mountains of time. We start a series—books, TV shows, etc.—and we continue consuming them because we've invested a lot of time in them already. We feel like we have to see them through to the end.

This was something that struck me before the prosochē module and I decided that if I wasn't excited to consume the next piece of a series I was going to drop it entirely. It bought back a lot of time for me each week. I extended this to even one-off movies and books. We might start a movie, start feeling like it's not worth our time in the middle of it, and yet we watch another hour of it because, "I've watched this much already, might as well finish it!" And there's another hour of your life you could reallocate to a more enriching—or at least, more entertaining—activity.

I worry that this might not seem the most philosophical thing to write about, but it's this lack of attention to how we allocate our time and attention that robs us of so much of our potential.

"…when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it's spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn't notice passing has passed away."

— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 1.3