Musings on Opportunity Costs & The Lightness of Being
The first time I learned about opportunity cost as a bolded vocabulary word in the pages of an economic textbook, it struck in me an uncomfortable psychological chord. This shamelessly pragmatic reality of life was epitomized so bluntly. It had a sobering feel. What did it amount to? The loss of potential gains from the road not chosen.
Every pivot, every decision we make in life accrues a cost — we know this consciously but avoid the visceral contemplation of it. What a chilly, hallucinatory hallway of the mind to go down.
Opportunity costs show up in the shadow trajectories that we could have chosen but did not. Like ghosts, alternative paths linger on the fringes of our consciousness but are usually banished out of sight.
Is it any wonder? The angst and sometimes regret from from these parallel non-realities would weigh us into inaction. The crisp snapping-off of different paths is inevitable, you see. Without it we would not get anything done.
Does everything really happen for a reason?
One feature of our decision-making is that we turn it into a story, we display it in a kind of art-gallery manner as a narrative that was meant to happen the whole time. Every time I hear the phrase “everything happens for a reason” I am…
