#4 -The desperation to salvage our sunk costs
The year is 2017. Two of my closest friends are in agony over the impending break-up of their ten year long relationship. Their romance has…
The year is 2017. Two of my closest friends are in agony over the impending break-up of their ten year long relationship. Their romance has seen the whole gamut of stuff you see in the movies. One could sense the romance in any space they were together. They were magical and, also, they were deeply dysfunctional. I had been an intimate witness to this decade-long saga — the becoming and unbecoming of their love. They were lovely people, but had been terrible to and for each other for a while. And now, they saw it, too, which made this decision even harder. There is no greater discomfort than the realization that your beloved is no longer the object of your desire but something else.. something precarious and uglier.. something unloved.
And yet, couldn’t they try to fix it? After all, they had been in love for ten years. Ten years. Twenty years if you consider their individual time spend. (Thirty years if you validate my self importance and imposition on their relationship.) Ten years of phone calls and letters exchanged across the country, poetry written to each other that matured with their age, endless songs sung and playlists made to capture the many seasons of their love, friends mixed and families understood, tattoos etched with seeming permanence, and a life shared with the promises and hopes of forever. They’d spent 40% of their lives so far with each other. How could they now wake up tomorrow and just.. start over?
I used to join him. Then we argued.
For a decade we argued. And sometimes
sailed, though I was admittedly mostly
decorative, a mermaid on the prow.
Whether I brought him better luck
is not my weather to tell. I cost him.
Time. He costs me. More.
Snipped from Divorce Song by Jameson Fitzpatrick
The year is 2017. I am 19; I identify very deeply as an ‘econ student’; I do so because I am deeply insecure but I am always trying to seem cool and credible; I have the tendency to theorize personal disasters to simplify and solve them; I act before I can fully understand what my actions can do. I really thought I had cracked it — their relationship was struggling and it seemed like the only reason they held onto it was because they wanted to salvage the irrecoverable ten years. But having loved once was no reason to love always. And I — Miss Reasonable to many faults — had no patience for irrationality. So, I emailed my friend the research on ‘sunk cost fallacy’. “The phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.”
The year is 2022 (it’s a few days ago). I’m with my dog on our daily morning walk and it begins to drizzle, rain and then obnoxiously pour in the matter of a few seconds. As I rush home, I see a mother and her (presumably) 8 year old son seek temporary shelter before he can catch his school bus. As much as I want believe that I’m onto some new bullshit, I am still thinking — SUNK COSTS! We know no real learning occurs in schools when it rains. The uniforms are soiled, girls are pre-occupied with ensuring their white uniforms haven’t grown transparent, the classrooms smell nasty, and it’s just too damn dirty and chaotic for the orderly enterprise of a school. The kids (and admittedly also the teachers) are in no real mood to really study (or teach). ~ The vibes are just off~ .Why ruin your mood, get drenched in the rain, and all for a wasted day of learning? Can’t he just study at home instead? Isn’t she making the sunk cost fallacy by forcing him to go to school — when he clearly won’t learn much — simply because they’ve gotten ready for it?
Time by Alex Dimitrov
Again I am unprepared
standing under an awning
in the middle of summer
autumn, winter, spring
watching the downpour
in what could be
the middle of life;
wondering how long I’ll wait
before becoming the rain.
I wonder — why do we commit this fallacy? If we indeed “vote with our feet” — and many economists insist that we do — might it not be better for us to keep trying to hold-up the damaged ship rather than letting it sink?
More interestingly, what do we look to salvage in these otherwise ‘doomed’ projects? While I don’t think the (popular use of) sunk cost fallacy theory is entirely wrong, I do think its over-indexes on an assumption that is often unintuitive — that we would be better off if we stopped investing in these seemingly unproductive decisions. It ignores the cost, the pain, the shame, of giving up. I think the trade-off should consider the costs of a sunk ship more sincerely.
We serve a multitude of projects and objectives through each act. When the mother sends her kid to school on a rainy day, she is not just catering to the project of his education. She may have woken up early, cooked and packed lunch boxes for her kid, ironed his uniform, dressed him, all while replicating the same chores for her husband (who hopefully dresses himself). There are planned tasks for the rest of the day which presume her kid is at school. Canceling school would spin these plans into chaos. The benefit of having a drenched kid out at school and absent from home during the day may be greater than the cost of monitoring him to study from the comfort of home while upsetting all your plans for the day.
Committing the sunk cost fallacy is — clears throat and straightens spine — crucial to a stable social order. We invest effort to make our promises seem credible. Keeping our promises — especially when they are hard — is how we develop resilience in our relationships. ‘Come rain or shine’ is about both perseverance and commitment. First, determination, among the most important mental muscles to nurture, is essentially committing the sunk cost fallacy and never giving up. There’s a lesson the mother is teaching her kid when she sends him to school even when it’s challenging to go: You persist at arduous things especially because it’s part of what makes the eventual success rewarding and credible. Second, who are we without the promises we keep? An unreliable flaker whose friends can’t trust them to show up when they said they would. Doing hard things for our loved ones is among our many cherished love languages.
The popular use of sunk cost fallacy often under-estimates the cost of disinvestment. This oversight is what makes the theory rather unintuitive. We must be interested in why we salvage our sinking ships. One is bound to find cracks at some point or the other in any long-term project or relationship, no matter what kind. And that is when things get interesting. The commitment and perseverance to these relationships — including the one we keep with ourselves — floats us through these moments and ties our bonds stronger. To love, then, is to make the sunk cost fallacy over and over again.
Of course, sometimes the relation-ship is wrecked beyond repair and there’s little that one can salvage. In those times, we need grace, courage, and abundant love. Instead of sending my friend the research on sunk cost fallacies in breaking up, I should have paid heed to why she wanted to hold on and what she feared would happen if she didn’t — what about your life with this man are you trying to salvage? How can we recreate parts of it together even in his absence? What will you need to start over? What will you miss? How do you feel? Have you eaten? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Untitled by Clementine von Radics
I thought leaving you would be easy,
just walking out the door
but I keep getting pinned against it
with my legs around your waist and it’s like
my lips want you like my lungs want air,
it’s just what they where born to do so
I am sitting at work thinking of you
cutting vegetables in my kitchen
your hair in my shower drain
your fingers on my spine in the morning
while we listen to Muddy Waters, I know
you will never be the one I call home
but the way you talk about poems
like marxists talk of revolution
it makes me want to keep trying.
I’m still looking for reasons to love you.
I’m still looking for proof you love me.
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When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.
Thich Nhat Hanh, via The Nook
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When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude