The idea of applying the concept from economics called “Opportunity Cost” to our personal life can be helpful in a provisional way. The idea is can be expressed as the ‘cost’ of lost opportunities incurred when we choose to do one thing instead of something else.
Fellow photographer and podcaster, Brooks Jensen, podcasted about this today (click here to listen to the podcast — ~5mins. long). He more eloquently explains how to apply opportunity costs to our goals. Brooks used the example of the artistic costs lost because we choose to watch TV instead of get out and photograph or work on a print or read a inspiring book.
It is what you could have had but have given up in order to have something else. It is up to us to decide if it each thing is worth it or not. We often don’t look at life this way. We can slip into letting life happen to us. As we mature (code word for become old) and we begin to get a sense of our end, the idea of looking at the opportunity cost of doing things can be helpful. Everything we do has an opportunity cost. We only have so much time and energy to accomplish our goals so we look of ways to be skillful and choose wisely.
What we achieve is largely a function of how we use our resources. How we use our time and the actions we do. More examples include — blogging instead of exercising, reading poetry instead of science fiction, buying a new Canon 5D instead of saving for retirement.
It is not that one thing is always better than another. We have to remember that part of the ‘costs’ in terms of time and energy of reading poetry is that we are not doing any of multitude of other things we could be doing to grow. We grow to become more vigilant, watching ourselves, seeing that we don’t become lazy.
Like all the other beliefs, theories and axioms that we use to become more skillful in life, this one is provisional and only gets us so far then we have to let it go. We have to be open to living in the moment and not worrying about so called lost opportunities. In the absolute realm we only have our actions and this moment.
I was going to blog this morning on a cool little CLI tool I found but instead I looked at the ‘opportunity cost’ and decided to blog on this topic instead.
As I have said before, I’m an avid podcast consumer. In the right hand column of willsimpson.org, I’ve updated the listings of the various podcasts I subscribe to. I’m continually adding and subtracting podcasts and my interests and the topics of the podcasts morph. If you listen to podcasts, what are you listening to?
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