The first thing I was taught in engineering school was, “Every decision you make is a tradeoff.” As in “Welcome to Engineering 100. I’m Professor So-and-so. Every decision you make is a tradeoff.”
At the tender age of 18, I thought they were being a little intense about the whole thing. Two decades on, I recognize this as some of the sagest advice I’ve ever received.
To quote from my dear friend, Wikipedia:
A trade-off (or tradeoff) is a situational decision that involves diminishing or losing one quality, quantity, or property of a set or design in return for gains in other aspects. In simple terms, a tradeoff is where one thing increases, and another must decrease.
Or, if we use English instead of Economics, every decision you make, consciously or not, costs you the ability to make a different decision, as well as the consequences and benefits of having made that other decision.
In trying to quantify this cost, economists developed a useful construct for thinking about tradeoffs, the opportunity cost. Again, from Wikipedia:
The opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative forgone where, given limited resources, a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives.
The economists have kindly constrained the cost from everything we might have done with that time, energy, and attention and reduced it to the best alternative. That is a comfort, given that there are infinite things we are not doing at every moment.
But also—and this is key—there is a baked-in assumption that, when making a decision, we know what the best alternative is.
It assumes that we understand what, exactly, it is that we are trading off.
But life seldom works that way.
When making choices in the moment, we tend to focus on the options in front of us—to the exclusion of long-term or more abstract costs.
Given that you are reading substack, likely during your workday, I’m betting you have at some point considered (consciously or otherwise) one of the great dilemmas of our time: Should I read the Internet or get my work done?
In the moment, scrolling the Internet feels like a break from work. And perhaps, in certain quantities, it is. The trick is that if this scroll break stretches from minutes into hours, it’s not your work time that is lost. Your work must still be done, so you stay late.
In the moment when you are deciding (or following the habits built on small decisions made over years), it feels like you are trading off tedious work for instantaneous pleasure or distraction. But the tedious work needs to be done, regardless. The actual tradeoff, then, is your personal hours, your relationships and hobbies, the necessary management of your household.
If you ask yourself:
Would I rather see what my ex is up to or nourish my current relationship?
Would I rather buy a bunch of stuff advertised to me (that I’ll be bored with next week) or save up for a vacation I’ll remember for the rest of my life?
Would I rather read Reddit threads I find (at best) mildly interesting or read the book I’ve been meaning to get to?
Would I rather regularly eat mediocre takeout or be able to pay for an unexpected car repair easily?
Few people, I think, would choose to stare at a screen or fritter away money when the choice is made explicit. And yet we often choose rectangle-time or expensive distractions and conveniences because the choice is, in fact, not explicit at all.
The terms of the deal are usually quite opaque.
The actual cost you are preparing to pay is rarely obvious when you choose your path because the actual cost is usually further down the road than the immediate benefit. This is true for time, it is true for money, it is true for any scarce resource.
Where in your life is something just not working? Start looking upstream to see if you might be making a tradeoff that is appealing in the moment but frustrating in the fullness of time.