Been thinking about this as I’ve found myself dithering ongoingly over a certain career-path question. The sunk cost fallacy has gained broad cultural currency, it’s a concept a lot of people know, and it’s one I’ve often tried to apply in my decision-making since I learned about it, probably in a college critical thinking course. The basic idea makes sense—that, rationally speaking, simply having put resources into a course of action shouldn’t weigh into my decision to stay on that course. I should be able to sell a losing investment that’s likely to keep dropping in value, no matter how much it cost me to purchase it. I should not keep working a job I hate simply because it took me years of hard labor to get promoted into it. If I buy a concert ticket and then receive a more attractive invitation the same night, I shouldn’t attend the concert just to justify the money I already spent.
In practice, I find that applying this principle in complex situations often feels at odds with the real advantages of making a commitment, also of relaxing fully into a process. Trying to fully separate my wish to justify embedded “costs” from my complex and changing feelings about an engagement reliably puts me into a narrow, strategizing mindset that can feel really paranoid. Like, how exactly do I differentiate between sunk-costing and simply making predictions that are informed by past choices? Isn’t the fact that I embarked on this path somehow relevant to my continuing on it? Where lies the real difference between irrationally clinging to an obsolete selfhood and a desire to preserve and enjoy continuity with my past?
The irony is that identifying the fallacy is supposed to help you cut your losses and let go of limiting justifications, but it does so via and within the overbearing narrative of cost-benefit analysis. “I’ve been in this relationship for two years now—that must mean something.” Of course, that could mean all kinds of things, could stir all kinds of associations, wantings, regrets. When we apply the sunk cost fallacy, those meanings collapse into a quantity of lost time, a quantity declared meaningless in the moment of its classification. It’s already gone, look to the future, decide in the present. Taken to its logical conclusion, this way of thinking construes the entire past as loss and devastation, the future as the only space of potential gain, and the present as a slivered moment whose entire purpose is to maximize that potential before it too crosses into the void. I mean, what might be the cost of that?
I’ve decided that the sunk cost fallacy is probably a great thing to know about for those rare situations when cost and value are clear and quantifiable and the fear of tarnishing your self-concept is the only thing that keeps you from folding. Carried into broader Life, it too easily becomes an invitation to second-guess everything all the time, to never stop scanning for an exit, to sink into the numbing trance of never-ending optimization. The trance may be incompatible with following a motion through its natural arc, with letting a previously established velocity flow into its fullest and most confident expression for no reason but to see it unfold. Avoiding fallaciousness is not a particularly delightful way to navigate, and there is something to be said for doubling down occasionally just to prove you can still be the fool.