There is always a cost. There is no such thing as a benefit without a cost. While benefit is annoyingly optional, cost is gravity, death, and taxes. Not optional. Want to cut loose and get ripped with your friends Friday night? Cool. In a few hours, you'll be on the bathroom floor wishing you were dead. This is the cost. Want to take someone out to a fancy dinner? Nice. You could have made a week's worth of meals had you stayed in. This is the cost. Want to wake up early every day and practice writing? Fantastic. Now you have no friends. This is the cost.
The other day, my two oldest kids began peppering me with texts about upgrading their phones. They fell victim to the classic modern mobile plan gimmick, "Upgrade every year on us!". Without even looking into it, I assured them this was not free. "But the commercial said!", they persisted. As they tapped those retorts into the family group chat (on phones that still work, I might add), I was already on the carrier's website looking for the fine print. And the fine print I found. The asterisk. The most diabolical symbol in the punctuation library. It tells you everything you need to know about something without the need to see another character. It's a beacon of reassurance that we can disregard every prepended word with extreme prejudice.
Though they're not so young anymore, my kids still possess asterisk blindness. And if they follow in my footsteps, they have another decade or more of getting disappointed, disenchanted, gypped, and otherwise ripped off before they build the intuition it takes to smell the wolf amongst the sheep. Since I'm trusting by nature, cultivating a good instinct regarding tradeoffs is a skill I didn't expect to learn. But to survive as an adult, it's of mortal importance to understand there's someone out there willing to do whatever it takes to undermine your progress. They're experts in manipulation tactics and persuasion, and they know how to target the voids in your willpower. They shine a spotlight on the benefits of your potential choices while suppressing all its costs. But they're experts. They don't show their hand so easily. And they have the ability to infect your judgment so deeply, that no friend, parent, mentor, or therapist will bear the dexterity to show you the truth. And that's because this person is you.
Assessing cost is a matter of honesty. It's a matter of finding a way to quiet the devils on our shoulders for just long enough to catch a momentary glimpse of future consequences. We think of costs when dealing with money, but going materially broke is fixable. Hell, a charitable uncle can rescue us from running out of money. But delivering us from the paradigm of habitual self-deception that caused our bankruptcy is an outcome only we have the power to manifest.
A friend of mine recently showed me a YouTube channel featuring a series called "Financial Audit". It's a podcast-style setup where the show's host, Caleb Hammer, meets with a financially challenged person to help them get on the road to healthier spending habits. The guests are primarily comprised of adults in their early twenties and thirties who are desperately deep in debt. Caleb's fruitless attempts to maintain his composure are proof his subjects don't entirely grasp the weight of their situation. I've yet to survive an entire episode without closing the laptop and taking a long walk. But it doesn't matter who he invites on, they all have the same problem. And it isn't the money. Though their psychosis presents as debt, the help these people truly need is with their dishonesty. Because the honesty required to accurately assess the costs of a tradeoff must start with the ability to accept the difference between a need and a want.
This is where our shoulder devils make their money.
Developing good habits around the need/want debate demands constant vigilance and attention. Practicing anything under those conditions is arduous, but doing so when the long-term benefit (a.k.a. our future) is nothing more than a hazy oasis on the horizon is too much for many to bear. The reason these habits require so much effort is a byproduct of how easy it is to pretend a want is a need. And while a want is easily discounted as frivolous, needs are mandatory. A want is just a want. Everybody wants. But a need is a stop-the-presses triage event. And when the ends are dire, we convince ourselves that any means will suffice, consequences be damned.
As our society progresses to add more convenience to our lives, the difference between want and need becomes more unclear. The barrier to the acquisition of wants is almost nil now, so we don't have the built-in hardship tax that used to accompany our wants. This hardship was just enough friction to put our wants on trial to face the judge of our laziness. We'd see a commercial for something. Let's say jeans. "Oh those are kinda nice.", we'd think to ourselves. "I think I need a new pair of jeans." But instead of being able to pull out our phones and buy them in under a minute, we had to go to laziness court. On trial? Those "kinda nice" jeans:
You stand before the court today a "kinda nice" pair of jeans, as seen on the TV commercial. How do you plea?
Necessary, your honor.
The prosecution would come out, address the court, and state its case against the necessity of those jeans. They would point out that in order to obtain those jeans, our lazy-ass would not only have to get up from the couch, but brush their teeth, put on some decent clothes, AND do something with their dreadful hair.
Now, I don't know about you good folks, but I believe those jeans are looking less and less "necessary" by the second. The prosecution rests.
The defense would try to refute the statements of the prosecution, but by then it was already too late. Doubt of the veracity of the jeans' claims had already seeped in, thus relieving ourselves of the burden of having to actually leave the house.
Understanding cost is about learning to stop pretending our wants are our needs. It's about quieting the benefits long enough to hear the consequences. And it's about getting good at projecting those uncertain consequences on an equally uncertain future. It's hard. It takes practice. But that practice is just a little easier when we understand there is always a cost. And if you don't see it, keep searching until you do.
Thank you for reading. See you next week.