dry grass singing

counting the cost

Economics, a colleague told me once, is the science of life. It is the study of how people make their decisions, of why they choose one road over another. This was a radically different take on the subject from the one i'd been accustomed to at school - a veritable paradigm shift, in fact, and one that changed, in however small a way, the manner in which i think about life. What used to be a rather impersonal, if vaguely fascinating, academic discipline suddenly became an all-encompassing theoretical framework for understanding human motivations and actions. The idea that everything carries an opportunity cost, and that all our choices are the result of the weighing and balancing of costs and benefits, was something that i had never quite appreciated before. Now, though, it appealed to me at a deeply personal level, made possible no doubt by my new-found awareness that everything we do in life, we do as a result of a choice, whether conscious or not.

Contrary to popular belief, the best things in life are not free. Even our most cherished values and beliefs come with price-tags attached. And if deciding in favour of some of these 'best things' seems, at first, not to make 'economic' sense, it is only because we are so accustomed to equating economics with money and finance, when in fact that isn't what economics is about at all.

Imagine, for instance, that you are an amateur artist who has given up a stable career as an architect in order to devote your time and energy to art. The cost of your decision? Partly monetary, of course - an artist-friend once confessed that Singaporean artists are constantly bitching about money (or the lack thereof), and the sacrifice seems all the greater in the light of the relatively attractive income guaranteed by a career in architecture. But there are other costs as well - the loss of prestige and social standing, the giving up of a high-flying yuppie lifestyle, and most frightening of all, the very real possibility of failure and subsequent disillusionment. Set against all this, the benefits may seem relatively meagre to some: the chance to do something you are passionate about, the possibility (as yet unfulfilled) of success and personal fulfilment. But there is also the cost of not pursuing a dream: frustration, boredom, wasted talent, the nagging 'what-ifs' that assail you as you lie awake in bed at night. The thought of which may, or may not, be enough to tip the balance in favour of the road less travelled.

At some point last year, i started making conscious, metacognitive choices for the first time in my life. i chose, for example, to buy peace-of-mind and clarity-of-conscience at the price of exclusion-from-the-in-crowd at work, because i realised that all the in-crowd seemed interested in doing was bitching viciously about people they felt did not match up to their high standards of competence and excellence. i realised, too, the price of that particular decision may actually have been higher than i could positively ascertain, for the simple reason that exclusion-from-the-in-crowd also rendered me vulnerable to being a victim of their gossip-mongering. More recently, i have purchased the-right-to-pursue-what-really-matters-to-me, at the cost of possible-deadlock-on-the-career-ladder, failure-to-fulfil-society's-expectations-of-me-as-an-ex-scholar, and probable-future-inability-to-match-my-friends'-lifestyles-and-income-levels. And at this very moment, i'm buying the-sense-of-achievement-that-comes-with-writing-something-vaguely-decent, with a-few-hours-of-lost-sleep.

Perhaps one day some motivational self-help guru (from America, of course) will write an allegorical fable featuring a Great Supermarket of Life where all the possible choices in a given individual's lifetime are lined up on rows upon rows of shelves, grouped according to some strange yet ultimately rational system (Career, Country-of-Residence, Life-Partner, Colour-of-Underwear...), all with price tags and electronic barcodes neatly attached.

So, how much is that doggy in the window?

posted by eothen @ 9:11 PM