Opportunity Costs

7 March 2026

Based off of a journal entry on 4 March 2026.

I am mired in the unenviable feeling of the nagging optimizer-- I could be using my time so much more efficiently. Even as I write this I am yearning to read -- but inevitably as soon as I pick up the book my mind will complain that it must unload the dishwasher. And, as soon as the dishwasher is open, I will fancy doing some sketching. Indubitably this attitude leads me to disenjoyment of whatever activity I do. My perception of the opportunity costs leads me to dissatisfaction.

Oh, that humanity were either perfectly economic or never so, rather than the incommodious disharmony of imperfect perception!

I find myself often debating between two inconsequential options, paralyzed between pros and cons. I remember myself to have always been this way. It started with the seventh-gen console wars, then to classes in MMOs, then to choice of games and to drinks and to beards and to majors. As easy as it would be to label this trait as all bad, it lends me to make wholehearted and well-informed analyses of situations and mutual exclusives. The monkey wrench in my impartiality is emotional reasoning. Emotional reasoning makes me take my critical analysis of a situation and throw it out of the window. How human of me.

My weakness is one of the things that makes me human. Still I remain in enchantment of my humanity, the glorious imperfection that is nothing more than a reflection of ultimate reality. In the age of artificiality, imperfection becomes more and more charming --and more and more necessary.

Ceteribus Paribus

In economics there is the principle of ceteribus paribus: all other things equal. When tracking the effects of supply (or any variable), assume that everything else stays constant. The physics equivalent of this would be to ignore air resistance.

The economics portion of my undergrad also taught me that humans are never fully rationally economic. In a fully rational-economic world, laissez-faire capitalism would win out (though on pedestal of the bones of the weak). Darwinism, even. Brutal.

We are not, though. We do the opposite of ceteribus paribus. We consider so many other variables, both consciously and unconsciously, that our decision making can never be certainly predicted. Herein lies the crux: no matter how much we can algorithmize or predict or divine, the human factor is uncontrollable and unpredictable by artificial means.

Were the human factor entirely random, though, we could use varying statistical analyses to correlate outcome in some manner. Yet human intuition hones into the likely outcome. It is a transcendence of the raw-numerical and economic into the human.

For Each Opportunity Taken an Opportunity is Lost

I have so much that I want to share with the world. I want to write like Shakespeare, draw like Duerer, paint like Rembrandt, code like Torvalds, make games like Meier. I recognize that each time I take a moment to write, I'm not putting in work to drawing. Each line of code I write is an hour I do not spend reading for pleasure. My burden is that of the starving peasant during the French Revolution: I cannot have my cake and eat it too.

How can there be so many masterpieces of art? How can there be so many sublime video games? I recognize that there is inestimable craft in each work. I yearn to replicate the artistry in making. Yet when it comes time to make, I am whelmed in apathy! Apathy and complacency. Exhaustion and apathy and complacency.

I could cast blame on my situation, my environment, my surroundings, my upbringing. It would be not necessarily untrue, whatever I may say. But the blame never fixes the real issues.

Within me there is a spark of the Creator. It may be quiet, it may be latent, but it has always been there. It is within you, too, no matter deep within you it lurks. Am I not within my rights to exercise it? It cannot lie still. It yearns, it rumbles, until within you it bursts. Ignorance of this spark is an affront to our nature.

Is it that social media in particular aims to inundate that spark with consumption?

Or is it the nature of time, of capitalism, of society, of hierarchy that we are led to ignore it?

It is here I am paralyzed. It is here where I am inundated with the sedative of content. Intellectually, I am aware of what is happening. I can't seem to get out of the miasma. I suppose the real test of will comes not when we are well-fed and well-rested but when we are aching and exhausted and sad.

Paul was right: the spirit is willing, the flesh weak.