your second largest cost is taxes, largest is opportunity cost

time is money. is this statement true? maybe. what would i change it to? time is the root currency. everything else are derivatives. the difference is that the value of time is highly volatile. depending on the things that you do is what gives that time worth. since the current state of our knowledge limits us to a finite set of years alive, we are given limited time which we are meant to put value to. we face day to day decisions that impact this value of our time. most of these require attention and an evaluation of a multitude of options. what is overlooked? the importance of making the best decision available.

loss aversion is one strategy that our brain employs that hinders our decision making. our mind feels the pain of a loss greater than the pleasure of an equivalent gain. it makes us avoid losses more than desire wins. it skews our ability to pay more attention to the cost of an investment rather than the benefits that it provides.

since the future is unknown and the further you look into it, the less obvious things become, we tend to choose immediate or short term gains over the long term gains. we use a greedy algorithm to find what is immediately the best decision hoping that it will result in the optimal long term decision but hoping is flawed.

society, inevitably, has a high impact on the decision making of people. they impact what we choose to value and push our decision making to some order. essentially, they remove a lot of our creativity and push on a lot of limits. society pushes us to do good for society over oneself. does this mean to follow that social law and sacrifice your happiness and potential for others? maybe, maybe not.

now, when it comes to figuring out all of your options for the current decision, the vast amount of options can result in cognitive overload. we choose to ignore the opportunity cost of the decision not made to simplify decision making. it is unrealistic to believe that one must calculate absolutely everything for a specific decision, but making it too simple lacks proper thought.

there are many of us that are too comfortable in our current position to choose the optimal path. we are scared of change or are satisfied with less and therefore we aren’t convinced to make the necessary change. in our current job we either don’t want to change our routine, are scared to go through the job seeking phase, or make enough money.