Opportunity Cost

I took a trip to Boston to see some old friends this past weekend. We had a lovely time, but events at each end of the trip festered in my mind to the point that I found myself lecturing over them in the middle of a long walk. Do you ever wind up talking to yourself because something unexpected just happens to matter to you? Though it feels strange, I like to think back to Matthew McConaughey’s interview where he urged Tim Ferris’s listeners not only to talk to themselves, but to engage with the seemingly involuntary ideas and questions that come across. Having done so, I welcomed the lecture. I’ve repackaged it in the first person for ease of reading. Here it is:

I’m visiting some friends I hadn’t seen in about two years. We arrive on Friday evening for our two-night stay. I’m traveling with my wife. It’s the first time she’ll have the pleasure of meeting these fellas. We check in to our room and head to the first rendezvous at a friend of mine’s house. We enter to a surprisingly calm vibe. We must be early. Greetings brighten the mood and I’m quickly made privy to the sad reality that an expected member of this weekend’s team has missed their flight. My friend Dave had planned to pick them up at the airport before they arrived so that we could head to the next rally point in about an hour. Our plans are resting on this time constraint and the night isn’t horribly young. No matter. The soldier that’s fallen back will have to meet us out and play catch up. We seem to have consensus on the matter with one exception, Dave. He can’t seem to stop grappling with decisions. He keeps asking for second opinions, claiming it might make sense for him to hold up his end of the bargain and drive out to the airport, cutting much deeper into his night than he had originally planned for.

I’m kind of just a passenger for all this. I didn’t add much to the discussion, but I was listening in utter disbelief. My perspective was this; I’d just been reunited with some old friends and begun a weekend that would close out Sunday afternoon. If this were an equation, time would be a constant. There are endless variables that could affect the experience between then and now, but none of them will affect how much time remains in the trip. From where I’m standing, Dave is contemplating spending a couple hours in his car while turning his back to the scarcity of time that’s right before him. Granted, the variables are rather distracting. Dave could’ve been thinking it’s the right thing to do to keep his promise and give our buddy a ride. It’s one thing to see scarcity in a finite span of time, but he could’ve perceived abundance considering the weekend had seemingly just begun. Maybe he just didn’t want our other friend to miss out. That said, I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so confused in that moment. It was only in reflection that I realized the opportunity cost of losing two precious hours together was daunting to me.

I’ll admit that I must’ve discarded the definition of opportunity cost about seven years ago after my macroeconomics final. Luckily, a conversation I was having after our weekend excursion made it click for me without boring definitions. In the context of my last anecdote, opportunity cost is the price Dave would pay if he chose to go to the airport, while he would have been free to seek other opportunities if he hadn’t. The term ‘price’ is a misnomer here, as there isn’t much money involved. From my perspective, the true cost was resting on the fact that we were already together in that moment. If Dave were to forgo that moment to sit in traffic instead, he’d miss the opportunity to reconnect and enjoy each other’s company until he returned.

The second pillar of the dilemma materialized as the trip was coming to an end. My wife was already on a flight home. She went back to be with our dog while I stayed an extra week to spend time to my parents. It’s Sunday morning, and I’ll be leaving Boston to return my mom’s car in a few hours. I meet up with three of my friends for the last time of the trip. Two of the same blokes from the previous story and one other. We’re on foot to go get some breakfast. I had split from the crew around 2AM the night before and unfortunately, I forgot something at the bar. A hoodie. An old one that I keep at my parents’ just so I have something to wear when I’m visiting. A had texted everyone from my Uber and asked that they collect the hoodie since they were still at the bar. Didn’t get a response, but I didn’t sweat it. While we’re on our way to the diner I mention the hoodie and Dave tells me they couldn’t find it. Some will say I’m grasping at straws, but I believe the events of Friday night had tuned my mind to the trend of opportunity cost, leaving me at an increased vulnerability to the conundrum I’m about to describe.

What Dave said next was that we could go back to the bar and look for the sweatshirt. I was silent. I must’ve looked back at him like he had told me he killed Kennedy, because the two others started to chuckle after a pause. I’m known for the occasional deadpan, so no one thought much of it, but I couldn’t come up with a response for the life of me. Eventually, I was able to muster something along the lines of, “no, man”. That was the end of it. It wasn’t until several days later that I was able to derive the nature of my disbelief. On a long walk through my hometown, I finally realized that the culprit was, once again, opportunity cost. Again, I’ll share my perspective. This was practically my greeting on the last leg of a great trip with guys I love and missed. It was known that my wife would leave early that morning, so all along I had planned for that breakfast to be the only time I’d enjoy their company without her. Quite a unique dynamic. This is true scarcity. To think that I might consider driving to a different part of the city to look under furniture for an old hoodie literally broke my brain. With only a couple hours left in a weekend with friends I may not see for another year, I wouldn’t trade that time for gold, let alone a sweatshirt.

I’m well aware I’m being dramatic, and these were not the intense situations I’ve depicted them as in this post. They were quite sober in the moment, but something was nagging me to think twice about them. The lingering discomfort was nudging me to uncover the lesson buried beneath. And in the midst of a brisk walk through wooded New England back roads, that lesson burst through my brain in the form of a belligerent scolding. The original currier must have been my ego, because I remember marveling over how smart I would sound delivering this lecture to Dave and my wide-eyed friends in the same moments I described to you. This misses the point. What happened at either end of that weekend wasn’t a missed opportunity to champion someone Dave's faulty logic. It was a gained opportunity to derive meaning from real feelings. Whether those feelings are selfish, emotional, or illogical, they are what make us act. The fact that the opportunity cost wasn't obvious to Dave or me in the moment proves it's not the most intuitive concept and probably deserves special attention when making decisions. Whether it's a weekend with your friends or the eighteen summers you have with your child, time is always a constraint. We all stand to enrich our lives by treating it as such.

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