My laptop is old. When I load it up it’s whirring and it’s wheezing makes a supersonic jet plane taking off sound quiet. And still every night I crank the old thing up and do my work. Eventually. It takes a while.
The other night I was obviously quite animated as I waited for the screen to appear. It was loading, I’m sure of that. Mrs Baggins at number 44 could have told me that.
The noise. My tapping foot. The occasional frustrated looks I gave towards my wife as she turned the volume up on Corrie. 20 minutes. 30 minutes. I waited.
Eventually my wife said,’The boys have got their Chrome book that you can use to do your work.’
I knew that. I knew it before I opened the laptop up that evening and I’ve know it since Christmas day when Santa had left them it. But I have fallen for an old psychological trick. And even though I know it, I’m sure to be winding up my old cronk of a machine instead of their new sparkly Chrome book tonight. And I probably will until it gulps it’s last bellowing breath.
I have invested so much time on my laptop which has my emails, passwords, data, downloads, files and pictures on there that I am refusing to let go, even though I know that this can be created and transferred onto a newer model. And when my wife said that I could use the Chrome book, I didn’t want to feel like I had lost 40 minutes of my life just to start again on a different device so I stubbornly carried on.
Economists call this The Sunk Cost fallacy. Because of what has already been invested into a project, one fails to stop and cut ones losses and proceeds regardless wasting more money. And in my case energy and time.
In 1956 the UK and France decided to build a supersonic jet. They called it the Concorde Project. After hundreds of millions of tax payers money and wasted time and effort they eventually built The Concorde. They knew long before it finally took off in 1973 that they would never recover their losses. It became one of the biggest financial misadventures of the 20th Century. Yet they continued to build it. Its final flight was in 2013 and remained millions of pounds in debt.
We all fall for this trap. We remain in jobs that we are undervalued in because it is what we have done for years. We stay in relationships that are toxic because we become numb to it. We live in a town that we hate because our parents and grandparents lived there and it’s where our crappy jobs are and our toxic ‘friends’ are. We have invested so much time, energy and money into something so much so that we fear just letting it go.
And one thing that I see, day upon day, are gym goers falling into the same fallacy. Burt sits on the Arm Pedal bike each day because he has done it for the past 3 years. Terry rocks in the ab machine each day and why? You’ve guessed it, he’s done it for years. He has invested years in getting a six pack. It won’t happen on that machine but if I can be stubborn enough to crank my machine up every night and governments can be wasteful enough to crank their machine up why can’t Terry sit on his machine?!
When we invest so heavily in something, we find it difficult to let go. Even when we know it is wrong, wasteful, dangerous or counter productive. We will spend hours in the gym each week doing the same thing as we were doing 5 years ago. The same class. Same weights. Same reps. Same machines.
I can offer an alternative to the gym goer, much like my wife offered an alternative to my failing laptop, but the sunk cost fallacy is a psychological burden for even the most determined and logical of people. I can get Burt where he wants to be in 6 months, but he’ll still be arm pedalling in 6 years. And he’s probably been conditioned to believe that it will work.
Why?
Because just like my laptop tells me to ‘wait one moment’…
And like the UK and French governments were told by the Supersonic Aircraft Committee that they would ‘revolutionize’ how we fly…
Burt was probably told by a professional to sit on that and pedal for an hour while they took his money and did fuck all.
And because of the time and effort he has already wasted, there’s no chance he’s giving up now.
Never Give Up PT 