Colm O'Regan: My New Year's resolution is to quit while I'm ahead

Colm O'Regan explains the Sunk Cost Fallacy and wonders why we're obsessed with completion
Colm O'Regan: My New Year's resolution is to quit while I'm ahead

Roger Kenny Photography Actor Head Shots www.rogerkenny.ie

A New Year’s Resolution. Sure you haven’t finished the OLD Year’s one yet. Isn’t that kind of what we say to children as they gambol blissfully through life? Gadding from one task to another. The trail of things on the floor behind them telling both the direction of travel and what they were doing when they changed their mind and did something else. They don’t appear to give a shite about unfinishedness, and I envy that. They have no hang ups about just ‘doing a different thing.’

Whereas we adults are often obsessed with completion. That’s that closed off now. Boxed off. We have a suite of snarky phrases and side-eye for those who don’t complete: “oh shur that didn’t last” / “He gave that up” / “She can’t stick at anything.” / “That went nowhere.” / “A pure waster.”

Now, you can only tolerate a few of those people in your lives too. But still, sometimes it’s good not to finish a thing.

We pride ourselves on not being quitters. but sometimes we just hang on too long. There’s a thing called the Sunk Cost Fallacy. It's when you persist with something because you’ve spent a lot of time/effort/money on it already. If you quit, all of that time/effort/money is wasted. Even if spending any more time/effort/money is not enjoyable or good for you.

It can manifest in a traffic jam where you don’t know whether you’d be better off turning around. The longer you wait, the more you feel you should wait longer. And then when you get there you’re shouting: “LOOKIT WE’RE HERE NOW AND SO CAN EVERY PLEASE JUST START HAVING A NICE TIME ALRIGHT?!”.

From a career point of view, luckily because I’m self-employed, most of my quit-decisions are made for me by others. (Usually because they are jealous and fail to recognise my genius). But I still suffer from the Sunk Cost Fallacy in so-called leisure time.

Leisure has become so listified. Bucket lists, things you must see/read/watch before you die. Every week the Irish Times has a list of 18/23/26/35 new TV series to watch this week. Series? This WEEK?

I remember when you knew in advance the month that A-Team was coming back. And in the meantime, you’d have to make do with Highway to Heaven. Now I have ‘Continue Watching For Colm’ lists across Netflix, Disney Plus, RTE Player (when the wind is favourable) which reads like a Wikipedia Page of ‘Emmy Series Winners since 2010’.

Book-lovers flagellate themselves on social media with the To-Be-Read pile. And I’m right there with them. The completion of one book gives me licence to get five more out from the library. I’m Rumpelstiltskin-ing myself with larger and larger barns of straw to be spun.

It’s a pity because it can be quite liberating to just quit. Years ago my wife and I were in Florence on a thing which used to be known in them days as a ‘Foreign Holiday’. We had tickets for the Uffizi Gallery but there was a strike that day and the queues weren’t moving. According to all the websites, the Uffizi is the ‘one thing you can’t skip when you’re in Florence’. Yet after a while, we looked at each other and simultaneously feck it, (except with a U), sold our tickets and walked away without turning back. Like Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek walking away from an explosion. Botticelli’s Venus was going to have to shag off back to her shell. There were no regrets.

So this year my New Year’s resolution is going to be simple. Nothing so ambitious as ‘being more kind to Colm’. That fella? No way. He needs to EARN that kindness. And he can start by stopping.

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