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Curing writer's block with sunk cost fallacy

I paid $20 to renew this blog's domain in July. But the truth is, I had been suffering from writer's block ever since the start of this year and hadn’t posted a single thing. At one point, I was ready to give up on the blog altogether, but a voice in my head kept reminding me of all the time and money I’d already invested in this blog. So, this week, I sat down to write this imperfect, patchy article—about none other than that voice itself. 

Let me start with a classic scenario where you might have also encountered this voice. Suppose you’re at an Italian restaurant and ordered some pasta and tiramisu. After finishing the pasta, you realize you’re full, and there’s no way your stomach can handle that delicious tiramisu sitting right in front of you. But then, that beautiful brain of yours reminds you that you’ll be paying for the tiramisu whether you eat it or not. In a desperate attempt to avoid wasting money, you reluctantly eat two quick bites. And just like that, my friend, you’ve fallen victim to the "sunk cost fallacy." 

The money you paid for that tiramisu was a sunk cost, with no chance of recovering it. So, in theory, it shouldn’t affect whether you eat the tiramisu or toss it in the trash. But in practice, it's not that simple. In fact, if you replace the tiramisu in that story with my blog's domain renewal, you’ll see how this fallacy crept into my thinking. 

Now, let’s say you don’t like Italian food and you're not a big fan of my blog. Are you safe from the sunk cost fallacy? Not really. Sunk costs are all around you. Sure, you can spot the obvious cases—like if I told you I lost a million dollars in a Ponzi scheme and now I’m heading to Vegas to gamble another million to recover my losses. But what about the less obvious, harder-to-spot cases? One such situation cost the British and French governments billions in investment. 

So far, I’ve made this fallacy seem like a purely negative thing. But I can also put a positive spin on it by sharing countless personal examples where it helped me stick to hard commitments. One such example is from a year ago when I spent $100 on new running shoes, which motivated me to run daily for almost a month. Had I not bought those shoes, I probably would have quit after just three days. Or take a more famous example - NASA, after the sunk costs of Apollo 1, could have abandoned their goal of landing humans on the moon. But they pressed on, and history witnessed the success of Apollo 11.

There’s a lot of nuance tied to this fallacy in our thinking, and I doubt I’ll fully grasp it in my lifetime, let alone summarize it in one article. So, ignoring expert advice that better decision-making requires not letting sunk costs influence our choices, I’ll let my $20 investment in this domain renewal dictate my decision to keep writing on this blog.

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