Costs :: 074
What's the Cost?
January is a hangover.
It starts in a daze, a disheveled mess. Sometimes takes the full month to really get momentum and energy. I'm specifically thinking of two major consequences of the holiday season: being unroutined and holiday shopping.
First, I'm coming off almost two weeks of being unroutined, sitting in pajamas and eating poorly all day. I'm still trying to find the rhythm of the year and the cadence of my old routine, made new for 2025. I'm starting to step into new goals and intentions.
Whatever sort of vision or resolution or intention I have for the year, it's happening.
We're all in it now.
Second, I'm looking around at all this stuff we bought in the last two months. And it's making me think of the accumulation of stuff. I'm noticing that we pay for that stuff twice. Once is obviously the financial cost to acquire the item. But the second cost is time. Simply buying the membership to the gym or the class or therapy is not going to get me the benefit. I have show up and put in effort.
This month, I am thinking about costs.
Literally, the definition of a cost is the expenditure required to achieve a goal.
What will it take to achieve those big goals this year? Financially, sure. But also time. Who are the people that will be involved to support and challenge the process? What are the resources required and the sacrifices that will be made?
Even bigger than that, I'm using costs as the lens I look at other big events this month: the fires in LA, the inauguration and the first executive orders, ceasefire and hostage deal in the middle east, Tik Tok ban, and of course the return of the Bachelor (kidding).
Grab a Gatorade and some aspirin. January's almost over.
Let's talk about costs.
Quote by Aja Barber for The Slow Factory
Who's Paying for That?
I don't want to pay for camp.
I'm putting off paying our landscapers.
I certainly don't want to pay for our kitchen renovation.
So I won't.
...well, not exactly.
A mentor of mine introduced me to a new idea he calls "Who's paying for that?"
It can often feel like we're at the mercy of other people to determine our workload and payments. Especially as an entrepreneur or freelancer which I've been for the last 9 years.
But one way to feel in control is to consider tying a client or project to an expense.
I'd love to go on a trip this year.
Can I find a new client to pay for that?
I really want a new guitar for my birthday.
Can I pitch a project and get it paid for?
I kinda need a new computer.
Could I put in some overtime and bill my hours to cover it?
In a world where everything feels bigger than us, feeling in control matters.
The Cost of Getting More Experienced
I remember the worst night of sleep of my life. (Ok, the worst night of sleep pre-kids.)
Exactly 10 years ago, January 2015, Lauren and were traveling and decided that for one night we'd save some money and stay in a hostel. We'd had great experiences in hostels meeting people from all over the world. But this night was different. We stayed in an 8-person room and had a 4am flight to catch. So by 8 or 9pm we were in bed. Every half hour, someone would come into the room to get something from a bags, change clothes to go out, or come home from a night out. And then, of course, the red eye.
That was the last night I ever stayed in a hostel.
That was the last red eye.
They're just not worth the cost savings anymore.
As we get older, we get more experienced.
And the more we experience the more we redefine what we like and don't like.
And the counterintuitive truth is:
Experience narrows our taste.
It feels backwards, perhaps. I travel so that my experience of culture expands. I try new foods to broaden my palette. I befriend diverse people to open my capacity for empathy. But I think actually the opposite happens.
With more experience, we learn more about ourselves. And with every new thing we try, person we meet, job we hold, we learn what we like and don't like. We learn what works better for us.
I'm at a place in my career where my 20 years of experience actually limits me. I'm not open to all possible jobs now. In fact, not many roles are a good fit. It has to be pretty specific.
The cost of becoming more experienced is narrowing my definition of what I like.
Experience has taught me I'm not interested in everything.
I can't go everywhere and probably wouldn't like many places.
And I don't need everyone to like me.
...that's probably for the best.
Because I don't like everyone anyway.
Subscribe To Your Life
I was cleaning out my old hard drive when I found a folder that surprised me: "iTunes", 79GB.
From high school into my late 20s, I ripped every CD I owned and hundreds of albums I bought into my iTunes library. There were close to 25,000 songs. Most of which I will never hear again.
I don't listen to music that way any more.
Sure, I have records and I listen to those.
But I get my music from a subscription. I pay to get access to an enormous library of songs and I can listen to anything whenever I want. And yet, I kinda listen to the same 5-10 artists or albums.
I used to pay for a trainer. And a gym. Now I have a subscription to Peloton.
I used to have cable and DVDs. Now I have a Netflix subscription.
If we connect some of the dots, the future seems to be subscription-based.
Every product becomes a service. We won't actually own anything.
We already lease our cars and rent our apartments. Perhaps in the future we'd rent the appliances that come with maintenance and upgrades like we do with our phones. Maybe we should be renting our furniture too. Swap out those table and chairs whenever you want to redecorate. We don't need to buy clothes because we could subscribe to have an infinite closet. Rent the Runway already exists. What would a grocery subscription look like–more like Amazon Fresh or Costco?
It might be nice to be moving towards a world where we subscribe to everything. But certainly there is a cost. What happens when we cancel? What happens to all those Peloton bikes when membership has lapsed? What happens to our phones and accessories when we no longer want the service? What happens to all the clothes that never get worn? What happens when we can’t access the things we bought? Paying for services often mean giving up autonomy. Or at least some privacy. More convenience often means more waste.
In a subscription-based world, the cost to sign up is only the entry to play by someone else’s rules.
[Subscribe To The Future Now] [Unsubscribe Here]
The Cost of Efficiency
A friend and I are texting when he writes "It's been a rough week." I hold my finger on the message until the emojis pop up and I select "thumbs down."
In the last decade, technology has been designed to make things easier for us. Actually, that's the case for nearly all technology for all time. It makes things easier– everything from the wheel to the telephone.
But in the last decade, new technology creates shortcuts that I don't believe are good for us.
Giving a message a thumbs down is not the same thing as saying "I'm so sorry, that sounds rough. I'm here for you." Not by a long shot. That's an obvious example.
But what about the ease of sending you my calendly? Pick a time that works for you. Done. But it takes the humanness out of trying to connect with one another. Apps like this also assume we're all *so* busy and important that finding a window to meet for coffee is too hard or not worth the back-and-forth.
We can tout AI as being helpful for idea generation or content creation, but when ChatGPT is writing every cover letter, and Grammerly is editing every email, how much personality is lost? (For example, I love parenthetical asides, but they're not always grammatically correct. Putting my voice through AI sands off the edges and waters it down.) (I also love mixing metaphors.)
There's music suggestions served to us based on what we've listened to in the past. Instead of reading, talking to people, record store hunting, and then discovering new music on our own.
The cost of our technology shortcuts is being disembodied. Book time with this tool. Read this email my bot wrote. Here's the emotion my phone offered as a reaction.
I'm hoping that amidst a tsunami of disembodying and time-shortcutting technology, that we also find comfort in inefficient interactions. Every meandering conversation, random "this makes me think of that time" story, and "I was just thinking of you" message is the opposite of taking a short cut. Real human connection is not efficient. Building relationships are ONLY friction.
Here's to a year (and maybe even a life) ahead of taking the long cut.
________
Thanks for taking the time today to be with me.
If you have reflections or thoughts, just reply.
Your thoughts are worth sharing and reading.
I'm cost-conscious, but not penny-pinching.
Refrigeyalater,
Jake
Oh hey, me again. 3 more quick things:
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The Email Refrigerator is a monthly delivery of essays, poetry, imagery, and thoughts, written and curated by Jake Kahana. Why a refrigerator? Well, it's where we look for snacks, a little freshness, and where we hang the latest, greatest work. And besides, "newsletter" sounds like spam.