If you have 10 kinda good options and are suffering separately from the 9 things that did not get done that surely is a problem. But I don’t think what is normally implied by opportunity cost has that pattern.
If you are doing something awesome and you get the option to use the same time to do something less awesome I think it would be proper to feel like passing up an opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot rather than letting money lay on a random small street.
I know it is rather not a proper thing but consider “the opportunity cost of opportunity cost”: in order to do that other thing you need to stop doing the good things you are already doing. Asking “Is it worth it to clean a street” feels different than asking “Should I stop putting out this fire in order to clean streets?” . So there are no free lunches, even if it feels like it you need to trade-in your existing lunch. If you are choosing from a menu of 10 dishes it is not like you are recieving 10 plates of food at the moment. So you are not losing the 9 because you never were having them. At most the cost of bad choice is how much the options vary. Dealing with options that are of value 0.7 and 1.0 but you don’t now which is which is limited to suck only at 0.3. If you feel negative to the extent of 0.7 something is going overboard.
Opportunity cost properly points to different thing. If your investment only makes what you have interest rates would have made you, it was ambivalent whether you should have ventured into it. If your company makes a bit above and you restructure and hit the same level that is not an improvement. Having more inferior investements you could have ventured or improvements you could have tried does not make the opportunity cost go up (it does not measure “the value of everything missed” but “value of missing everything”).
If you have 10 kinda good options and are suffering separately from the 9 things that did not get done that surely is a problem. But I don’t think what is normally implied by opportunity cost has that pattern.
If you are doing something awesome and you get the option to use the same time to do something less awesome I think it would be proper to feel like passing up an opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot rather than letting money lay on a random small street.
I know it is rather not a proper thing but consider “the opportunity cost of opportunity cost”: in order to do that other thing you need to stop doing the good things you are already doing. Asking “Is it worth it to clean a street” feels different than asking “Should I stop putting out this fire in order to clean streets?” . So there are no free lunches, even if it feels like it you need to trade-in your existing lunch. If you are choosing from a menu of 10 dishes it is not like you are recieving 10 plates of food at the moment. So you are not losing the 9 because you never were having them. At most the cost of bad choice is how much the options vary. Dealing with options that are of value 0.7 and 1.0 but you don’t now which is which is limited to suck only at 0.3. If you feel negative to the extent of 0.7 something is going overboard.
Opportunity cost properly points to different thing. If your investment only makes what you have interest rates would have made you, it was ambivalent whether you should have ventured into it. If your company makes a bit above and you restructure and hit the same level that is not an improvement. Having more inferior investements you could have ventured or improvements you could have tried does not make the opportunity cost go up (it does not measure “the value of everything missed” but “value of missing everything”).