One of the concepts that really stuck with me years after taking a class in macroeconomics is the idea of opportunity cost. In many ways, nothing is more speculative and counterfactual in economics—two words that have my literary brand all over it—than the question of opportunity cost. This is essentially the cost of not being able to do one thing because you chose to do another. The original idea applies to things like capital allocation. As in, if you had a $1,000 to invest and you decided to invest all of it in shares of Apple (ticker symbol: APPL), then the opportunity cost is that you wouldn’t be able to invest those funds in another stock/ETF/money market account at the same time, even if they might be hotter, have better fundamentals, management, momentum, appreciate faster, and/or have a better return. In economics, opportunity cost assumes finite resources (both time and money) in a zero-sum game where you can make one choice or another but not both. IOW, opportunity costs are necessarily binary by nature.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the opportunity costs of media consumption as an artist. I spent years doomscrolling through TikTok during and after the pandemic as a coping mechanism mostly but also as a way to navigate anxiety, absurdity, & uncertainty. For that reason and many others, I would never criticize anyone for posting pics on IG every day or zipping through their social media timelines or watching UGC (user generated content) online since much of it is funny, moving, infuriating, cute, smart, & culturally informative.
At the same time, I’d argue that as an artist, I have a lot more to lose than non-artists when I spend too much time consuming other people’s content: I risk losing my own art. I risk never creating it.
Obviously, no one can write all day and no one can work all day either. That’s pretty clear. But for many people, it isn’t a big opportunity cost to be on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok for 10 hours a night. Sure, they might forget to eat and there might be dog pee on the carpet left in protest and it’s possible they might go to bed late and not get enough sleep (or sleep like shit with images of floating chihuahuas and Asian couples saying “We’re Asians, of course we play the piano,”), but overall the opportunity cost is small or non-existent for most people because there isn’t anything else they would have done differently. But for people who create original artwork, writing, music, thought creation, content creation, digital products, & entrepreneurial projects, for example, spending 10 hours a night on TikTok pretty much means they’re not creating. They’re only consuming.
And while consuming content, whether in the form of movies, books, museums, traveling, talking with friends, doing research, or yes, scrolling through your social media accounts, can all be important, entertaining, & nourishing to the human psyche and inspiring to the artistic mind, the opportunity cost of consuming too much content can actually lead to the destruction of our own art because there’s only so much time in the day. Consume too much and we can’t create enough. It’s as simple as that.
It doesn’t have to be that way, obviously, and it shouldn’t be that way if we can help it. But some people can’t take control of their content consumption and that’s by algorithmic design. You’re not supposed to control yourself. Timelines are created so that you lose track of time. Algorithms are created to establish a rat-pellet-button cycle where swiping becomes the dopamine rush. That’s fine for typical consumers who might want to reward themselves after working all day or tolerating their moochy in-laws during the holidays or breaking their backs in a construction zone or teaching uncooperative college students how to do scholarly research, but this can annihilate potential art for creators. Looking back over the past couple years, I’m haunted by all the creative work I didn’t create, all the books I didn’t write, all the post-rock/electronic music I didn’t write. It’s possible that one of those creative works might have changed the course of my life in some small but significant way. It’s also possible it might not have. But the point is I’ll never know now because that work was never created while I swiped my phone like a brain-dead consumer for months.
To be fair, I was burnt out last year after promoting and project managing three books, creating and executing my own marketing campaign, & going on a limited book tour. All in the course of 10 months. But at some point, my recharge period became an idle period and I just continued to do nothing but work on this newsletter, play Cyberpunk 2077, grow my investment and retirement portfolios, & flick up on TikTok for hours and hours in the bathtub.
I’m haunted by work I never wrote. I try to live my life without regret since I normally try to make the best decisions I can based on the best available information at the time, but this is one area where I’m all contrition and counterfactuality.
Fortunately for me, I’m in the process of doing major edits for my next novel (which I’ve renamed Dizzie & Moto) that I started 10 years ago, added 50 pages to back in 2016 for my then agent, & then pretty much ignored for 8 whole years until I suddenly figured out one night in bed where the plot structure was stuck and where it needed to go. That was two months ago. Two! Now I’m done with the novel and I’m in the hard revision process. I could have easily not finished this book with all of my social media consumption but now it’s one of my favorites. I could have easily wasted endless hours on IG, YouTube, & TikTok like I used to, and I’d be in the exact same place I was two months without a finished manuscript in sight. But as I placed harder rules on my own media consumption and finally discovered where my novel truly needed to go, I literally doubled the novel’s length in 2 months and this shit is good if I may say so myself. So good.
At the end of the day, I have to remember to center my own artistic production and de-center my media content consumption if I want to have the kind of prolific writing career I’ve been striving for for the past 20 years. It’s the only way I’m going to get shit done. It’s the only way I’m going to become the author I need to be now and in the future.