Why do I always feel guilty for spending money?
He spent eleven hours researching flights for a weekend trip.
Opened twenty-three browser tabs. Cleared cookies. Checked Tuesday versus Wednesday. Incognito mode. VPN routing through three different countries. Read the same five tips repackaged in different fonts.
The flight cost the same as it did when he started.
He bought it anyway because the trip was already planned and his friends were waiting for confirmation and at some point the research becomes its own kind of prison.
Afterwards he felt stupid for trying so hard to save forty dollars he would have spent on dinner without thinking twice.
We do this with everything now. Optimise before we experience. Research before we decide. Seventeen comparison tabs open for a purchase we will make regardless because the need is real and the deadline is closing in.
The question is never really whether we can find it cheaper.
The question is what we are avoiding by staying in the research.
There is a strange comfort in the hunt.
As long as we are still looking, we have not committed. As long as we have not committed, we cannot have chosen wrong. The tabs stay open. The decision floats.
We treat frugality like a moral position when sometimes it is just fear dressed up as diligence.
Not always. Sometimes the research matters. Sometimes the forty dollars is the difference between making rent and not. But often. often we know what we are going to do and we perform the optimization theatre anyway because it feels like control.
He knew he would buy the flight. He knew eleven hours before he clicked purchase. What he wanted was not a better price. What he wanted was the feeling that he had done enough to deserve not feeling guilty about spending the money.
Maybe the expensive part is not the ticket. Maybe the expensive part is the eleven hours we spend trying to prove to ourselves that we tried hard enough.
What if we just decided and moved on?
Sit with it for a minute.
When was the last time you spent hours researching something you already knew you would buy? What were you actually optimising for. the price, or the permission to stop feeling bad about wanting it?
If you skipped the research entirely and just made the choice, what would you do with those eleven hours?