Opportunity Cost: On the Lives I Chose Not to Live
In every choice we make, there is always another life we let die.
I don't remember exactly when I first learned about opportunity cost. Somewhere in high school, probably. What I do remember is that when the concept was taught, it felt like someone else's business. The kind of thing relevant to big decisions, the ones still far away and still very abstract.
Turns out you don't need an economics class to understand it. If you live long enough, it will come and explain itself. This is my story, and a few of the lives I've let go.
First one : going abroad for my master's degree.
The decision felt right. Still does, even now. But the opportunity cost was never recorded anywhere except in my own chest.
My mother's face. the first time I came home after months away, looking slightly different, slightly smaller than I remembered. Nothing dramatic. Just something subtle, and painful precisely because of that subtlety. A change I should have witnessed slowly, in real time, instead of finding all at once like opening a chapter I'd missed.
The laughter of old friends, now heard only through Instagram Stories, with a delay that doesn't quite feel like a real delay, and jokes that arrive slightly out of breath from the distance between their mouths and my ears.
I don't regret leaving. But I can't pretend nothing was lost. And somehow, uncomfortable as it is, those two things can occupy the same chest. I think leaving is the easy part. What's hard is everything that keeps happening in the place you left behind.
Everyone goes to Jakarta. It's practically a law of nature for anyone with ambition and a KTP from outside Java. Jakarta is the answer, they say. Jakarta is the place. And for a stretch of time, I almost believed them, but I didn't go.
Not because I wasn't brave enough, or because there was no opportunity. But because I know myself. I know that I am someone whose peace of mind depends heavily on whether she can see a sky that isn't cut off by buildings, on whether she can walk somewhere without feeling like she's competing with everyone on the same sidewalk.
The opportunity cost is a career that might have moved faster. A network that might have stretched wider. A version of me that might have been more ambitious, more visible, more ā something. I don't know exactly, because I didn't go there to find out.
What I do know is that I chose a quieter city. And in that silence, something inside me stayed intact. Something that probably wouldn't have survived if Iād forced it to live at a speed that wasn't its own. Was it the right decision? Depends on who you ask. But it was my decision, and thatās enough.
And finally, the relationship that didn't continue.
It wasnāt for a lack of love. Quite the opposite. It was because of that love that the decision felt so expensive. But some things are just bigger than feelings: different life paths, values that didn't quite meet in the middle, and a honesty that arrived late... but better late than never.
The cost is a version of life that mightāve been warmer in some parts. Someone whoās there, who knows my name in a way no one else ever will. But thereās also a cost to not letting go, and thatās the one thatās harder to calculate because itās made of things that didn't happen: the peace that never came, the direction that stayed blurry, the version of myself that kept negotiating with a choice I already knew the answer to.
Letting go, as it turns out, has its own price tag. And choosing to walk away was one of the most "adult" things Iāve ever done, even if it didn't feel adult at all while I was doing it.
We so often only count what we gain. The credit column is always full, because the brain is a very selective accountant. One that quietly refuses to record the painful expenses. I think a lot of grief doesn't come from failure. It comes from the shadow of the alternative lives we didn't live. From questions with no answers that we ask anyway, in the nights that are a little too quiet:
What if, back then, I had chosen differently?
Time no longer feels like a river running forever. It's changed shape into a finite stack of coins that must be spent with great care. Don't use them today and they're gone. No interest, no cashback, no loyalty points to redeem at the end of the year.
But understanding opportunity cost is not meant to make us regret. It's the opposite. It teaches us to stop choosing carelessly. To stop paying with the most valuable coins we have: time, presence, peace of mind, and ourselves.
This life is a series of losses we chose ourselves. Each of my three big decisions left behind something that can't be taken back. I don't know if they were the right ones. What I know is that they were honest. Made with the best information I had at the time, by a version of me that was trying her best. And I think I'm proud enough of the choices I've made.
