Ryan Phillippe, hard cider and sunk costs

There is no reason for this image to be here other than it cracks me up

The other night Jake was bottling hard pear cider in the designated brew room and I heard him exclaim, “Blugh! This cider tastes like crap.”

I went over to check out what he was doing.  He looked at me with a tortured expression and thrust a bottle in my face. “Here, drink this.”

“Um, isn’t that a little like you telling me to ‘smell your finger?’” I asked. “No thanks.”

“I don’t know what happened,” he remarked, taking another long draw. “But it tastes awful.”

“Then why do you keep drinking it?” I asked. I noticed a long row of capped bottles on the counter. “And more importantly, why do you keep bottling it?”

“Because I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in this cider, babe,” he said as he capped another bottle. “I climbed the tree to pick the pears. Friends helped me pick them.  It took a long time to juice them. I carried 30 pounds of peels to feed to the chickens. I’ve been monitoring and fermenting the juice since November.  I can’t toss it now.”

“Even though you know the cider sucks?” I asked. “Sounds like a sunk cost to me.”

Sunk costs sometimes cause people to make bad choices. Because we’ve already invested so much time, effort or money in a particular endeavor — be it in the stock market, a job, a relationship, or, in Jake’s case, forcing himself to bottle sucky cider — we have a tendency to stick with that choice, even though switching courses may be more beneficial to us in the long run since it frees us up to make better choices instead.  Think of the investor who refuses to dump an abysmally performing stock even though all signs point to a continued decline in its market value. Or slogging through a book or a movie you actually hate because giving up is a validation of all that wasted time and effort.

I remembered a few months ago, Jake and I were watching the actor Ryan Phillippe bastardize a Dutch accent in a sucky film called Five Fingers on Netflix, and about a half hour into it, I looked at Jake and said, “This movie is a sunk cost. I’m going to bed. I’ll get more satisfaction from leafing through a Land’s End catalog. Care to join?”

“Nope,” he said. “I started Five Fingers, I’m gonna finish it.”

“Even though we both know you hate it as much as I do?”

“Yep.”

As I lay in bed that night, I was secretly pleased with myself for having made the hard choice to cut my losses, to nullify my irritation over watching Ryan Phillippe try to act for the more serene pleasure of perusing crewneck shift dresses in a Land’s End catalog. I felt like a prudent investor. Jake, meanwhile, seemed like an irrational, overly emotionally invested one.

I mentioned this episode as Jake bottled the sucky cider, and reminded him that when he did finally climb into bed at 1 a.m. that night, he himself admitted the movie was a waste of time.

“Don’t you think that bottling this cider is a little like watching Five Fingers?”

“Maybe, but the problem with your sunk cost theory is that it makes a person a fair weather friend,” he said. “A sunk cost person gives up. When things don’t go as planned, a sunk cost person bails. That’s not a good strategy for success.”

“Drinking cider that tastes like donkey piss isn’t a good strategy for success either,” I said. “Some goes for enduring Ryan Phillippe for two hours. You could make the decision to dump this cider down the drain right now and allocate your time and energy and resources toward making a fresh batch that tastes better.”

“But I can’t waste all those pears,” he said. “Goes against my nature.”

“So…by the same logic….are you saying that you’d stay in a bad relationship even though the relationship left you with nothing but a bad taste in your mouth?”

“Yep,” he said. “I don’t give up when the going gets tough.”

“But isn’t that also a little disingenuous?” I asked. “You end up not being 100 percent true to your own feelings, or the other person’s.”

“But I’d never leave you, hon.”

“Even though you might be totally miserable inside?”

“We’d work through it.”

The conversation was getting too hypothetically deep for my liking, so I let the matter drop.  But it made me wonder — is it really better to pour the proverbial cider down the drain, or force oneself to drink it, like Jake?  Which act is more sincere?