Killing your darlings
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> Our second biggest cost is taxes, and our biggest cost is opportunity cost.

~ [Attributed to Larry Page](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jeff-dean-and-noam-shazeer)

Larry Page and Noam Shazeer both obsess over opportunity cost. It's the cost that matters most when evaluating policies, personal or public ones.

Here's the problem: opportunity cost is invisible. The counterfactual, by definition, doesn't exist, so you never see it. Kahneman calls this ["what you see is all there is"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Optimism_and_loss_aversion).

A solution to this ocular blind spot in your personal life is deciding against doing the thing *you really want* to do.
You kill your darling.
You will be super conscious of what you left on the table, the counterfactual becomes clear, and you actually take all the other options more seriously.