Intellectual Diets and Opportunity Cost - an Argument for the Scrupulous Reader

Economists - or those economically inclined - often speak of the concept of Opportunity Cost; that is, the value of the thing that you could have had if you didn't choose the thing that you just did. It's the value of your foregone alternatives, and, if you're speaking of economic predictions around a coffee table with your erudite and fiscally minded kin, perhaps the concept fits neatly into the picture. The thing is, we wouldn't usually apply this notion when choosing what we click on when browsing Facebook, or whilst looking up new links to enjoy, or even in the kinds of books that we read. But we should.

Economics, and the idea of Opportunity Cost, is really concerned with the study of choice and deciding on the best decisions to make in order to maximise whatever outcome we're looking for. This means that such notions can and should be used when we consider the choices that we make on a day to day basis. Here, I'm going to argue as to why it's so important to be scrupulous in terms of the things that you're reading and why you should be planning what content you consume on a daily and weekly basis.

Story Time
When we think of 'reading', a traditional view might include some bespectacled man dissolving into a couch by the fire with a fine leather-bound hardcover in his hands, leisurely perusing throughout the night, or perhaps a schoolgirl languishingly flicking through a prescribed text, waiting for it to be all over. Perhaps we're reading the latest eBook release on our eReader for a sustained period of time. But do we consider the mindless link-clicking that we do on our ever-shrinking portable devices as reading? I don't mean just 'reading' in the sense of looking at a word and understanding what it means, but reading as in consciously and deliberately choosing particular content to consume and mentally engage with.

I would argue that the mindless browsing so many of us fall victim to is reading - to a degree. The Facebook posts that we scroll through when we're avoiding writing our next essay, the links on Reddit or 9Gag or Lifehacker or any one of the myriad of sites on the internet that so many of us simply default to when logging on, the browsing on various clickbait-y news websites that we use to simply pass the time? During that particular moment when we've decided to click on whatever's distracting us, are consciously and deliberately acting. But not enough.

Reading Onions
But let us take a step back and examine what has happened. A hypothetical situation here is the young adult who's hopped onto a train and, finding the receding scenery unengaging, decides to pull out their phone and flick through the ticker tape of unwanted personal opinions before finding a news story that promises a healthy deal of righteousness and injustice. They then decide to read the title and perhaps even the first paragraph. At a microscopic level, we can argue that our young citizen here has indeed been deliberate in their choice of content - out of the suggested links that his internet platform, in this case Facebook, has offered, they've made a choice of one of them. However, look at the situation from afar and we must begin to ask some questions. Before they hopped onto the train, did they consciously decide that they would jump onto Facebook along the duration of the ride in order to find something to entertain them? Did our young man or woman contemplate the options available to her in terms of the content that was available, and make a choice? Or was it more of an automatic, reflexive reaction: the same kind that babies show when you put a bottle (stimulus) to their mouth, and they suck (response)? A baby wouldn't usually contemplate their choices when offered milk, and all too often we don't demonstrate our discretionary ability when we pick up our phones and mindlessly browse the net (response) if we find ourselves in situations that happen to be unplanned and boring (stimulus).


Reserve Bank of Time
Let us contemplate then. Consider a week, then remove all the time we (actually) spend doing activities that both require most of our attention, are necessary for survival, and preclude distraction such as reading, be this work, household chores, activities of daily living, sleeping, etc. What's left is time for entertainment, hobbies, social activities, and what have you. Out of what's left, consider the time that you spend doing any form of reading - deliberate or not. For most of us, it probably isn't an expansive amount of time.

Now consider what content you actually want to consume. Consider this: if you could have a gastronomical tour of the world in a year, what would you want to eat? You'd only have a limited amount of time in the year to travel, eat, and appreciate your food, and there would be an almost unlimited amount of different foodstuffs littered around the world for you to try to sample. In a situation like this, the decision-making process is rather simple: research and find what your favourite foods are and then find a way to get to the place that offers it and then consume it, before moving to the next. You, however, will know that if you choose to spend all your time in South Korea sampling their food, you won't have any time left to sample the rest of the world's food.

Our reading diets are much the same - there is only a limited amount of time that we have each week, month, or year to read. Have we considered our end goals in terms of what we read? Is it to be more informed? To be entertained? To absorb more knowledge about different facets of the world? To keep up to date with the latest news? Every book we read means that we could have spent that time reading something else. Every time we mindlessly browse, we could have spent that time consuming literary foodstuffs that bring us closer to what our goals are in reading. That's the opportunity cost we must consider in making the (often unconscious) decisions that we make each day.