opportunity cost

Opportunity cost is the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative not chosen.

Everything has an opportunity cost attached to it. Especially in a city like Mumbai, every decision, from the smallest to the biggest one has an opportunity cost. Move cities, sacrifice comforts but get more opportunities; don't move here, live #likeaboss midst comforts but miss out on important opportunities and the pretty women ... Stay in a cube, pay less for it, save more money but travel more for work... travel less for work, but stay in a smaller cube and pay more for it. Take the train, get felt up by 5 men but reach home cheap and faster. Take a cab, sleep in it, be comfortable, get stuck in traffic and pay through your nose, eyes and ears. The list is never ending.

Its simple yet quite easily given a miss; every step of your daily living, you incur an opportunity cost, and the worst thing about this is that it grows... it increases as you grow older. From which cartoon to watch and which one to not, to what education stream to select, to what kind of job to accept and which one to reject... the gravity of the decisions we make or rather we have to make results in a higher opportunity cost paid with every passing day.

So on one of those days when the manstruation cycle is on top gear, I contemplated and tried to realize what is the biggest opportunity cost that we bear; the answer was right in front of me.

In the lust for ambition, money, fun and more money, we bear the ultimate opportunity cost of health. Work consumes everything and then the whatever residue remains splits between eating out, sleeping and practicing various forms of intoxications. Look around and try and think of one person who isn't suffering from some sort of health issue. A healthy life has become difficult to find and I can't think of a single person right now without a health problem.

In the extremely near sighted vision of wanting to achieve all the success and enjoyment one can, we quite humanely lose far sight and forget to preserve for tomorrow. Work hours are no longer in a single digit. Breakfast has become lunch, lunch is evening snack and smoke breaks are no longer breaks but rather a part of work itself. The food industry must be running on some part because of take home dinners. Fridays and Saturdays are considered wasted if we are not wasted enough by the end of it. They say dare to dream big and beyond to achieve success; now, one is lucky enough to get those few hours of undisturbed sleep to be able to dream about anything except targets and schedules and meetings.

Those who know me well can easily and very rightly point a finger at me for being a hypocrite to write this. Living and surviving (so far, so good) with a condition that clearly chalks off 80% of the things that happen in daily routine and lists them as ranging from fairly to majorly lethal, I do have my own lapses. But I am neither condemning nor writing an open letter to today's youth. Its like a vicious circle of numerous catch 22 situations that we have landed ourselves in.

On one hand we have hospitals (now with star ratings like hotels) coming up all around and on the other we have healthcare progressing on near sonic speend. So you either rely on this and continue to enjoy the satisfaction of that one cracked deal at work along with the endless hours and sleepless nights put behind it or revel on pride of chugging 4 pints of beer and gulping those 16 on the house shots. Or you pull up your act, get the will power and self control meters running and make sincere efforts to make it a healthier living.

I reiterate that I neither condemn / criticize the lifestyle being practiced nor do I intend to initiate a movement calling for a drastic change in life through this. I just voiced an opinion; an opinion which took seed and grew the moment I realized that I felt like hugging every elderly person I see these days and congratulating them for having survived so far.