The OC

While people differ in many ways, there’s at least one constraint that unites us all: time.

Whether you were born an third-world country or The OC, whether you are tall or short, senior or junior — your number of hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a year does not vary significantly.

Since time is limited, we have to be careful about how we spend it. Time spent on one thing cannot be spent on another. This is what we call the opportunity cost of things — or as I refer to it more casually: the OC.

When I was (even) younger and (even) more naive, I watched all episodes of The OC. That’s 92 episodes, multiplying this by roughly 43 minutes per episode, this adds up to a whopping 66 hours of my life.

What was the OC of watching The OC? What life lessons did I learn from Seth, Ryan, Marissa and Summer that would allow me to confidently say: yeah, that was a good use of my time. I’ll admit: Seth was a funny dude, but I extracted few deep insights beyond that (spoiler alert) growing up rich does not guarantee happiness.

However, simply dismissing those 66 hours as a waste undersells it.

The bigger question is: if I would not have spent those 66 hours watching, what could I have spent them on instead?

You can do a lot in 66 hours. These days, I wish I had 66 hours to do anything.

Maybe I could have read ten classic books, allowing me to whip out clever, slightly dated quotes during casual conversation. Or I could have built a product from scratch. I once spent a weekend crunching out a pretty feature complete Twitter clone, so in 66 hours I could probably have built a Facebook competitor, and be a billionaire now. Or maybe I could have learned a cool new skill, like practicing magic tricks. My kids probably would have loved this, and I would actually be fun at parties. That said, it could have been a blocker for getting my wife to marry me, which would render the whole “fun for my kids” argument moot.

But alas, I binged-watched The OC instead, so that’s the version of reality we live in and we are all facing the consequences. You’re welcome, Mark. Sorry, kids.

You’d be surprised by the amount of time I spend on OC (the opportunity cost one) discussions, both professionally and personally. Is it worth it? I’d argue that generally yes: I think that often, perhaps more often than we do naturally, spending some time thinking about opportunity cost is better than just blindly doing stuff without seriously considering the alternatives.

So here’s my suggestion: before jumping into the next significant effort blindly, let’s look at it through the OC lens and ask ourselves: what’s the opportunity cost here? What would Seth do?

Not just: is this time spent on something valuable, but also: isn’t there something even more valuable we could spend our time on instead?

If so, then let’s do that instead.

Now the meta question you should be asking yourself is: what was the opportunity cost of spending a few minutes reading about opportunity cost, and the opportunity cost of me (Zef) writing about it? Was that worth it? What could we all have done instead? This is hard to judge (and I’ll reflect on that), but I believe that if all I would have just given you was a dictionary definition of “opportunity cost” with the ask “yo, make this part of your operating system” it would have had zero effect.

There’s still a risk that your only take away from this whole thing is that you check where you can stream The OC (it’s on MAX and Prime Video). But maybe, just maybe opportunity cost becomes a little bit more top of mind for you now. It took years for me to truly appreciate the value of this concept, I hope I can shortcut it for you a little bit. If so, all of this may have been worth it