Sunk Cost Fallacy

So I am a fan of reading and viewing TV stuffs. I typically am good at finding titles that are perfectly aligned with things I like in the past, and overall, I'm good at picking the good ones. But every so often I pick a bad one, which spells trouble for me since I feel compelled to finish what I start.

Why am I bringing this up now, you may ask? Late 2020, I realized I had fallen out of touch with one of my great passions: reading physical books. I think I became busy with school for a while, and being assigned lame books took out the fun, but in an effort to try and have less screen time, I gave myself a goal of a certain number of books to read. Then this past year, I set it higher, and tried to read 40 books in 2021. I beat this goal while having read extra books. So this year (2022), my goal is 50 books. I am pretty decently on track (maybe two or three books slower than I should be, but i have plenty of series I know I'll tear through, so all is well), however I've come across a problem this past week. A series I thought was going to be a slam dunk and be so entertaining that I'd be ultra efficient and get ahead turned out to actual be a real stinker. The specific book doesn't really matter for the sake of this blog, so I won't bother naming it.

The issue with this book is the fact that it was a YA novel with the plot that had potential to be enjoyed by all ages, but the actual contents regressed to overly simplistic and bare-bones writing. Someone in a review of the book on Goodreads (not sponsored by the way, it's just what I use to keep track of my books) phrased it quite well in saying it felt "like an outline." And that's the best way I could describe this book. There were so many ideas and details that started to be introduced only for the author to move along and never flesh them out. It does lend itself to allowing the book to be short and fast to read, but also leads to a lot of "what happen to X or Y?" or "how'd we get here?" or even "why did that character do that? I thought they were a different personality type..." I'm sure that there is a set group of people out there that would enjoy the book as well as it's sequels, but I unfortunately am not one of them.

And of course given my strong need to finish what I started I read the whole first book. I kind of regret wasting my time on a book I didn't like when there are so many books I would like and haven't read yet. And of course I almost had the urge to finish the second one too, in a vain hope that maybe it'd get better and also as that urge continued. However last night, I realized that although this puts me back a little with my reading goal if I drop it, I can't waste my time on it. And since I don't like it, it'd take me longer to get through reading it than a good book of that length or possibly longer. Thus. I've dropped it like a hot potato.

So, learn from my mistakes. don't suffer through something just because you feel you need to see it through or because you've "come this far, might as well wait out the rest." As we are all painfully aware, life is short. And it's never too late to back out and do something that brings you joy and sparks passion instead of headaches and anger.

See you next week, my Jellybeans! Stay happy, healthy and safe!