How to Make (Seemingly) Impossible Decisions
How 'opportunity cost' can reveal what's really on the line when we make decisions—a case study on choosing to quit social media
To quit or not to quit social media—that is the question.
Is it nobler to suffer the fear of missing out on internet fame (and the middling fortune that might come with it)? Or take up some half-baked “strategy” and, by posting, end it?
How do you make a big decision when there’s so much uncertainty on both sides of the equation? Heck, how do you even make a small decision when both options are good (or bad)?
Whether or not you’re grappling with this question of social media, there is probably a decision you are weighing. After all, life is a long series of choices, each with its own costs and benefits. While there are plenty of tools we can use to navigate our decisions, the want I want to explore today is the economic concept of opportunity cost.
What Is ‘Economics?’
There are many misconceptions about economics and ‘the economy.’ Economics is not only about numbers, finance, or business. It’s a social science, a study of human behavior and choices. As NPR's Stacey Vanek Smith aptly put it when I spoke with her, “It’s very human. It’s very personal.”
Economics helps us understand how limited resources are distributed. That’s what being economical means, after all. When we economize, we’re judicious with our resources. We might want all sorts of things, but we’ll need to choose the particular wants we will satisfy based on our limited resources.
We do these sorts of calculations every single day. We economize at the grocery store. We do it when considering what Substack or Patreon subscriptions to spend money on. We even economize on vacation, acknowledging that we don’t have the budget for an all-out bacchanalian bash, so we must prioritize.
In this way, economics has a lot to teach us about decision-making. Should I spend my time on this project or that project? Should I charge more or less? Is this a good investment or a bad investment? Should I quit now or keep going?
Economic frameworks might not tell us which decision to make, but they often reveal unexpected ways to see the situation and make our choices more straightforward. One way I think about economics is that it’s the art of laying everything out on the table so we can make more informed decisions. And often, when we lay everything out, the financial or quantifiable considerations are only a tiny piece of the puzzle.
Opportunity Cost
Opportunity cost is a decision-making framework. The concept helps us think through our choices by inviting us to consider the value of different ways to use the same resources. Economist John Quiggin puts it this way, “The opportunity cost of anything of value is what you must give up to get it.” To be clear, “cost” and “value” don’t have to be financial. Time, enjoyment, or learning, among other forms of value, can also be considered.
Considering opportunity cost also prompts us to see value in alternatives we might easily dismiss.
The point of thinking through opportunity cost when weighing choices isn't to reveal the correct answer. It's to reveal the full context of the decision—so you're not missing information that might sway your choice.
Let’s return to the question of whether or not to quit social media.
I can’t tell you how many times over the last few years I’ve heard business owners and independent workers say, “I’d quit social media tomorrow if I didn’t need to be there…”
To which I inevitably respond, “Why do you have to be there?”
Social media platforms can be labs for testing ideas. We might use social media to support the scale of our business, attracting an audience that wants to purchase our product. Some professional fields rely on social media as proof of concept and credibility.
But most often, the reason is the potential for benefits—the audience that turns into loyal customers, the personal brand that garners speaking invitations, the passive income that promises a life of ease. And sure, there is a potential benefit to be received via social media. There’s also the potential to win the lottery. And while I’ll admit that the odds of making it big on social media are slightly better than winning the lottery, potential benefits must be weighed against actual costs—of which there are many when it comes to social media.
The desire or “need” to be on social media is socially constructed. We learn about the necessity of social media because people on social media tell us it’s necessary for success. Or, as
put it:…there’s an extent to which the influencer industry is basically a machine that generates confirmation bias at scale. That is, every influencer is, at the very least, a walking advertisement for the idea of becoming an influencer.
No business needs to be on social media to succeed. No career is dependent on social media for advancement (unless perhaps you’re a social media influencer). Social media marketers and influencers invented this perception. Without recognizing that, we can’t acknowledge that the time we spend on social media is a resource we could distribute in several other ways to fill our needs and desires.
Accounting for Resources
First, to use opportunity cost to decide whether or not to quit social media, we need to consider what resources we have to distribute.
The most obvious, and probably most significant, is time. How much time do you spend creating content for social media? Checking your posts for likes or comments? Answering DMs? Perusing your feeds? How much time do you spend thinking about social media?
The second resource is mental energy. How much mental energy does social media take up? Is it draining or rejuvenating? Does spending mental energy on social media make you feel better or worse? How much does social media interrupt your ability to focus on other things?
Next, we need to consider emotional bandwidth. How easy or difficult is it for you to maintain emotional balance while engaging with social media? Do you have to down-regulate your nervous system after using social media? Does it make it harder or easier for you to carry on analog relationships?
And finally, let’s talk about money. Whether or not you spend money on social media training, strategy, or implementation, you probably use social media to further your career, find clients, or build an audience you can profit from. But how well is that working? Can you attribute, even obliquely, sales or new clients to social media? Or is it something you assume is working without much proof? Do you have results now, or are you counting on results in the future?
For time, mental energy, and emotional bandwidth, we need to ask: How else could I allocate those resources?
And for money, we should consider: What other ways could I generate the same level of returns (or better)?
So far, these are big conceptual questions. Let’s take a look at a case study.
Why Hillary Rea Quit Social Media
Toward the end of 2022, I noticed a LinkedIn post from Tell Me A Story founder
. Hillary announced that she had decided to delete her LinkedIn profile at the end of the year—just as she had done on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at the end of 2020.On its own, this announcement was unremarkable. There’s a steady trickle of people deciding that social media marketing isn’t worth the hassle. But what stood out to me about Hillary’s post was that she said that quitting Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook was one of the best business decisions she ever made.
Hillary told me that she started to pull back on social media in 2020.
It was a challenging year to be on social media. We were reckoning with a 9/11 amount of deaths from Covid every day, an administration that seemed hellbent on spreading misinformation, and our own feelings about being locked down in our homes. We were also reckoning with the violent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery—as well as the long legacy of police brutality and white supremacy. It was a lot to process.
Add financial insecurity into that mix, and you have a recipe for spiraling into a dark place.
On top of all that, Hillary noticed old patterns of comparison and self-judgment resurface—patterns she’d worked hard to overcome. Each time she logged on to check a feed, she’d feel like she wasn’t doing enough, or that someone else was doing it all wrong, or that she should have the same level of success as others. “I had worked really hard on moving through that—being in this space where I could, like, fully trust myself personally and professionally. And I noticed those comparison feelings and judgmenty feelings coming back to the surface,” she told me.
By the summer of 2020, Hillary had stopped posting or checking her feeds, both personally and professionally. She went dark. Before long, she’d made a decision. On December 31st of that year, she conducted a “ceremonial deleting”—multiple Twitter and Instagram accounts, as well as her Facebook profile, business page, and group memberships ceased to exist.
What was she giving up by deleting her social media accounts?
I wanted to understand what she was trying to do on social media in the first place.
“I don't think I had a strategy. I mean, I know I hired someone to give me a strategy. It was about growing the audience, but in service of what, I'm not sure,” she admitted. She told me that she wasn’t worried about giving up business results because social media wasn’t creating any in the first place. She told me she did worry about losing touch with friends she’d reconnected with on social media.
For Hillary, the costs of being on social media included the expense of hiring a social media strategist, an unhealthy mental state, and the time it took her to come up with content and post. She weighed that against the potential benefit of social media—and the choice seemed obvious. The costs outweighed the benefits. But what new opportunities could she pursue without the costs of social media on her balance sheet?
“The two best years of business”
Since late 2016, when she went full-time, Tell Me A Story has “had the best two years of business” after quitting social media. Hillary told me that she has the data to prove it—not just in terms of revenue, but the way she runs the business, the people she’s working with, and the opportunities she’s creating for herself. “I know what works, and it's all an extension of who I am, what Tell Me A Story is,” Hillary told me with a huge smile.
Hillary’s broad strategy is to model different styles of professional communication for people who might want to hire her. And she pursues that strategy in three core ways: free events, speaking engagements, and intentional networking.
First, Hillary offered free events called the Speak Up Sessions.1 She experimented with format, schedule, and style over the last two years. She used these events to answer questions and teach, as well as to showcase her own clients.
Next, she prioritizes speaking engagements. She partners with organizations to run a Five Word Life Story workshop with their people. She also seeks out podcasts where she can talk about storytelling and the work she does with clients.
Hillary also puts time and intention into reaching out to groups and companies she wants to partner with. “I am actually spending my marketing time reaching out to seek out the opportunities that I want,” she said. For anyone who was attracted to inbound marketing or social media precisely because it meant you wouldn’t have to cold call or email, “reaching out” for the opportunities you want might seem like a bridge too far.
But here’s the thing: it’s really effective.
Hillary uses Michelle Warner’s Networking That Pays system and has turned intentional outreach into a habit that takes her about five minutes per day. She spends time thinking about who she wants to connect with and why she wants to connect with them. “I’m really focusing on building big relationships that maybe feel out of reach at the moment.”
Activities like pitching podcast hosts, cold outreach to potential partners, and offering high-value free events are on many people’s “wouldn’t it be nice if” lists. Our podcast clients regularly tell us that these activities are on their lists, but they never seem to have the time to do them.
When we don’t consider the opportunity cost of social media, we don’t recognize what we’re giving up. We don’t see that social media time is time we could be spending on these other tactics, which often have a much higher value. Social media isn't a free way to reach a lot of people; it actually costs quite a bit.
The potential benefits of social media seem glamorous, and like they’re only a perfect posting strategy away. After all, social media is where the hype is—at least, on social media.
We don’t see that social media time is time we could be spending on these other tactics, which often have a much higher value.
Those other activities don’t seem as glamorous because so few people are hyping their outcomes. But, I said it on the TEDx stage, and I’ll say it again: the most successful people I know aren’t big names on social media. They don’t have massive audiences. And they might not even have social media accounts. Instead, they spend their time on marketing and networking activities that dependably deliver massive results—things like podcast interviews, speaking engagements, and intentional outreach.
They recognize that they could spend time on social media promoting themselves or their work. But they also recognize that the potential benefit of social media is outweighed by the cost of giving up the time they spend on a strategy that’s already proved successful—not to mention a less anxious, judgmental, or obsessive mental state.
That’s opportunity cost in action.
Remember, the opportunity cost of one choice is whatever you give up to get it. When we give our time to social media, we’re giving up time that could be spent on other marketing activities—things that could easily result in more leads and more revenue. When we give our time to other marketing activities, we give up the potential to become “internet famous,” but we also give up all the potential harm that’s caused by worrying about those platforms.
Just to be clear, I’m not making the argument to quit social media. As of this writing, I still use social media. I’ve even started to gasp post Reels on Instagram. Social media has been a tool that’s benefitted me greatly—and continues to do so. That said, I’ve dramatically changed my approach over the last few years. And I’m always paying attention to whether I’m still getting benefits from the time I spend on social media or whether that time would yield better results spent on something else.
So, what are the economics of a decision that you’re considering?
Maybe, like Hillary, you’re contemplating completely pulling the plug on social media. Perhaps you’re thinking about whether you want to hire an employee to help you grow your business. Maybe it’s a career change that’s on your mind. Or, ya know, smaller things too!
Consider the opportunity costs associated with this decision. If you stick with the status quo, what are you getting? What resources are you using? And how else could you use those resources?
If you allocate your resources to an alternative, what would you be getting? And what would you be giving up?
To go further, consider the socially constructed desires and resulting scarcities at play with both choices. Why do you want one option over the other? What seems scarce but could simply be redistributed?
Keep in mind that what you’re giving up is rarely cut and dry. It’s rarely obvious. You might need to sit with your choices for quite some time to fully understand your options. But when you do, you can be confident about the decision you make because you’ll have truly weighed the options.
These free sessions ended in November 2023. She now offers a version through her newsletter,
.