In this year of spiritual retirement in Vienna, I have thought too much and experienced the full gamut of human emotions. I feel more intensely than ever how time flashes by and we grow up. Things change very quickly. A friend of mine who found himself in a similar situation in London harbours very similar thoughts. This morning on the subway I was listening to Nena´s “Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann” and I became melancholic, as I always do when listening to that song. It reminds me of my Erasmus in Bielefeld. Everything was so wonderful there, so childish and naïve. I do not want to grow up. Where are the summer loves now? The Sommerlager? American hard rock from the 80s? The partys with dated pop in German discos? Beers at 12.00 in the morning?
People evolve somehow, grow up. And I do not know whether I do that in a logical way. It seems I do not, as the majority seem to follow the “way towards anticipated retirement”. The news that this or that guy has settled down reaches me more frequently now than ever before. Someone writes a mail and says “here in Spain the people are so stuck… no wonder, I suppose that´s what there is if you stay… all my friends buy a house, get married or have children”. Meanwhile I keep on thinking about going to Brussels, burning money to pay the flat rent in Vienna and in 1000 journeys. People you´ve known for years tell you that those who´ve got a decent economy have bought a house… It seems sensible, does it not? Mortgage for ever, children, marriage. Security, peace, in other words. But by doing that one also leaves other things: different stories and scenarios, new friends, errors to learn from, and so forth.
Settlind down? I´d rather take advantage of the opportunities of rambling round now that I´m young, I´m a curious baby en tour of discovery. Setlling down terrifies me, it would mark the end of childhood. I´ve got dead serious Peter Pan complex, I´m the naughty boy who did not want to grow up. Marriage? I cannot, I´m a boy. A mortgage? Bitte, I haven’t got the slightest idea as to where I will be 7 months from now. Maybe I should go home, look for a job there, mortgage up my life and settle down. Is that the prudent and logical thing to do? I do not think the people who do that ever though about the opportunity cost. Then again, they might have…
Yet I suppose it is normal to reflect on those things when you can see everything change around you. And when a friend informs you that the love of your days of youth got married, so beautiful a girl that that I very seldom gathered the courage to talk to her… and she got married! Well, in addition to that, my friend came to know it because the “marvellous news” appeared, with pics and all, in the social section of certain tacky newspaper, alongside three or four sentences that… for the love of God! So kitschy they could make a man puke. My friend sent the mentioned “thing” to me. Devastating. She looked beautiful. Ye Gods, I feel like Die Ärtzte, it is too late for me, and I knew it from a friend. And like Die Ärtzte, someday I will avenge it and she´ll regret it, yet it will be too late.
Alas, it will never happen for me. I should have thought about the opportunity cost back then, when I should have tried: what is the alternative to doing nothing? Exactly what it happened: NOTHING. And now she´s on the “way towards anticipated retirement”. Why that urge to settle down? I cannot grasp it. I told my friend in London about my Liebeskummer and he developed some raving on the application of opportunity cost to relationships. I link it here. As you see, opportunity cost must always be borne in mind.
Opportunity cost is a term used in economics to mean the cost of something in terms of an opportunity forgone (and the benefits that could be received from that opportunity), or the most valuable forgone alternative. For example, if a city decides to build a hospital on vacant land that it owns, the opportunity cost is some other thing that might have been done with the land and construction funds instead. In building the hospital, the city has forgone the opportunity to build a sporting centre on that land, or a parking lot, or the ability to sell the land to reduce the city’s debt, and so forth… Opportunity cost need not be assessed in monetary terms, but rather can be assessed in terms of anything that is of value to the person or persons doing the assessing. Assessing opportunity costs is fundamental to assessing the true cost of any course of action. Note that opportunity cost is not the sum of the available alternatives, but rather of benefit of the best alternative of them.
I´ve gone through opportunity cost in this blog already, in Arbeit macht krank & Le Stage. Here I assessed the opportunity cost of going to Brussels, and not the other way round. Error. Opportunity cost must be assessed both ways. In Le Stage, the opportunity cost of going to Brussels is staying here; the only benefits I lose: money and security. It seems high, does it not? Well then, let´s take a look at the opportunity cost of staying here: not going to Brussels to do the Stage, and consequently losing all this stuff:
- Having my piece of mind back (here I do shite that chips away at the frayed seams of my sanity day in day out)
- New city, new country
- Learning French
- Getting to know 600 stagiers from more than 30 different countries
- Be close to people I love
- The widening of opportunities the stage may provide me with
- Seeing how the EU is, from the inside.
- Being the guy who resurrected the Doha Round of Trade Talks, thus revving up global Trade (I exaggerate here).
I could go on for hours, yet, in a nutshell: NO CONTEST. I´m going to Brussels. I already told the bosses here and they understood. Well, nobody could expect that so nice a guy as I am would stay here doing rubbish. Two months to go and counting! I´ll keep on rumbling down the road and musing on Erasmus, summer loves and that I do not want to settle down yet. Falling through space and time, direction endlessness.
