We’re all familiar with the sunk cost fallacy, right? Once you’ve invested money into something, you’re more likely to hold onto that investment, and possibly invest more money into it, rather than cut your losses and walk away. Rather than weighing the costs and benefits objectively, we instead allow the money that we’ve already invested to distort our decision-making process, often resulting in a poor decision. Put another way, we tend to persist with a bad decision because it allows us to delay the realization that we made a mistake. Rather than admit our mistake, learn our lesson, and move forward with wisdom, we double down on our bad decision, deny reality, and get punished for our stubbornness. 

But are there non financial areas in our life where we also allow the sunk cost fallacy to wreak havoc? Absolutely. 

One obvious area where this fallacy pervades is in the domain of religion and spirituality. Most people have some opinion or stance about religion or spirituality, especially once they are adults. Usually by the time someone is married or owns a home they have established firm beliefs about whether they believe in god, or a higher power, or whether they are a flat-out atheist. They have made up their mind based on their life’s experiences, and not many people are looking to change that opinion, or even to entertain other ideas on the matter. In other words, most adults take firm stances on spirituality and religion and push forward with semi-certainty, as it’s more comfortable this way; constantly remaining open-minded and flexible can be challenging and exhausting. 

But what is lost by closing one’s mind to the possibility of spirituality or god’s existence? 

Imagine for a moment that spirituality is real, and some type of higher power exists. Imagine still, that if a human spends time and energy towards opening their mind towards this world of spirituality and god, that they are bestowed with unbelievable experiences, greater than the physical world could ever provide. Suppose further that for many people who are not altogether enjoying their physical existence, tapping into their spiritual side can provide insight, wisdom, and a new perspective which will enhance their daily, mortal lives. Suspend your disbelief yet again, to imagine that this higher plane of existence could unite all things in the universe, granting us meaning, purpose, and feelings of connection and love that were hitherto before unimaginable. If even a fraction of these potential benefits were possible, would it not make sense to at least try the whole spirituality thing out once before one dies? 

Consider this example. Suppose you are investing money into various capital markets. Some money is put into government bonds, some into risky high-profit enterprises, some into fortune 500 companies, some into the foreign exchange markets, and some into the electronic currency markets. You pick a balance of investment strategies so that if one of them performs poorly, hopefully the other investments perform well and balance out your losses. Despite some markets being riskier, if you avoid them altogether you’ll lose out on potentially huge returns. 

This same diversified approach to investing should be applied to life. Instead of putting all of your beliefs behind one idea, such as atheism, diversify. Rather than being a staunch atheist your whole life, explore different religions and spiritual paths. Don’t spend your whole life exploring religion if it doesn’t work for you, but also don’t ignore all of spirituality and religion because you’ve decided that atheism is the be all and end all. Let’s compare spirituality to a high-risk market. Sure, it’s less stable and not guaranteed, but there is tremendous reward, and many people who invest in it make lots of money. Similarly, many people who spend time pursuing a spiritual journey find unbelievable reward, euphoria, and richness that is rarely achieved in the physical world. By only investing time into atheism, this whole beautiful world of spirituality is lost to them. The atheist may have retained a consistent belief throughout their whole life, but they are the ones who miss out on the huge potential benefits of the spiritual world. 

Why does this matter? Because life is limited. We only get one opportunity to experience the full richness of the human experience. We are blessed to have an extraordinarily advanced brain, capable of intense and diverse emotions, as well as complex abstract reasoning. If we limit our lives to only that which we have an abundance of concrete logical data, we are closing ourselves to the infinite richness that the spiritual life holds for us. To spend a whole life merely obsessed with the physical world is a waste. How many times can you eat ice cream, have sex, or get drunk before the experience becomes boring and mundane? Repeating the same basic experiences over again doesn’t provide novelty to us. It doesn’t enrich our lives. In fact, it shortens our lives, by substituting repetition and monotony in place of a variety of new and diverse experiences. I implore all of us to remain flexible, and keep an open mind. So what if you prefer atheism, that’s fine, but give spirituality a try first, and see if you don’t enjoy that too. Then, if it’s not for you, at least you’ve given it a shot, and you have no regrets. 

It’s hard for someone who has no spirituality to understand what the big fuss about it is, but to someone who finds spirituality, it needs no explanation. We all live physical lives - that’s a given if we are alive. But for those who experience a true spiritual awakening, nothing in the physical world compares. It’s much less an argument that us spiritual beings try to make, than sympathy we are trying to express for those individuals who never experience its unsurpassed joy and euphoria. If there was a drug that gave you greater euphoria than you’ve ever experienced, and it had no side effects, wouldn’t you want to try it at least once? That’s what spirituality is. If you don’t want to try it, ask yourself why?