Gifts to our Future Selves

A short story and a lesson learned while cooking chicken.

During the week, I do most of the cooking at home.

Cooking of course, is the final stage of the journey. Before getting there, there’s meal planning, grocery shopping, grocery unpacking (which I despise), and then cooking.

The other night, I was cooking a chicken stir fry. Usually this meal—which I’ve prepared many times before—would take me about an hour from start to finish.

One of the steps in the prep of the chicken is to use a little baking soda to tenderize the chicken. It’s a trick I first learned from this video, and I’ve used it ever since.

On this particular night, when I was dumping out the baking soda onto the chicken, it came out in clumps. Perhaps a few too many clumps. I broke up some of the clumps with my fingers and carried on with the prep of the chicken.

If you take nothing else out of this post, just know this: Too much baking soda makes something taste like metal. Especially chicken.

When we eventually sat down to eat, all that chicken that I had meal prepped for, bought at the store, unpacked, and then spent an hour prepping, tasted like a plate of hot garbage. Hot metallic garbage.

***

A sunk cost is something you’ve spent that can’t be recovered.

In the most basic sense, you can think of a sunk cost as monetary, like the cost of the chicken in my story. But of course, sunk costs are not just monetary.

Our attention for example, is a perpetual sunk cost—which is why I’m so grateful that you choose to spend some of it here.

Effort is another one.

One of my favourite views on sunk costs, comes from Seth Godin. In a blog post from 2021, he writes the following:

“Ignore sunk costs” is the critical lesson of useful decision making.

The thing you earned, that you depend on, that was hard to do–it’s a gift from your former self. Just because you have a law degree, a travel agency or the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic doesn’t mean that your future self is obligated to accept that gift.

A sunk cost is a gift from your former self to your future self, and your future self can choose whether or not to accept that gift. I just love that.

So in my chicken story, what exactly was the gift that I was giving my future self?

***

Interestingly, I thought a lot about this in the moment when it happened.

I think the answer can be found in my behaviour immediately after realizing that the chicken tasted like metallic garbage.

I was frustrated. Internally and externally. Externally, my behaviour looked like throwing the chicken in the garbage as quickly as possible and then cooking some fried eggs to make up for it.

Internally, I was so angry with myself. I was in no way kind to myself. My sole focus was to fix my “mistake,” though a better word for how I was feeling at the time would be “failure.”

Do you see now what the gift was?

It was an opportunity to practice self-compassion.

But I wasn’t ready to accept it.

***

In the time since my metallic chicken moment, I have come to be grateful to my former self for providing that gift, even though I wasn’t ready to accept it.

Self-compassion is something each one of us can use lots more of.

I was inspired to reflect on this moment with gratitude to my former self, by this hauntingly beautiful post by Henrik Karlsson: The Third Chair. It is fully worth spending your attention on it.

Your future self will thank you.