Have you ever started watching a movie, and then one hour into it you realize how terrible it is? But you decide to continue watching because you have already invested one hour into it? Or you continue watching that series even though it is a bore?

Severally, I have also forced myself to finish a meal when I am already full, reason, I didn’t want to waste food and time I spend cooking.

You might as well have decided to continue dating someone bad for you because you already have invested so much in them. You have put a lot of emotional investment into a relationship and it becomes very challenging to break it off. Or you are stuck working for a toxic company , you have already spend months or years working there and so you feel you will have wasted a lot time if you resigned. So you stay.

You might have joined a class (degree, etc.), club or group and along the way you fill it is not a fit for you. So you keep going since you have already paid for it and perhaps you have invested several months or years into it.

If you’ve experienced a version of any of these, Boom! You fell victim to the sunk cost fallacy or as it also called, Concorde fallacy.

But in reality, it doesn’t matter that you’ve already invested time into whatever scenario above. If for example, it is bad movie, and you don’t like it, you can walk out of it. You will only continue feeling bad about yourself if you continue watching.

Years of emotional investment in a toxic relationship (any relationship) makes it very uncomfortable to cut your ties, but you might have to.

We fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy because we are emotionally invested in whatever money, time, or any other resource we have committed in the past. How can we free ourselves? You need to recognize the logical fallacy in it. Don’t waste any more of your time.

The sunk cost fallacy is also called the Concorde fallacy when describing it as an escalation of commitment. This refers to the construction of the first commercial supersonic airliner. The project was predicted to be a failure early on; but everyone involved kept going. Their shared investment built a hefty psychological burden which outweighed their better judgments. After losing an incredible amount of money, effort and time, they didn’t want to just give up.