I was crossing a river in Alaska when a man next to me caught a salmon and a brown bear started moving right at him. He had already completed a difficult task: he hooked the fish, kept tension on the line and began to draw it towards him. Then the bear entered the water.
He didn’t try to move faster. He didn’t hold back or reckon he could still hold the salmon. He cut the line and walked away. The bear took the fish. He has to keep fishing. The whole decision took about four seconds.
I’ve thought about it ever since, because most of the things we struggle to let go of don’t come with a brown bear. They will open gradually. The project wastes time without attracting attention. The job no longer feels right, but it becomes familiar enough to make it hard to leave. The relationship changes, but both remain true to the version they once believed possible. There is no single moment that forces you to make a decision. So we start to feel irresponsible to stop, not because it’s always the right choice to keep going, but because we’ve invested so much.
Psychologists call a version of this increased commitment.
We continue to invest in a decision because walking away forces us to confront time, energy, or opportunity. feeling what has already been spent does not lead to what we expect. In layman’s terms, we keep going, not because something is working, but because stopping requires us to admit that it wasn’t working some time ago.
Why the river made the decision clear
It would be tempting to say that the fisherman’s body made a decision before his mind got involved, but physiology is more complicated than that. Immediate threats mobilize them nervous systemnarrow attentionand get us moving faster. But it wasn’t just adrenaline that made his decision so clean. It was a certainty. It didn’t matter how much money he had spent on that caviar hunt. The next decision was how much it would cost to continue.
The weight we carry
Most of us will never reach that level of clarity because nothing forces us to reduce sunk costs. We do both calculations at the same time: what we have already spent and what it will still cost us to continue. Letting go may seem like declaring previous investments worthless, so we keep adding it, hoping that enough time will eventually justify the time spent. It rarely works that way. The score will only be longer.
What are we actually protecting?
The people who find it the hardest are usually more defensive than the outcome. If part of who you are is someone who doesn’t quit, in relationships, at work, a friendshipproject, then stopping is not the only practical decision. It’s a threat to the story you tell about yourself. A few months ago I wrote about a trap to catch to prove oneself. It’s its quieter cousin: the trap of refusing to stop, after the point has already been made.
Consider the fact that two people will continue their relationship for several years after it does not work out, because ending the relationship means admitting that the years already spent did not live up to what they expected. Or consider the case of someone who is well past the point of growth, because leaving means admitting that the previous choice was not what they thought it was. We trust people, including ourselves, in what they say out loud.
A test that really works
The fisherman did not ask what he put in that fish. He asked what it would cost him to continue with a bear ten feet away. We can ask the same question without the bear. Don’t ask: Can I still do this? Many people can work on many things for longer than is useful. Instead, ask: If I were making the decision today for the first time, knowing everything now, would I choose it? Ignore what you’ve already spent. It cannot be recovered by spending more.
“No” does not mean that the decision has already been made for you. It means that you now have information that you didn’t have a moment ago, and instead of a choice, you have to open your eyes. Sometimes that choice is to leave. Sometimes real constraints, financial obligations, safety, time, or responsibilities to other people mean that the right course of action is to slow down, attempt repairs, or plan instead of leaving immediately. The test doesn’t tell you what to do next. It tells you the truth that actually works.
Cutting the line was not a failure of commitment. It was a commitment, once the weight of what he had already spent ceased to be part of the equation.
If you had to decide today for the first time, what would you choose?
