good things come to those who wait by Taylor L. '29

When my roommate flew back home after finals at the end of the spring semester, she bequeathed her bike to me until she returned, which was about a week. I was hanging around to volunteer with the MIT EMS medical detail for graduation and start my UROP, so I figured that I would try cycling around for a change. 

Nothing would ever be the same.⁠01 I’m taking 21W.755 - Reading and Writing the Short Story, and we learned that Russian author Nikolai Gogol said that the last line of every story is that “nothing would ever be the same again.” So I hope you enjoyed my story I always swore off bikes and scooters because I figured that my legs work fine for walking. That’s true, but I never realized how much it truly annoyed me to have to budget fifteen minutes to walk to class. Chipotle and Cava were now five minutes away instead of twenty. Graduation was happening on Killian Court, and I could literally leave three-ish minutes before I was supposed to be there. Getting a bike unlocked levels of lazy and last-minuteness I’d never even dreamed of before. 

When my roommate returned, I was devastated when she took back her bike because it meant I would have to walk across the bridge every morning to get to lab and every evening to get back to the frat in Boston we were staying at. I did that for two days before I snapped. I was getting so many steps in, at the cost of my sanity. One of the best parts of UROPing is that you can get paid, and so I set out to buy my own bike with my newfound exorbitant wealth.⁠02 UROPs make $16.25/hr  

I ventured into the wilderness of Facebook Marketplace looking for my perfect bike, so much so that I added scrolling Marketplace into my social media rotation. I developed this plan where I would Bluebike to the seller’s house and hopefully ride my shiny new bike back. This failed three times before it succeeded because I failed to realize that there are different sizes of road bikes. I think the worst time was when I went up to Somerville to look at a gorgeous pink Cannondale while it was raining, and it didn’t work out because it was too tall.⁠03 the listing said it should fit 5’2”-5’6” and I’m 5’6”, so maybe I just have short legs I had to Bluebike back in the rain, which had only started pouring more. It seriously felt like the ride of shame.  

I eventually ended up with a nice Bianchi, and it was a 10/10 life-altering purchase. I made a rule for myself during my UROP that I absolutely had to leave the lab during lunch and go outside and get sunshine, and with the bike I had enough time to go back home and cook a nice little lunch. I had amazing work-life balance. 

The bike infrastructure in Boston could use some work, but I’m honestly happy that there’s bike lanes at all, because in Winston-Salem you just have to ride in the main lane and hope nobody hits you. It’s super developed around campus, and riding along Mass Ave makes me feel so cosmopolitan. I figured I should go for some longer rides at some point as well. There’s a great-ish bike path right next to campus that runs along the Charles River, on both the Cambridge and Boston side. I would recommend, but I did get lost a few times, which is impressive considering it’s mostly a straight path. There’s also a lovely area up north in Somerville called Mystic Lake that I learned about after kayaking there, with some peaceful viewing spots and a little beach. 

A picture from Mystic Lake. Kind of looks like a New England postcard

Shannon Beach! Surprisingly nice for a beach that's on a lake

The Tufts Sailing Pavilion is actually here as well. Super cool but I never saw any boats launch.

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I never stopped scrolling, and at this point I was hooked on Marketplace and wanted to spend more money. I honed in on my next target, and, after some digging, I found a surf green Fender Stratocaster for $100. The seller even threw in a mini amplifier for free. I rode to their house on the bike and rode back through Fenway with the guitar case on my back, and I felt like I’d really mastered Marketplace. 

Learning guitar was about the only useful thing I did during the COVID lockdown, but in my freshman year, I barely even thought about it. My dorm has a music room down in the basement, but it was always a bit of an event to get there and play, because I’d have to walk all the way down six floors and get the key from the front desk. I probably practiced about twice the entire year, but now I have it on a stand next to my bed, and I can just pick it up and play a bit for five minutes before or between some homework. It’s truly one of the best quality of life improvements I’ve made. 

The love of my life

So here’s the issue I’m running into here: I’m too good at finding exactly what I want on Marketplace eventually, but how long am I willing to wait until the “perfect” thing falls into my lap? For my bike it was three weeks, and I spent those three weeks walking/busing/Bluebiking. It was inconvenient, of course, but I can consider that period of inconvenience as part of the price for finding a bike that I love now. For my guitar it was more like a week, but I passed on about one hundred other ones during that span because they weren’t speaking to me. 

Us economists⁠04 I'm three weeks into intro Econ like to think of choices like these in terms of opportunity cost, which is the value of the next best option that you had to forgo to make the choice you did. If you pick A, then your opportunity cost was the value you would have gotten from B. If A costs $10 and gives you 5 imaginary units of happiness, and B costs $8 and gives you 3 units of happiness, then the opportunity cost of picking A is B and the $2 that would have been in your pocket if you’d bought B.

I’ve written before about being indecisive, and I’m finding new metaphors to articulate it here. In a perfect world where everybody behaves perfectly rational and in their own best interest, every choice would be made to minimize opportunity cost and maximize benefit—in other words, to get the most value while giving up the least. I think sometimes I get too caught up in the idea that what I have now or what’s in front of me is good, but there could be something better that I don’t even know about yet. And I always wonder whether I should stand there and welcome it when it finally comes, if it does come, or whether I should take a good thing for what it is and move on.

Here’s another example: During the spring semester, I had a 9am that I would be consistently late to because I’d go to the Z before it.⁠05 In hindsight, this is a problem that could have been fixed by a bike To cut some dead weight and shave a few seconds off my commute, I decided that I would just leave my gym duffle in a locker during the day and come pick it up in the afternoon or evening once I was done with classes. 

The Z closes at 11, so whenever I was too sleepy to go fetch my bag, I played a game I call locker roulette. Every night, the Z staff are supposed to comb through the locker rooms and cut locks if they’re left on, and also empty out lockers if people leave stuff inside of them. There’s a lot of lockers, though, and sometimes you can get away with leaving your stuff there for one night, if you’re lucky. 

So, when I neglected to collect my bag by the end of the day, I would come to check on it in the morning with great fear in my heart. I could only figure out the state of my belongings once I said a prayer and opened the locker.⁠06 Schrodinger's locker I played this game pretty often and usually I won, but they got me twice. The first time, they cut my lock, which was actually a little upsetting because I’d had the lock for years, and the combination was 10-20-30, which was really easy for me to remember. The second time, I hadn’t bothered to buy another lock, so they just took my stuff. Each time they held my bag for ransom at the front desk until I gave them $10, so this ran me a total of $20. 

Let’s run the math here. Students can rent lockers for $4/month. I didn’t buy a locker until May, so I didn’t have to pay that eight months worth of rent, which is $32. I only ended up paying $20 in fees. So I saved $12. 

It gets better. There’s two women’s locker rooms in the Z. One is located in the depths after you scurry through a few hallways, and one is near the pool, and it’s objectively better in my opinion. I’d been looking into renting a locker earlier, but only the ones I didn’t want were available then. Then on one beautiful spring day in May, I checked the website and there were pool lockers available. So not only did I save $12, but I also ended up with a better locker. 

I think it’d be interesting to weigh the pros and cons of my purchases through the economists’ lens, and try to figure out if I’d been silly and accidentally chosen the second-best option instead of the first. But maybe I’d be too analytical trying to make everything so quantitative, because whatever units of happiness I choose are imaginary and we’re really just guessing as to whether buying a green or a red guitar maximizes my benefit. Let’s say instead that shopping comes from the heart. What if I just take the best thing I see in front of me?

Let’s pretend that when I open Facebook Marketplace I become a greedy algorithm, which you code to try and solve a problem with constraints (like a budget or a time frame). It navigates through combinations of resources in a certain way, depending on how you program it, and spits out the first viable solution it finds. Oftentimes this isn’t the most efficient solution, but if you’re only looking for something that works, it’s fine. So maybe I decide that I want my guitar now, and I don’t want to wait for any other listings, so I’m just going to buy the one I like the most out of what’s on my screen.

The two options here are overthinking and underthinking, and I don’t really want to do either of those, but there are too many roads that lead back there. A lot of the time I find myself considering a bunch of what-ifs, which is a little weird to me because I’m very happy with where I’m at, but something in is me always wondering if I’ve made a wrong decision at some point that’s kept me from ascending and reaching nirvana. Maybe I was too hasty and sprung for something I shouldn’t have; maybe there was a better, cheaper bike posted a day after I bought mine, but I’ll never see it because I pulled the trigger already.