If Scenarios 1 and 2 don’t feel fully equivalent, you’re probably suffering from the sunk cost fallacy!
There’s at least one other common reason why scenarios 1 and 2 may feel non-equivalent, besides the sunk costs fallacy: you may maintain different mental bank accounts for different goals, and so the $10 in scenarios 1 and 2 may be debited from different bank accounts.
For example, if you budget yourself $10/day for recreation, in scenario 1 you would have used up your recreational budget for the day, while in scenario 2 you would not.
Even if you do not maintain separate explicit budgets for e.g. fun vs. productivity vs. do-gooding, you may operate approximately, internally, by allowing each of your goals a certain approximate shares of time/money/etc., with which to optimize for what it wants. And so you might still have an intuitive feeling that you’d spent enough on recreation today in scenario 1, and not in scenario 2.
My non-confident guess is that it’s healthy to do have different implicit or explicit budgets for different goals.
There’s at least one other common reason why scenarios 1 and 2 may feel non-equivalent, besides the sunk costs fallacy: you may maintain different mental bank accounts for different goals, and so the $10 in scenarios 1 and 2 may be debited from different bank accounts.
For example, if you budget yourself $10/day for recreation, in scenario 1 you would have used up your recreational budget for the day, while in scenario 2 you would not.
Even if you do not maintain separate explicit budgets for e.g. fun vs. productivity vs. do-gooding, you may operate approximately, internally, by allowing each of your goals a certain approximate shares of time/money/etc., with which to optimize for what it wants. And so you might still have an intuitive feeling that you’d spent enough on recreation today in scenario 1, and not in scenario 2.
My non-confident guess is that it’s healthy to do have different implicit or explicit budgets for different goals.