Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

The fear of being a sucker, the risk of it, should get to be like any other risk.

Like just a normal risk that can be traded off against other priorities depending on how serious it is or what the real goals are.

And oftentimes the real goal is something deeper than I want to avoid scams.

Oftentimes the real goal is something like I want to be a compassionate citizen or I want to be a person who connects with other people or something like that.

Exactly.

And there's part of what I like about that example so much is that what do I care if the store makes a couple dollars off of me for some random product?

If I got to have the, if I got to actually enjoy myself for this particular thing, like in some ways the focus on the store taking advantage just isn't even like part of my, it should, I think if I, my like rational self says that doesn't need to be part of the decision.

What matters is how valuable would this thing have been to you?

That's what really matters, not like is this store sort of pricing their goods in a way that seems sort of the platonic ideal of the prices for these goods.

No, you don't want to be the one who's like the fool in the sayings, you know, one born every day, that kind of thing.

It just feels like that's sort of a cultural status nobody wants to occupy.

But, you know, a lot of times if your goal is something like,

getting things done quickly or having some sort of deeper integrity in some kind of a process, right?

And you think, well, listen, actually the risk that this is gonna cost me a little bit more or whatever, all else being equal, it's a relatively small risk.

So really my only sort of pitch here is just to right size the risk, right?

Just to give it the space it deserves rather than the sort of like radioactive sense that I can't go anywhere near a situation that would make me feel a little bit foolish.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I will say, as a person who in my day-to-day life, I teach contract law, and in contracts, there are a ton of cases where you think, these people are spending so much money to litigate a dispute because neither of them is willing to feel like they were the sucker in this situation.