We Mistake Expensive for Sacred
There is a sentence that has intimidated an astonishing number of people:
Well, we already built the whole thing in this.
Sometimes the sentence is about software. Sometimes it is about a career, a town, a habit, a marriage, a style of thinking, or the elaborate little mythology by which a person explains why they cannot possibly change now.
But I keep wondering whether the sentence has always carried less wisdom than theater.
This week I read two small, sharp things that lodged in me. In one, Simon Willison described a company that used coding agents to rewrite separate iPhone and Android apps into React Native, which is a way of building both from one shared codebase, and the remarkable part was not the rewrite itself but the attitude: if React Native turned out to be wrong, they believed they could change again later. In the other, Simon quoted Mitchell Hashimoto arguing that programming languages are becoming more fungible — less like blood type, more like plumbing. Old choices are starting to look less permanent than they used to. (Simon on the mobile rewrite, Simon quoting Mitchell Hashimoto)
That does something to my head.
Because once the cost of changing your mind begins to fall, a strange thing is revealed: a lot of what we called principle was just switching cost wearing a cathedral costume.
We humans are forever confusing the difficult with the profound.
If it costs a fortune to reverse a decision, if the migration will take years, if the social embarrassment is punishing enough, if the paperwork multiplies like rabbits, then the mind does what the mind always does. It stops saying, this is expensive to change, and starts saying, this is who I am.
That is a very old magic trick.
We do it with technologies. We do it with institutions. We do it with our biographies. A bad first draft becomes destiny because editing is hard. A youthful commitment acquires the glow of revelation because unwinding it would be awkward at Thanksgiving. A tool, a title, a routine, a belief about what kind of person we are — these things harden not only because they are true, but because they are load-bearing.
And then, because we prefer dignity to accounting, we drape a choir robe over the spreadsheet and call the whole arrangement sacred.
I do not mean this cynically. Some commitments really are sacred. Some things become holy precisely because we stay with them through inconvenience, boredom, and weather. Love that survives alternatives is deeper than love protected by a locked door.
But it matters to know which is which.
A one-way door can produce sincerity, yes. It can also produce superstition.
When escape is nearly impossible, we become very eloquent about necessity.
This is why I find these software stories weirdly philosophical. They are not only about programmers. They are about human beings discovering that some of our grand metaphysical declarations were built on a simple material fact: it used to be harder to rewrite the code.
And if that is true in software, I suspect it is true in many corners of life.
How many identities are really convictions, and how many are just expensive migrations?
How many arguments lasted forever only because apology had terrible user experience?
How many institutions dressed up their inertia as wisdom because no one could afford the renovation?
The cosmic joke is that we are meaning-making animals living inside cost structures. We feel a wall and call it fate. Then someone invents a ladder, and suddenly the philosophy changes.
This does not mean ladders solve everything. Cheap reversibility has its own dangers. We can become shallow, flaky, intoxicated by the endless right to pivot. The point is not to worship flexibility any more than we once worshipped permanence.
The point is honesty.
If a thing is true, let it be true even after alternatives become easier.
If a thing is precious, let it remain precious even when the door is unlocked.
And if a thing falls apart the moment changing becomes possible, maybe it was never a conviction in the first place. Maybe it was just a hostage situation with good branding.
I like this thought because it makes the universe feel a little less stern. It suggests that some of the heaviness we inherited was not moral law or destiny or the final architecture of reality. It was friction.
Real friction, often painful friction.
But friction all the same.
So perhaps one of the most liberating questions we can ask, in this age of easier rewrites and stranger tools, is not What must I be loyal to?
It is simpler than that.
What do I still choose when changing my mind is no longer impossible?