The heaviest price you pay is all the roads you didn't take.

Opportunity cost is an overlooked yet crucial metric in human action.

Sometimes, the price you pay by foregoing an alternative future matters a lot more than the cost of executing your action.

Formal education is an excellent example of this:

What could you have achieved if you followed your dreams instead of taking the road of compliance?

It is easy to analyze what happened and impossible to examine what never happened.