The Sunk Cost Fallacy

What happens when in a moment, devotion turns to decay? When tending the same garden no longer yields fruit, yet we water it still, out of memory, guilt, or the belief that love alone can summon life from exhausted soil. We cling to what we once built, long after it has stopped belonging to us, because leaving feels like betrayal. every hour invested becomes another thread binding us to something already slipping beneath the surface.

Not everything that asks to be kept was meant to last.

We mistake endurance for grace. We confuse loyalty with wisdom. We call it faith when it is simply fear wearing sacred clothes. The truth, when it finally arrives does not roar. It settles. It stands Quietly in the doorway, reminding us that what we’ve been trying to preserve is already gone, and that the only thing left to hold is absence itself.

At first, loss appears as emptiness; the echo of what once stood. But emptiness, if you listen closely, has texture. It hums with the residue of what has been taken, a faint pulse that refuses to fade.

Some things fall apart quietly, without spectacle. They don’t shatter, they thin. They lose colour, weight and meaning, until all that remain is the outline. And we keep touching that outline, trying to remember what it once contained. Fingers tracing the lines of fantasies that used to exist.

We are taught to honour what survives. Yet most of what matters never does. It leaves behind fragments, scents, gestures, phrases, that no longer belong to any living thing. And still we collect them, name them sacred, and arrange them in the order of before.

Perhaps that is how grief sustains itself: through repetition, through the ritual of keeping what has already gone.

There is a tenderness in ruin that only appears when you stop trying to rebuild it. The brokenness itself begins to breathe. The hollow places speak in New tones. You start to understand that what has collapsed was once the framework of meaning, and now it has become the proof that meaning was always temporary.

To love something truly is to admit it will one day dissolve. But this knowing does not dull the ache. It only sharpens it. You will see the futility of holding on and yet you hold on anyway. Because what else is there to do with hands?

We tell ourselves that staying is noble, that to endure is to honour what was, but there are kinds of endurance that are only slow forms of drowning. The water rises so gently that you don’t notice when it reaches your mouth.

The mind tries to make sense of it. It keeps ledgers, counts the hours, rehearses the reasons. It whispers. Look how much I have given. As if balance could be restored through calculation. Grief has no economy. It trades in weight, not worth. You cannot recover what has sunk; you can only learn the contours of the void it leaves. And still, the body continues; brushing its teeth, folding clothes, answering calls. It obeys the mechanics of survival while the spirit remains gasping for air while water fills your lungs. There is a strange mercy in the way the body moves even when belief doesn't follow.

In the silence after collapse, the world feels both flattened and too large. The days stretch wide but remain empty at their centre. You walk through them as if through a room stripped bare, echoes where furniture used to be, dust that refuses to settle. Time moves, but you don’t. There is no new beginning waiting on the horizon. Only the slow, unspectacular passing of hours, the repetition of gestures, the muted hum of a life that continues out of habit rather than conviction.

Sometimes that persistence feels like cruelty. Sometimes it feels like grace. Mostly, it just feels like inertia; the body carrying forward what the soul has stopped believing in. Sometimes I imagine that all that has been lost still exists, but in subtler forms, the way steam remembers water. The way silence remembers song.

Yet, that comfort feels unearned, a story told to soothe the ache, because what is truly gone does not return in gentler shape. It simply lingers, a low hum beneath the consciousness, a shadow that no longer follows but stains the light. The memory of it breathes through everything, but never in ways we can hold.

There are nights when the air feels too still, and the outline of what once was sharpens again. The Mind replays what could have been kept, what might have been saved if you’d just don't something different; as though repetition could rewrite the end. But there are no answers in the echo, only the soft resistance of time refusing to turn back. The world continues indifferent. You move through it like a ghost wearing a familiar name.

The days that follow are quieter, but not in peace. They are filled with the dull hum of absence, a weight that does not shift. You begin to understand that some things do not end cleanly, they dissolve inside you, slow and uneven, until you can no longer tell where the ruin stops and the body begins.

Everything feels slightly unstitched. There are gestures you still make out of habit, the way you check for what is no longer there, the way your hands reach for tools you can’t bear to use. Even language betrays you, words that once felt steady now break apart under their own meanings.

People say that time will fill the space, but it doesn't. It only hardens the edges. It teaches you how to live around what’s missing, how to fold the emptiness into the rhythm of things, how to appear whole while knowing you are not.

This is not despair. It is something quieter, a dull, persistent knowing that what was lost still owns a portion of your breath. And so, you keep walking through the outline of the life that remains. Not rebuilding, not beginning again, just continuing.

The days become repeittion of the same gesture: rising, remembering, enduring. you stop searching for meaning in the wreckage. You stop naming the ache. Eventually, even grief becomes the background noise; still constant, but muted.

There is no resolution here. Only the slow erosion of certainty, the thinning of belief, the quiet admission that not everything loved can be salvaged or transformed. What remains is stillness, heavy, unspectacular, faithful. It does not promise renewal. It does not ask for surrender it simply stays.