## Progressive Summary **Layer 3**: **The real cost of a decade-long commitment is not foregone income — that is recoverable — but the alternatives with expiry dates that lapse during it; price the expiring options before signing.** **Layer 2**: "Giving up my youth, including my fertility, and foregoing income to train for 14 years..." — Dr. Arghavan Salles **Layer 1**: Feb 2023 viral self-report: surgeon Arghavan Salles names two costs of her 14-year training — income (recoverable) and fertility (expired). At 42, the second could not be bought back. ## Atomic Insight Standard opportunity-cost accounting prices the foregone salary, which later success can repay. But some alternatives are options with expiry dates — fertility windows, athletic primes, founding-era market windows, aging parents' remaining years. Their value decays on a clock that ignores your pipeline, and no terminal payoff restores them. [[Two-Way Door Decision Making]] distinguishes reversible from irreversible decisions; this note adds the time axis. A commitment that looks like a two-way door at signing becomes one-way partway through, because the options you would return to expire while you are inside. Decision rule before any multi-year commitment: list the live alternatives, mark each *recoverable* or *expiring*, and treat the expiring ones as the real price. If that price includes an option you are not consciously willing to spend, restructure the commitment — part-time, deferred, parallel-tracked — rather than discover the loss at exit. ## Cross-Domain Applications - **Finance**: option theta — holding an expiring option unexercised is itself a choice. - **Family planning**: the source case — fertility spent on a credential whose value she later rejected. - **Strategy**: market-entry windows close while incumbents perfect their pipelines.