Yesterday, I spent north of two hours researching prices of various Pokémon cards and products. In the end, I decided to do nothing. Have you ever been on the long road to inaction?
For me, it started with a deal I spotted on Instagram. A certain collection box on sale offered the rare chance to get two otherwise pricey booster packs at retail prices. If you bought the maximum of eight boxes, you’d have 16 of those packs plus a bunch of other ones—and 200 euros less, of course.
“Tempting,” I thought, then browsed around to see what else was available. But I kept coming back to that box. Finally, I did more math. I looked up all the cards I actually cared about from that set. What did I discover? Even if I bought them at suboptimal prices, getting all of those cards outright would set me back 500 euros max. Those 16 booster packs, meanwhile, would likely contain not a single one of them.
In the Pokémon world, it’s not a secret that buying singles gets you more bang for your buck. Everybody knows you’re paying extra for the thrill of “What’s in the box?” But sometimes, you have to crunch the numbers for your exact situation to remember just how much cheaper individual cards are. After I saw them on the screen, I closed the tab and never looked back.
With the box deal dead in the water, I realized something else: An item on sale is always urgent, but buying single cards rarely is. Sure, those, too, go up in price, but since you’re generally paying less, you can always buy a few here and there. You don’t have to drop 500 bucks on a Sunday afternoon for fear of everything disappearing tomorrow. So instead of frantically ordering all the cards from various vendors, I just saved them all on a list. Now, I can buy them peu à peu, and I’m no longer in a rush to do anything.
More often than not, doing nothing is the best thing you can do. You might have more information tomorrow. You’re probably already on track today. What nobody tells you is that, sometimes, it takes just as long to convince yourself to stay put as it does to summon the courage to act.
The road to inaction may stretch far and wide, but it, too, is often a road worth traveling down. Don’t let anyone rush you along—and don’t feel bad for consciously deciding to do nothing at all.