Vanity Activities

Summary

Vanity Activities A few weeks ago, I came across a ~4,000-word guide to something called “credit card churning”. The essay had gone viral. Plenty of people loved the piece. The writer seemed to care a lot. If you aren’t familiar, credit card churning is a term used to describe people who fully optimize their credit cards to get maximum rewards. (Airline points, hotel points, cashback.) One of the comments pointed out what I was thinking: “Isn’t this kind of just a hobby? It doesn’t really make that much money for the time invested.” This got me thinking about a whole category of activites that I will call “vanity activities”. . . . In business, a “vanity metric” is a statistic that sounds good but is not very useful. The number of pageviews on your website and the number of likes on your tweets are fun to look at and sound impressive, but optimizing for them completely misses the point if they don’t lead to something more important (e.g. profit). Thus, they are vanity! Our definition for vanity activity can be similar: something you do that seems more useful or virtuous than it really is.Credit card churning is a perfect example of this, because it is an activity that presents itself as useful but if pursued deeply can end up costing more (in time) than it is really worth. I wanted to start a list of other activities that might be classified as vanity, so here is my attempt: Reading the news. The news, perhaps deceptively so, feels very useful; staying informed seems virtuous. The easiest way to put this into perspective is to go read a random news homepage from a few years ago. 99 percent of it does not matter at all and you do not need to know it. The real reason most people read the news is for fun. Which is okay, but it’s better to be honest. This is vanity!Biohacking. The stated motive for people who get full blood test panels multiple times a year and pop 40 supplement pills a day is to stay healthy. That might be true for some of them. But it would be difficu...