Google the meaning of Sacrifice’ and you’ll find ‘to give up something important for something that seems more important‘.
(There are other meanings, like offering something to a god, that aren’t relevant here).
But the question is – if you’re giving up something of lesser value for something of more value, is it really a ‘sacrifice’?
How is it different from any other transaction?
Because that’s exactly what you do in a transaction. Give up something you have for something you want more.
If I give cash for bread, it’s because I think that amount of cash is less, or at most equal, in value to the bread I receive for it.
If you sell shares, it’s because you think the cash is more in value to you at that moment than the shares, and vice versa if you buy shares.
In that sense, you sacrifice money for bread or shares.
No Real Sacrifice
Whenever I heard the word ‘sacrifice’ I always had in mind something hard, something like renunciation.
You renounce or give up something.
You do something very hard, something that a normal person wouldn’t, or would hesitate to.
But it’s an incomplete picture because it only covers half the canvas, depicting just the ‘giving up’ part of a sacrifice.
You sacrifice ‘for’ something, which means there’s also something you receive.
It might be intangible, like a god’s blessings or someone’s well-being, but there is something you get for your sacrifice, and that something outweighs the cost of the sacrifice.
Moreoever, if you believe that you have agency, that you choose your actions and no one compels you, then you’d agree that you entered the sacrifice voluntarily, of your own free will.
So you did something that you chose to, that gave you more benefit than it cost you – then where is the sacrifice?
I think the answer is that there is no real sacrifice.
At most, there’s opportunity cost – the thing you give up, that which you forego to get what you value more.
It could be giving up a couple of hours of sleep to exercise or work on your hobby, or not spending money on going out to save up for a car or a vacation.
This might seem like a pedantic game, simply playing with words, and perhaps that’s not entirely wrong.
But it can be useful because words like ‘sacrifice’ seem loaded.
They come with a lot of baggage, powerful words apparently signifying deep, meaningful actions.
Piercing through their bubble helps to shatter their illusion and clarify your own choices and actions.
Another such one is ‘self-control’ or ‘(self) discipline’.
‘Discipline’ brings to mind rigid obedience to a set of rules.
Avoiding junk food or alcohol. Exercising, reading, writing, making time to learn a skill – do this long enough and you’ll probably hear that you’re very ‘disciplined’.
Again, it’s based on the fallacy that you ‘want’ to indulge in things that others, those who’ll call you disciplined, do – but you ‘hold yourself back’ because of your discipline.
But if you genuinely enjoy what you do, you wouldn’t think of it as a sacrifice.
And you’ll probably realize you don’t have that much discipline as others might think you do.
It’s just another transaction where you give something up for something more important to you.
You might give up junk food or sleep or going out to do something that has more value for you.
So someone who exercises or studies daily might be an extremely lazy and disorganized person otherwise.
Yet those who only look at one aspect of a person tend to extrapolate it to make a judgment about the person as a whole. It’s like judging a book by the first chapter.
It’s just that exercise or study is something that matters a lot to him so he makes time and effort to do it.
There probably are times when it’s tempting to give up, but what keeps a person going isn’t so much ‘discipline’ as it is second order consequences – knowing that the temporary discomfort is outweighed by future value.
That’s not to say that this isn’t a commendable trait. In fact, such people are among the most impressive you’ll find.
Impressive not for their ‘discipline’, but because of their passion and deep commitment to what they consider matters to them.
And because of their awareness (and acceptance) of opportunity costs, things they give up, to make time for what they want – which is what frees you from distractions.
As well as their understanding of second order consequences – to push through and persist through difficulties, that are inevitable, and in fact desirable – because if it was easy it couldn’t be worth it.
Sacrifices Aren’t Trumpeted
“I’ve sacrificed so much for this.”
Anyone who brags about or keeps bringing up what he’s sacrificed probably regrets it, and wishes he hadn’t.
A person who sacrifices his career to spend time with his family or goes hungry to feed his kids won’t constantly remind them of it, trying to make them feel guilty or responsible for his decisions.
Because it was something he chose, and because he chose it believing he was getting something worth more for what he ‘sacrificed’.
Imagine someone who gives up a high-paying job for social service, like a Mahatma Gandhi leaving his law practice.
Or someone voluntarily leaving a comfortable life to undergo avoidable suffering – say a Nelson Mandela spending a quarter of a century in jail or a Witold Pilecki volunteering for Auschwitz.
To an outsider, it’ll probably look like a tremendous sacrifice because it’s hard to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
All you’ll see is an apparently terrible transaction – someone giving up something precious for something awful in return.
Like paying a billion dollars to be whipped and beaten.
It’s hard to imagine that someone in their right mind would ever do that.
And no wonder it looks like a sacrifice.
And I think it is a real sacrifice, and if you asked anyone else they’d probably think so too.
But I also think that if you asked the very person who actually made the sacrifice, they wouldn’t consider it one.
They did what they wanted.
What they got meant far more to them than what they gave up, and they probably wouldn’t have it any other way.
It would have been far more painful to continue as they were, and to not have made a sacrifice – after all, you usually get plenty of opportunities to backtrack.
It’s easy to try to be cynical about this and argue that such people didn’t do anything great; they merely acted in their self-interest.
They derived something, some value, from their sacrifices – perhaps personal fulfilment, happiness, social esteem, validation or whatever.
It’s a pointless argument because you can say that about every single action (especially if you define ‘value’ broadly enough); it doesn’t tell you anything new.
On the contrary, I think they deserve far more respect for this because what they did was of their free will and not under someone’s orders.
Even more impressive, it probably wasn’t the result of a blind, unquestioning commitment to any ideology but the culmination of a process of reasoning and introspection to carve an independent path in a world pushing you in a different direction.
So a sacrifice is only a sacrifice to the rest of the world; to the one making the sacrifice, it is anything but.
A sacrifice is invisible to the one who makes it.
For all the rest of it, words like sacrifice and discipline are what people tell you to get you to do what they want you to.
They aren’t things you do to yourself, unless you act without using your mind, or you torture yourself and regret your actions.