Some Of You Should Uber To Restaurants More

Look: for reasons entirely beyond me, Taking A Taxi has always been in my mental bucket of Things Only Rich People Do, of the kind where no matter how wealthy I become I still feel naughty doing them.

On the other hand, Going To Restaurants – while once in my mental bucket of Things Only Rich People Do More Than A Couple Times A Year – has shifted into my Pretty Normal Activities bucket,[^1] so for better or worse I now do it fairly frequently.[2]

But it turns out that money is fungible,[^3] and dollars spent on taking a taxi are not inherently more or less egregious than dollars spent eating out. So if the total cost of your night out is "cost of activity" + "cost of travelling to the activity", you should basically consider those two items as a package.

Now: if you live in a big and expensive city, in my experience, ubering 20 mins further away from the center can often get you a nicer and more interesting dinner at a lower price, which more than compensates for the additional travel costs. (And yes you could have got there with an hour of public transit, but your time is valuable and also you wouldn't have actually done that, so it's moot). Yet I don't see or hear of many people doing this.

I promise you I understand how narrow a demographic this post is relevant to: a particular type of pretentious bobo living in one of a handful of cosmically expensive cities. I dearly hope that this doesn't describe all of you, but also I suspect that a non-trivial segment of you share this malady, so here we are.

[^1]: I'd love to read more about how much this is a broader cultural shift vs I've just moved into a different culture vs a "during your childhood, you were a child" effect.

[^2]: I'm not sure it's for the better! I do really like restaurants, but I suspect that if I sat down and really calculated the value I get out of different forms of spending, I wouldn't get enough value from restaurant-eating to justify them relative to cost. But man is a social animal, and my people go to restaurants a lot.

[^3] [citation needed].