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 difficult to say that ‘biohacking’ is always as useful as people who practice it would claim. There may be another motive here, which is that they simply enjoy biohacking. They like seeing the blood numbers go up. Or down. Or whatever. It’s a game.
- Ethical consumption. It feels virtuous and useful to not use a plastic straw. Or to not cut down a tree for Christmas. But these activities are not actually saving the world. They are not even the most environmentally conscious behavior changes you could be making in your daily life (for starters, you could stop eating meat). I think most people do these things because they feel good, not because they are good, which makes them vanity activities. (To be clear, that does not make them bad.)
- Career development and ‘networking’ events. The stated motive for going to a networking event is that you’d like to further your career, make some connections. Honestly, though? I think most people who go to these events just like meeting people. It can be fun. Socializing is good. Again, this is a great motivation to want to go to networking events. It just is not what most people say. Which makes it something of a vanity activity.
- Productivity optimization. The stated motive for reading 10 books like Atomic Habits every year and paying $49 per month for productivity software is that you are making yourself much more effective. Are all of these people actually becoming that much more effective? I doubt it. I work with Atomic Habits readers and non-Atomic Habits readers and haven’t seen much of a difference. Instead, I feel like the real motive for most of these people is that they simply enjoy doing productivity stuff. They like checking the boxes. They like reading self-help books for the sake of it. That’s okay, but it isn’t as useful as it seems.
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. . .
Why write any of this?
I think it’s worth examining the things you do in life under this lens. If you do, I think you may realize that one of two things is the case:
- You realize something you do is a vanity activity and decide it’s not worth doing anymore. [0]
- You uncover your true motive for doing something and make peace with it. You accept that credit card churning is a game you enjoy and would prefer to spend time on instead of, I don’t know, going for a bike ride.
What might be a vanity activity for me might not be for you because we have a different relationship with it. Regardless, I think this is a helpful thing to think about. Time matters, a lot, so it’s worth thinking twice about how we spend it.
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[0] This was my exact course of action when, a few years ago, I realized that credit card churning was a game. And that I was making less money researching credit cards than if I was just doing real work.
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