I completely agree with the idea that we live in a world of “unlimited bowling.”

In an economics class in college in the 1980s, a prescient professor of mine put this question to the class: “How do you price things if the marginal cost is zero?”

I often think of that question, since in the past decades the marginal cost of so many things has indeed dropped to zero. Things that used to be expensive or unavailable altogether are now available for free: unlimited access to information on the Internet, thousands of free smartphone apps that perform tasks that previously required a camera, video camera, voice recorder, decibel counter or metronome – to name only a few.

Many things which are not free have nonetheless plummeted in cost, such as clothing and entertainment in the form of online streaming.

The pandemic has forced many of us to stay at home and create our own boundaries to make up for structures that have been taken away. We find ourselves with an endless supply of choices of what to do with our time, yet only a few of them serve our true purposes.

This makes Seth Godin’s question particularly relevant: “Given that we have these choices, the question is what will we do with them?”