What following your element really costs

Any promise that doesn’t put a number on its cost is an incomplete promise. Here is the account, as honestly as it can be made.

What entry costs

A date. That’s all, and it’s deliberate.

There is no assessment, no forty-item questionnaire, no preliminary session. The one piece of information the reading depends on, you already have — you write it several times a year on forms without thinking about it. The only effort of entry is giving it.

This is the point where most people stop, not because of cost but because of mistrust. It’s a legitimate mistrust and it deserves a straight answer: nothing else is asked of you, nothing is sold to you at that moment, and you receive information you didn’t have before.

What the first six months cost

Attention, not money.

This is the part no one announces. Once your element is known, nothing spectacular happens: you receive simple indications, a few each month, suited to your nature and the time of year. They are short and often disappointingly ordinary — a gesture to move, a flavour to bring back, something to stop doing.

The real cost of this period is the cost of trying. An indication you read costs nothing and returns nothing. You have to hold it for two or three weeks to know whether it concerns you, and that is an effort of attention more than of will.

Many people fail here, and not through laziness: through impatience. They expected a transformation and received an adjustment.

What the year costs

Less than the year before. That is the reversal, and it comes faster than you’d think.

A routine that is addressed to you is a shorter routine. You stop buying on hypothesis, which for most people represents the majority of what they buy. You stop alternating between contradictory logics. You stop paying for products that will end up half-full at the back of a drawer.

Add up the unused jars of your last five years. It’s a figure no one wants to look at, and it is almost always higher than what a year of coherent care costs.

What the second year costs

Nothing new, and that is the point.

By this stage, what was an effort has become a default setting. You no longer think about what you apply in the evening, in the same way you no longer think about how to drive. The mental load disappears, and that is the true benefit — far more than the face.

The cost no one ever counts

There is one, and it is the highest of all: the cost of not knowing.

It appears on no receipt. It is made of years of misdirected effort, of products that were correct but wrongly addressed, of false conclusions drawn from lukewarm results, and above all of the slow giving-up that follows — the idea that there is nothing to be gained, because you tried a great deal and gained nothing.

Compared to that, the account in the other column is modest: a date, six months of attention, and a subtraction.

It is an investment whose particularity is that it diminishes with time instead of growing. There aren’t many of those.