Blown Out Car Speakers

(Note: This post is longer than my usual 5 minute or less reads.)

I love listening to music in my car, particularly with the volume loud and the subs bumping. There are not many better freedoms than a warm day, with the windows down and good music jamming.

About a year ago all my car speakers blew out. It started off slow. At first, just one of them blew out, so I had to adjust it to where the music was faded to not play out of that particular speaker. Then another blew, then the next. For months I just had one speaker to listen to music from in my car. All the volume pumped through that one speaker and I could only listen to music at a fraction of what I was used to listening to it at. Then of course that speaker blew out, and I’ve been left with 4 very horrible speakers for the last several months.

I thought about getting them replaced as soon as it happened. I asked around town for what the best prices were and found out that I’d have to pay about $200 to get them replaced with at least something decent. I didn’t mind the price. It sounds pretty fair to me, however, I’d still rather my speakers have just not blown out in the first place. Regardless, I decided to wait, and wait, and wait. And then I realized a whole year had gone by and I still hadn’t fixed my speakers.

This whole time I could’ve been enjoying my music on full blast as I drove around, but the immediate inconvenience of taking the time to schedule an appointment, dropping the car off, getting picked up, and paying the $200, was the reason I avoided it.

The ironic thing is, here I am a year later and the cost will be the exact same. I didn’t save any money at all by waiting, and I missed out on that whole year that I could’ve been playing music loudly.

I think we do this in our lives a lot. I know I do. Something goes wrong and instead of making a change or fixing it immediately, we decide to let it linger. The cost of making change is too high, so we imagine the problem will just go away, or we can avoid it and it will get better.

Weeks, months, or years pass, and we realize that part of our life is still broken. It still lingers. We miss whole portions of our lives, all because we don’t want to pay the immediate cost of time, discomfort, pain, confusion, or uncertainty. At the end of the day, the cost is still the same, if not higher than we would’ve paid in the short term; and we still have the same problems to address.

Change is inevitable. It’s almost always inconvenient, and often painful. We cannot avoid change, but we can choose when we choose to embrace it, when we choose to take the risk, etc. It will no doubt hurt, and it will cost time; but the sooner we do it, the sooner we get to enjoy jamming out to music in our car speakers.