Ask HN: How to deal with opportunity costs and long time horizons?

Hi HN,

Background: I’m a 28 year old Front End Engineer for a small startup in SF.

I’m having a strange dilemma and I’d like to hear your thoughts / advice.

How do all of you deal with projects / endeavors that have uncertainty and take a long time to uncover the uncertainty? Recently, I’ve been thinking about diving into VR development in my nights and weekends, which are largely spent distracting myself with social media and other “infotainment” (Reddit). The time burns by painfully and I’ve been thinking about spending it better.

I've always been interested in games and startups and so I was thinking this would be an interesting path. VR seems nascent enough for participants to enter who don’t have a lot of capital. A solo venture may be too difficult but a small team may be able to do some damage?

Here’s my question: Is this something worth considering, due to how long it will take to validate? The fashionable approach to starting a company or a side project seems to be: Test it for 90 days and then pivot, continue, or quit. The problem with VR is that it will take me far longer to validate whether I’m even competent at it, since I’m starting from scratch and an “MVP” game requires a lot of moving parts (models, animations, gameplay, etc.) Is it worthwhile to spend, let’s say, 2-3 years experimenting and learning something only to find out that your efforts were fruitless? I find this especially worrisome because of the opportunity cost: I could likely start a different type of company, study to get a better job, or even spend my free time taking up a physical hobby like martial arts.

As an aside: the startup I work for could go out of business within the year as well, which stresses me out. I ask myself if I should be spending my spare time prepping for interviews and sending out resumes...

There is unfortunately only so much time in a day, and I struggle a lot with wondering how best to spend it. Any advice or thoughts are welcome. Thanks.