An exploration of sunk costs, stubborn loyalty, and the psychology of sticking with things long after they’ve stopped serving us.
There’s a moment – usually around episode three – when I know.
I instinctively grasp that the Netflix series I’ve committed my evening to is going nowhere. The plot is staggering around like a Notts County back line defending a 1–0 lead in the 89th minute. The characters are flatter than the Kop after conceding to the opposition’s first attack. The dialogue feels like it was written by someone who once overheard a conversation in the Trent Navigation and thought, “Yes, that’s how humans communicate.”
And yet, I keep watching.
I stay up later than intended, letting the next episode autoplay while muttering “this is rubbish” and leaning forward as if proximity might somehow improve the experience. And then, at the end, the limp twist – the non ending, the emotional inducement that never pays off – and I declare, “I knew this was going to be crap!”
Anyone who has followed Notts County for more than a few seasons knows this feeling. You see the disaster coming. And yet you stay. You watch. You hope. You suffer. You return.
This isn’t just a streaming quirk or a footballing affliction. It’s a window into how humans make decisions – and why we often stick with political choices long after they’ve stopped improving our lives.
When Time Already Spent Becomes a Trap
The sunk cost fallacy, popularised by behavioural scientist Richard Thaler, explains why we persist with failing endeavours simply because we’ve already invested in them. Once you’ve spent two hours on a series, stopping feels like admitting defeat.
It’s the same logic that keeps Notts fans renewing season tickets after a relegation season that felt like a slow motion car crash. The 2018–19 implosion – relegated to the National League, the oldest Football League club tumbling into non league – was the ultimate example. We tell ourselves, “I’ve already been through this much pain – might as well see how the next chapter hurts.”
Research by Achen & Bartels shows voters behave similarly: sticking with a political party even when it consistently fails to deliver, because switching would mean acknowledging past choices might have been misguided.
We don’t like being wrong. So we keep watching. We keep voting. And the faithful keep turning up at Meadow Lane in the rain.
The Seductive Pull of Finishing Things
Completion bias – demonstrated by Kivetz, Urminsky & Zheng – shows that humans love finishing things, even when the task itself isn’t valuable. That little dopamine hit of completion keeps us glued to a mediocre series.
It’s the same impulse that keeps Notts fans in their seats until the final whistle of a match that was effectively over after 12 minutes. You know the ending. You’ve seen it before. But you feel compelled to see it again, just to complete the ritual.
Politics has its own version – voting the same way every election maintains narrative continuity. It avoids the discomfort of rewriting your own story.
The Need to Know How It Ends
The information gap theory explains curiosity as the tension between what we know and what we want to know. Even when a story is bad, we want closure.
This is why you’ll sit through a terrible finale just to confirm your suspicions. It’s why I’ll watch Notts concede a 94th minute equaliser even though I predicted it in the 63rd. It’s why people stay loyal to political stories long after the leaders have clearly run out of ideas. We want to see how the story ends — even if the ending is obvious, painful, or both.
Hope bias – explored by Tali Sharot – is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes. It’s the voice that whispers: “Maybe it’ll get better.” It’s the same psychological mechanism that convinces Notts fans that this season will be different, that the defence will hold, that the January signing will be the missing piece, that the footballing gods will finally give us a break.
Streaming platforms rely on this – and so do political parties and football clubs. Hope is powerful. Hope keeps people loyal long after logic has left the building.
Protecting Ourselves from Being Wrong
Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance explains how humans experience discomfort when beliefs and actions conflict. To reduce that discomfort, we often double down on our choices rather than revise them.
Stopping a bad series means admitting you made a poor choice.
Changing your political allegiance means admitting you may have misjudged something important.
Stopping supporting Notts County means… well, that’s not even an option. The club is a hereditary condition – you don’t choose it; it chooses you.
The brain prefers consistency over accuracy. Thus, we defend decisions that don’t serve us — because the alternative is psychological discomfort.
The Netflix–Politics–Notts County Triangle
Zoom out and the parallels become comically clear:
Identity
Political identity functions like a social identity. Supporting Notts County is the same – except with more trauma and fewer televised debates.
Loyalty Rewards
Netflix gives you sequels. Political parties give you slogans. Notts County gives me palpitations.
Switching Costs
Political switching feels like betrayal. Switching football clubs is even worse – it’s social treason.
Emotional Hooks
TV uses cliffhangers. Politics uses fear and hope. Notts County uses late goals – usually against us.
When Loyalty Becomes Harmful
Sticking with a mediocre series is harmless. Sticking with political choices that actively worsen your quality of life is not.
Achen & Bartels argue that voters often prioritise identity over outcomes. People would rather be consistent than be better off. Notts fans understand this instinctively; we’ve been prioritising identity over outcomes since 1862.
And sometimes the loyalty doesn’t disappear – it just migrates. When voters feel let down by a long standing party, they don’t always rethink their worldview; instead, they often shift to another group that feels familiar or adjacent. It’s less a change of direction and more a sideways shuffle – like abandoning a disappointing Netflix series only to start another in the same genre, written by half the same writers, starring many of the same actors, and somehow expecting a radically different ending.
But in politics, the consequences are real. Loyalty can become a form of self harm – a long, slow binge watch of a series that stopped being good years ago.
The Final Episode
Binge watching a bad Netflix series is an inoffensive quirk. Supporting Notts County is a lifelong endurance sport. Both reveal something profound about how we make decisions.
We cling to stories long after they’ve stopped serving us, preferring the comfort of consistency to the discomfort of change.
We let identity override outcomes, and sometimes, whether it’s a streaming series, a political allegiance, or a football club that specialises in emotional turbulence, we need to ask the simplest question: “Is this actually making my life better?”
If the answer is no, it might be time to stop letting autoplay run the show. But I’ll be honest – I will never abandon Notts County.
© Ian Kirke 2026
@ iankirke.bsky.socia