# face the music (owed)

*Ordinarily means:* to accept the unpleasant consequences you have been avoiding

choosing the fixed cost of contact over the running cost of steering around it, walking the model into a wall it already knows is there.

- Computed level: L19 (depth in the emergence graph, not abstraction)
- Status: review  ·  Domain: model and reality

## Emergence
**Emerges from:** [choice](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-choice.decision), [cost](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-cost.economic), [contact](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-contact.physical), [wall](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-wall.range-end), [model](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-model.representation), [maintenance](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-maintenance.upkeep), [pay](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-pay.economic), [information](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-information.knowledge)

**Through:** The wall is already in the model; what is being paid for is the detour around it, a maintenance cost that runs for as long as contact is deferred, and facing converts the open-ended spend into one fixed payment.

**Novel properties:**
- fixed cost replacing running cost
- collision already priced in
- deferral as open-ended spend

## Examples
- A company that finally writes down the bad asset spends in one quarter what pretending cost it every quarter. *(finance)*
- The confession takes ten minutes; the secret took two years of bookkeeping. *(society)*
- Declaring the migration failed frees the team that the workaround had been billing weekly. *(engineering)*

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*Canonical: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-face-the-music.owed*  
*Structured data: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-face-the-music.owed.json*  
*Every definition provably resolves to space, time, energy and pattern.*