Everything is a tradeoff, as sages are quick to remind us. For instance, you could be stabbed in the gut with a rusty knife... or... you could trade that happening... for it not happening. The problem with this "everything is a tradeoff" positions — which position is, to be fair, much better than what it is cultivated to destroy, the naive view that nothing is a tradeoff — is that while it is technically correct that decision between alternatives is technically a tradeoff, what people usually mean by a "tradeoff" in this sense is actually movement along the production possibility frontier (ppf), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production%E2%80%93possibility_frontier , or something analogous to it: you have to be moving from one maximally-attractive possibly state to another maximally-attractive possible state. Everyone knows that it's possible to do worse than the limit of the ppf, to descend into the cozy bubble of that illustrative diagram, possibly to sink to the origin. You can just be lazy and do that. You can just destroy all of your guns and butter in a fit of madness and get there. It's not a tradeoff anyone would want to make, but it is always available.

And, in real life, a lot of the decisions we face are like this. "Tradeoffs" in a technical sense, but one of the decisions is obviously worse, so the expression "it's a tradeoff" doesn't really apply.

(PS: Come to think of it, there are also a lot of situations where you *can't* tradeoff for more of something, for love nor money, or at least that you can afford, and so those aren't really tradeoffs either (there's no trade to be offed).)