Step 1. Analize what's the possible consequence / event that you find undesirable
Step 2. Determine whether there's something you can do to prevent it: if there is, go to step 3, if there's not go to step 4
Step 3. Do it, do that thing that you believe can prevent it. And after you've done it, go back to step 2 and reevaluate if there's something else.
Step 4. Since there's nothing else you can do to prevent it, accept the fact that this consequence might happen and adapt to it... you already did all you could do given the circumstances and your current state/ability, you can't do anything about it anymore, so why worry? just accept it. Try and make it less "undesirable".
Step 5. Wait. Entertain yourself some other way.. you did your part.
Step 6. Either the event doesn't happen, or it happens but you already prepared to accept the consequences.
Step 7. Analyze what (not) happened and how it happened (or didn't). Try to understand it better so in the future you can better predict / adapt under similar circumstances, and go back to step 1.
Yes. There is an entire field of risk management devoted to this topic. It’s complex.
There are some strategies that you can use in a wide variety of situations: commit as late as possible, figure out how to undo something before you do it, imagine the worst consequences to an action and then decide if you can accept that worst outcome.
How to do those things? It depends on the situation. What else can you do? It depends on the situation.
Use a password manager, and invest in a hardware security key. Other than that totp, aka autheticator apps, is your friend when it comes to 2fa unless you can use your hardware security key. Stay away from sms and email authetication unless its the only choice. Besides that practice the 3,2,1 rule as others stated especially for your password manager vault and your totp seeds.
I usually recommend bitwarden for strangers since I dont know how discipline they are with backups, but currently I use keepassxc on desktop and keepassdx on my android. For hardware security keys, yubikey is kinda held at the highest honor but theyre are a bit on the pricer side. Since you would need to get at least 2 (one as a backup), their more budget friend model would run you 50-60$. They also go on sale time to time but imo its worth the investment and basically a must if you use a cloud based password manager.
Not happening. Every action and decision you make or don’t results in a consequence. Cause and effect. These consequences aren’t always obvious, negative, or noticeable right away but if you look far enough back on your life you will probably see how your choices snowballed to where you are now.
Some people think they are tragic characters living some Shakespearean tragedy where all the bad things happen to them are just the universe/fate giving them a bad hand. This choice to be nihilistic determinist leads to self fulfilling prophecies where they make no effort to improve their life.
Some people think they they are the masters of their own destiny and that despite there being bad parts of the world that are unfair they do the best they can to find success anyways and not throw a never ending self pity party. These people tend to get farther in life and are much more satisfied.
These differences in philosophies are indeed a personal choice everyone subconsciously makes. Whether to be the captain of the boat that is your life and steer it to the destination you want or to be a helpless passenger pushed by the oceans waves adrift until you crash.
A person in an abusive relationship chooses not to leave it through inaction. despite how much they think they have no choice because of X reasons. A severely overweight person who blames their genes and makes no effort to try and loose it. An unhappy married couple who want to divorce but convince themselves not to ‘for the kids’ so they live a decade or two of an unhappy existence subjecting their children to second hand misery when the better option for the kids long term wellbeing was to indeed split. There are consequences to hard decisions, sometimes its not even a right or wrong decision. The pieces just fall where they lay.
Not doing something to change the trajectory of your life is also a choice whether you want to recognize it as one or not. Its the choice of inaction that you justify to yourself.
The problem is that nobody wants to be at fault when things go wrong. Its much easier to scape goat blame to fate and all of life’s unfortunate circumstances. When you do point the finger at yourself for at least some of it you gain much more control over the direction of your life.
I agree with all of this except your example about choosing not to leave an abusive relationship. The most dangerous time for an abuse victim is when they try to leave their abuser. Often, there is a very real threat of death hanging over them. It’s an over-simplification at best and straight up victim-blaming at worst to say that a victim’s inaction is the reason they continue to be abused.
Start saving money while you’re young if you’re in a position to do so.
I can’t believe the number of colleagues I’ve had in the past that were making good money without having responsibilities (living at their parents’) and spending most of it at the bar or to go party in Cuba only to hear them complain years later that they didn’t have enough money saved to make a 10k downpayment…
Not sure about that one, the friends that started way late got on a rampage and crashed hard. Not being used to the highs might just make you not want to come back down.
The question was about irreversible consequences, not the best way to get into drug use. The later you start, the more stable you brain is - the less consequential it will be for your development. Not hating on drugs by the way, drugs are awesome. But they do mess with your brain.
Don’t waste energy trying to live life with zero irreversible or undesirable consequences.
Plan to avoid them, sure. Make good choices, sure. Accept that a lot of your learning, growing and opportunities will emerge from irreversible and undesirable outcomes
Yes, life is a continuous stream of irreversible consequences. You just have to make peace with that fact and you can live a much less stressful life. (I say this as someone who has not made peace with that fact yet.)
Agreed. Trying to have a zillion overcomplicated algorithms to avoid minor problems in life is a surefire way to plan your way into anxiety.
Accept there will be minor (and some major) issues in your life that could not have been anticipated and gamed in advance. Get good at problem solving and try to make decisions that bring you closer to your desired outcomes. A healthy balance between food decision-making and reasonable problem solving will get you further than anything else.
Do you mean decision-making on food or generally good decision-making? Not sure on what does it mean by reasonable problem solving, could we have some specific examples? Thank you.
The reasonable problem solving I was talking about is trying to make the best decisions you can given the circumstances, and knowing that even though you tried your best in that process, things will not always work out ideally. Being hard on yourself for making POOR decisions is understandable, but beating yourself up for making a good decision that wasn’t THE BEST DECISION POSSIBLE is counterproductive.
Giving examples for this sort of thing is difficult because of all of the nuance involved. Just make a step in the right direction every time you can, and your situation should generally be on an upward trajectory because of it. Allow yourself failure because each failure is an opportunity to learn; and if you learn, you also get to count that as win
Sunscreen. This is not limited to occasional outdoor activities, because the bulk of your UV exposure over a lifetime is your everyday exposure. Use an everyday SPF moisturizer on your face, neck, and arms.
Started a daily stretching routine recently. I read one of those ‘things you wish your younger self did’ posts and stretching came up a lot so I thought I’d give it a go. I guess there’s some pretty irreversible consequences that come from aging so doing what you can to limit that seems like a good idea.
Honestly I just started by winging it. I played a lot of sport as a kid and just started by doing some of the stretches I learnt growing up. Then you can kind of figure out which stretches you like most and what order you like doing them in. The key thing for me was really just inserting it into my existing routine. So if you already have a workout routine you can just add it to that. If you don’t then you could try doing it first thing in the morning when you get out of bed, or last thing at night before you go to bed.
Avoid relying on a single failure point, especially when it’s a person or group of people, when the consequences are anything of substantial value or importance to you.
Instead, when such a failure point exists (which is more or less inevitable in life), before committing, have an alternative exit plan prepared and thought out, including the trigger point for when it’s time to bail, and preferably have the exit plan already begun in some way so that starting it up when necessary isn’t too hard.
Getting trapped in a situation where people have power over you or your situation, but are letting you down, and you have no clear recourse, is a mind fuck and gets plenty of people. The exit plan is there to protect you and provide perspective as much as giving you “an out”.
A corollary of this is that if you can’t setup a satisfactory alternative/exit plan before you commit, then you shouldn’t commit, unless you’re absolutely certain that you can live with the worst case scenario. Which is dangerous though, because it’s easy to convince yourself that things will be fine and that the worst case scenario is actually better than it will turn out to be … better to stay agile and have the exit plan.
If you feel in your gut that she’s not the one, you have to trust that feeling. Going into a marriage you know is going to leave a part of your soul behind, reasoning that you’ll just give it a chance for a few years, that’s lost time. It never comes back.
You have to trust your gut. If you have a bad gut feeling but don’t want to tell others because of goals your mind is afraid of sacrificing, you need to trust your gut over your mind.
If that’s where you are, just know that there is a better life than you can imagine waiting for you, if you truly decide to feed your true self. Everything you think about losing is nothing compared to the continual warm glow of knowing you’ve got your own back.
Don’t give that up for someone else. Don’t be with someone who makes you betray yourself.
I truly wish I’d known this when I was 21. Got married super young and went through 20 years (4 years of dating, 16 of marriage) of hell. I had so many reservations that I refused to admit to myself, let alone others, because I didn’t believe i was worth loving, that I’d never find love again, etc.
My family actually celebrated when I left my ex. They’d apparently seen it the whole time.
I stayed with a woman for about five years after my gut knew.
One of the things that helped me start realizing I had to get out and make my own life was this line from a psychology course I listened to on youtube, talking about intuition:
If you ignore that thing that’s calling you forth, you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine.
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