As the titled mentioned, is there anything that we should do to avoid undesirable life consequences?
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
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.
Figure out exactly what undesirable life consequences means to you. Some people dream of a quiet life with pets and hobbies, some would call that a failure.
But no, you can’t avoid all negative life consequences. Even if life is a 1:1 totally predictable processing machine (it’s not), you still can’t control all the inputs
Try to avoid jumping off a tall building into a herd of angry goats infected with anthrax while shooting up meth with a dirty needle.
Do not parachute into hostile dictatorships naked and passionately screaming the name of the country’s dictator’s mother; then when the police come to deal with you, throw random narcotics at them.
Refrain from public interspecies fornication for the duration of your visits to the sacred sites of major religions.
Do not permit the bandsaw to become acquainted with your neck.
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.
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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…
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One thing that comes to mind is, avoid applying and following every rule to the extreme.
Like how you did here with rule 1 😂
Don’t be a dick.
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.
3-2-1
3 copies of data
2 different storage medium
1 set of data at an off-site location
Commonly refered by the sailors as “one spouse in each port”
Don’t break more than one law at a time
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