As the titled mentioned, is there anything that we should do to avoid undesirable life consequences?
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.
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.
Sure: never go anywhere or do anything of substance or interact with anyone in any meaningful way. Avoid the potential for consequences.
Exist, but don’t live.
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.
Seriously, young people. Trust your gut.
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.
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.
