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

    • 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.

        • Yeah, sorry. I wasn’t talking about food.

          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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

      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.

  • Try to keep your cool in messy situations, that way you can easier think about how to get the least worst or even a good outcome. But it can be hard, maybe something like tapping on your arm can help to distract and clear the mind

    I know that this does not answer your question, but i really cant think of something that was not already told

  •  bstix   ( @bstix@feddit.dk ) 
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    31 year ago

    It’s difficult to avoid them, but you can obviously make an insurances against some undesirable consequences, like house fire or illness.

    Also keep a buffer of money to solve sudden stuff. Like, don’t travel without having enough cash to get a return ticket, or if you rely on a car, you should always have enough money to make a down payment for a new one when it inevitably breaks.

    In general you shouldn’t have to be afraid of irreversible consequences. You have to break an egg to make a cake. Changes are most often for the better.

    Some things are obviously more serious than others and sometimes you just can’t know everything up front. Like having a child. That’s a leap of faith that you just have to do if you want to. Changing jobs can also be nerve wrecking, but you can probably insure your income or make savings in case things don’t work out.

    Is there anything in particular you’d like to be able to undo?