Finally, I want to take a moment to say that while there are many bad decisions you can make in your life, perhaps none is worse than making no decision.
We all must make decisions — every day, big and small, we have to choose what to eat, what to wear, who to talk to, how to spend our time, and so on. If you’re not choosing what happens in your life, then you are simply not living, period.
The problem, as we discussed, is that every decision is accompanied by costs, risks, and sacrifices. Often, if we’re good at structuring our lives, we will find risks and costs that we’re happy with, and perhaps we even enjoy taking on.
But a lot of the time, we’re not going to be thrilled with the risks and costs of our decisions. And often we will try to ignore those risks and costs. We will try to pretend that they didn’t happen or that they weren’t our fault.
If we do this enough, then we may even reach a point where we decide we want to experience no downside in life — that we don’t think we should have to deal with any risks or costs, no matter what we do. On the one hand, this makes us an entitled and self-absorbed twat. On the other, while it is annoying to others, it only harms ourselves.
Refusing to be accountable for your decisions is a decision. Refusing responsibility for the costs of your choices is a choice. It is possibly the worst choice.
Because when you give up the desire to make a decision — when you choose indecision — then you are no longer the cause within your own life, but the effect. You no longer determine your own fate, instead you hand it off to others around you.
And while this may make you feel comfortable in the short-term — to be able to say, “See, it’s not my fault things didn’t work out, and X, Y, and Z happened!” — it will utterly destroy you in the long-term.
Make decisions. Choose your own life. Live with the risks because the risks are what make it meaningful.
And never forget, you’re still just a fucking monkey with a screen.