bad decision | betsybeadhead

I have this situation going on. I’ve come up with a way to explain it. It is all a metaphor, but it works.

Say I have a friend who is terrible at driving on the freeway. She gets all flustered and upset with all the racing traffic. She needs to go downtown, so I tell her the best route to take that doesn’t use the freeway. I’ve taken that way myself many times. I give her my GPS with the route programmed in. I give her a map.

And she takes the freeway anyway. Then she gets frustrated and upset. Then she freaks out and just stops her car on the side of the road on a freeway overpass. Then she expects me to come rescue her. She expects me to leave work and drive to where she is and take care of her.

She’s created the problem. She had a perfectly acceptable way to get where she needed to go and refused to use it. She doesn’t try to take care of the problem herself. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a surprise. It was the logical result of the situation, because that is what always happens when she drives on the freeway.

Even though I did my best to prevent the problem that she is experiencing, she’s created the problem by ignoring me. And now she wants me to rescue her.

And I refuse.

And I’m seen as the bad guy.

She’s not acting like an adult. She’s not acting in a responsible manner.

If she did her own thing and got into trouble, but rescued herself, then it would be fine.

But that isn’t the situation. My plan is always to prevent the problem before it is a problem. And if I rescue someone when they ignored me to start off with, I’m enabling their bad decision making.

If someone keeps doing this, then I stop talking to them at all. They want me to help them, but only after they’ve made the situation infinitely and unreasonably worse.

I have no problem with helping people who try their best. I have a big problem with helping people who cause their own problems again and again. I feel that I’m aiding and abetting if I help someone who refuses to take care of herself.

If I wanted dependents, I would have had children.

Perhaps you have read about the New Hampshire man who recently lost his life savings on a carnival game. For some reason he thinks that he was cheated. There is something seriously wrong going on here, and it isn’t with the carnival game.

Perhaps it was rigged. That is par for the course with carnival games. It is how they stay in business. But they didn’t have a gun to his head. He felt cheated by them, but he let it happen.

The man is 30 years old, and his life savings amounted to $2,600. That alone is kind of sad. I certainly understand it. I’ve been there. This is the American way. Don’t think about the future at all. Don’t save, don’t plan ahead, don’t think about the repercussions of your actions. This is why people who smoke for years get surprised that they get lung cancer.

There is something very dangerous in this way of thinking. We are asleep when we think like this. But let us continue with the facts of the story.

He was trying to win an Xbox Kinect. They cost anywhere from $200 to $300 based on the capacity of the model.

He was playing a game called Tubs of Fun. The object is to toss balls into a tub. The problem is that the balls kept popping out the further he got into the game. He kept playing, and spending more money.

This is the very definition of throwing good money after bad.

He lost $300 to start off with. He would have been better off just buying the console, but by then he was hooked. He said “You just get caught up in the whole ‘I’ve got to win my money back.’”

Then it gets even worse. He went home. He didn’t keep working on impulse and the excitement of the game. He had time to cool off. But he didn’t. He got the rest of his money ($2,300) and went back to the carnival and continued to play the game. He lost all of it.

He did however win a stuffed banana with dreadlocks.

He contacted the police and is considering a lawsuit. The company that put on the carnival has since pulled the game and is interviewing the contractor of the game.

It isn’t the game that is at fault.

I find it doubtful that you can sue anybody for taking what you hand them. He wasn’t robbed. He got caught up in the game. He had time to cool off and didn’t use it. Nobody forced him to play the game.

“For once in my life I happened to become that sucker,” he said. “It was foolish for putting up my life savings.”

It is a sad story. It isn’t unfortunate. There wasn’t bad luck involved. There were a series of bad decisions. It is sad because he lost a lot of money for no good reason. It is sad because he didn’t know when to stop. It is sad because he still thinks it is somebody else’s fault that he threw away his money.
We have to stop letting ourselves be victims of our own lack of attention. We have to start being intentional. We have to wake up. We have to think about the repercussions of our actions, and our lack of action.