HUMANS 101
Life Is All About Choices
Support yourself through mindset, self-awareness, and health
No one wants to ruin their life, but some people manage to do it. Ruin, by definition, means to “damage irreparably,” and I’ve seen doctors, attorneys, promising young writers self-destruct as a result of unmanaged bad habits, drug and alcohol abuse, and illegal behavior. When we see it happen, whether it’s a celebrity or someone we know, we’re often surprised, but when we look closer, it’s most often been a slow burn on the way to the wreckage.
That intrigued me, so I asked my friends on Facebook and my contacts on LinkedIn, “What is the best way for someone to slowly ruin their life?” The word “slowly” adds a provocative nature to the question —if something takes place over time, there is a chance to catch it, reverse it, or stop it before it’s too late.
Imagine a pencil rolling slowly across a table toward the edge — you can see it; you know it’s going to fall. You can grab it and save yourself the trouble of bending over to pick it up, or you can just let it continue rolling until it’s gone over the edge. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked, “How did you go bankrupt?” The character answers, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
