How do you turn around the cumulative effects of bad decisions or bad luck?

October 10, 2009 10:05 PM

How do you turn around the cumulative effect of bad decisions or bad luck?

A friend recently pointed out to me that in life chaos breeds chaos. When one area of life is out of whack it causes other areas to get out of whack as well. This seems to have a cumulative snowball effect that becomes difficult to dig out of and causes more seemingly unrelated problems. I've particularly seen it occur in couples who marry young, possibly expecting a child, without an income to support themselves and a lack of knowledge about how to manage the organization of a household. The financial problems snowball and it seems impossible to get ahead, and eventually they become relational problems. I've also had friends with chronic health problems that could be solved by losing weight but every time they tried to exercise something like sickness would get in the way. Do any of you have any experience turning situations like this around? How did you do it? Do you know people who turned situations like this around? How did they do it? How would you help people who are in this position? While it would be easy to label some of this a poverty or discipline problem, it's also a systemic problem. How do you intervene at the systemic level rather then judge or enable?

posted by jeffreyclong to work & money (9 answers total)

Life is nothing if not a cluttered room. Best advice I've ever received for dealing with a cluttered room is ...

Start at one corner, deal with every piece of clutter in that corner, proceed clockwise from there, or counter if your so inclined, but keep it linear (circular?). Deal with each piece of clutter as it comes, keep progressing in a consistent direction.
posted by philip-random at 11:20 PM on October 10, 2009 [4 favorites]

In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values author Robert Pirsig discusses "gumption traps" as being one kind of innate human behavior that is both limiting to the person until they are recognized, and likely to be a source of change as soon as they are recognized, usually because of fatigue with failure and disappointment. When you're sick and tired, enough, of being sick and tired, you actually change. But it may take you decades of being sick and tired, to get that sick and tired.

Shrug. The worst gumption traps are the ones we ignore the hardest. Still, Pirsig does offer practical advice for recognizing, avoiding, and recovering from many common gumption traps. And once you've got the means of doing that for some simple ones he illustrates, its a lot easier to be cleverer about avoiding or overcoming some of the more subtle ones you may find in life.
posted by paulsc at 11:40 PM on October 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

I wrote a long and embarrassing explanation of all the hassles we've found ourselves in over the last 20 years, but long story short, we learnt from our mistakes and stopped doing the stuff that kept putting us in a hole. Over time, we acquired assets, and skills and better jobs and better ways of being in a relationship. it's not perfect, but the difference between us then and us now is mostly what we know, and learnt from experience, not from what people told us.
posted by b33j at 1:19 AM on October 11, 2009 [2 favorites]

The best advice I can give is to make sure to leave energy for the unexpected. So many people run themselves ragged on the day to day business of living that they have nothing left over for the random tragedies that are the reality of life. It doesn't take much to derail an otherwise good life - always leave a little wiggle room for the unexpected.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 1:37 AM on October 11, 2009 [3 favorites]

Yeah, you've got to just start working on one problem at a time. Actually a lot of people think this is closely related to the problems of people in poverty. If you have 1 problem, you fix it. If you have 100 problems, what's the point in fixing the one?

You've got to set goals, and work on one thing first and get it done. IMO health is the most important.
posted by delmoi at 2:03 AM on October 11, 2009

Some social theorists would argue that this is where social capital comes in.

When people manage to bounce back from stressful events and keep their lives together, they do it by drawing not only on their own personal strengths, but also on their connections with other people - family, friends and the wider community. That's social capital. It's a societal thing, really, but you can try testing your personal social capital with this handy questionnaire. [Google PDF]

In every society, some people get marginalised - because of poverty, or race, or class, or illness, or because they made a bunch of bad decisions. Whatever the reason, some people tend to have low social capital. People who live in particularly disfunctional public housing estates, for example, tend to score really low on questionnaires like the one above. People who volunteer or take part in community activities tend to score much better.

So you're right, a person can make one bad decision which leads to a cascade of bad decisions, with horrible consequences for everyone involved, and often it's not just a result of individual failure. The systemic factor at work is that when things began to fall apart, the person had no-one to call on for help. Or, they tried, but there was no-one who was functional enough, powerful enough, or willing enough to really turn things around. That's what it means to lack social capital.

When you see NGOs or government agencies funding projects that seem a bit petty and self-indulgent, a bit removed from the 'big picture' - community murals, collective gardens, drop-in centres, cultural groups - they're often trying to build social capital in their communities. The idea is that the more connected people feel to their communities, and the more trusting relationships they have in their lives, the less likely they are to completely fall apart when bad fortune hits.

There are critics of social capital on both sides of politics. Some on the left say it's a fascist concept that gives the government an excuse to leave the poor to help each other. Some on the right say it's a socialist notion that gives bleeding heart liberals an excuse to fund feel-good programs while allowing people to shirk individual responsibility. But there's plenty of research to suggest social capital is worth fostering.

Where all of this leaves you and your friends, I don't know. But caring for them and others as much as you can, and being involved in your community in general can't hurt, and might help.
posted by embrangled at 5:40 AM on October 11, 2009 [9 favorites]

I'm definitely having this experience right now. It seems like every time we try to get ahead, something happens. Last week it was a flat tire, and I just lost my shit over that. That was accidental, not the result of a bad decision, but if we had made better decisions to begin with, it wouldn't be the financial hardship that it is.

Anyway, there's nothing "systemic" that can be done in our situation, save for someone giving us a lot of money. We're the ones who have to get up, dust ourselves off, and keep going. I realize that this is more difficult in cases of REAL poverty, not just financial discomfort, but for many people, this is what it boils down to - doing whatever it takes to extricate yourself from a bad situation.

However, I think mental illness pays a part in many people's "stuckness," though, and addressing that is something society should pay more attention to.
posted by desjardins at 6:36 AM on October 11, 2009

I'm in this situation right now. A sense of black humour helps. When the fifth car problem in 6 months happens you can smile a little at the absurdity of it all and use the tire iron for its intended purpose, not to work out frustration.

What's making it possible to turn things around this time, for me, is:
* a clearer perception of what is actually happening,
* what its impacts really are, and
* a larger set of tools to process the thoughts and feelings that come with those events.

The clearer perception is partly a result of having been through some of it before and knowing I eventually got through those crises, and partly the ability to separate the events from the emotions (and knowing that by moving the emotions to the side I'm reducing some of the impacts of those events.)

Knowing more about how things like anxiety and depression work physiologically makes it easier to anticipate their effects, and means I don't get so down on myself for being so human as to have these 'flawed' responses to life.

The larger set of tools has to do with things I've learned about my own cognitive distortions, and some outside support I'm getting for things like mindfulness and relaxation (I find the Progressive Muscle Relaxation to be especially helpful when under stress.)

It's strengthening each part of my coping mechanisms that helps put me in a place where I'm better able to ride out the rough patches. A poor analogy would be a car that has all four shocks wrecked by a bad road; putting one strong new one in place only makes things a bit better, but to get back to a smooth ride I'll need to strengthen all my supports.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 9:39 AM on October 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

Just rereading your question, and realized what I had to say didn't cover the systemic part of it. My experiences are from the subjective side of things (i.e. a user of services), but I've seen enough to know that you need a varied and engaged support system whose parts communicate with each other. It's made quite a bit of difference to have my support workers and doctors talk with each other and be aware of what has already been done, and why; not just in terms of their resources but also in spotting errors and avoiding duplication of efforts.

You don't mention specifically what kinds of people (or problems) you are trying to help, or what your relationship is to them. This makes a difference to what you can do (and even what you should do, in my opinion.) I'd have different suggestions for a counsellor than I would a family member, for example.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 10:01 AM on October 11, 2009