Flow State

There are days I feel like the old man yelling at the sky.  Okay, most days.

Not because I think everything used to be better. It wasn’t. But somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching people that choices have consequences. Worse, we started treating the mere existence of consequences as injustice.

I see it constantly with students. They’ve never been allowed to fail. Never been allowed to sit in discomfort. Every setback becomes trauma. Every criticism becomes harm. Nobody says, “OK, you’re offended. So what? You’ll survive.” Nobody says, “You’re stronger than this.” Nobody says showing up, paying attention, and doing the work is simply required. Instead, we cushion every landing and remove every consequence, then act confused when resilience disappears.

And it’s not just kids.

I see the same mentality in the news almost every day. Someone makes a choice – often a whole series of choices – then complains about the predictable outcome as if it was imposed on them by society.

Last week, there was a story about a professor who married a woman from South America after an entirely long-distance relationship. Her immigration approval was delayed, and the article framed it like they were being cruelly “separated.”

Separated? They were always separated. The entire relationship existed in different countries. He chose to marry someone who was not a U.S. resident. He chose not to move there while waiting for the visa process. Those are choices. Nobody forced them.

Or the endless stories about retirees suddenly squeezed because an adjustable-rate mortgage kicked in. I sympathize, but why does a 65-year-old retiree still have an ARM? Why are they still carrying major mortgage debt at retirement age? Nobody ever asks that question. The assumption is immediately that somebody else should absorb the consequences.

Student loans are another example. Again, nobody forced people to borrow massive sums for degrees tied to careers that mathematically could never support that debt load.

I know someone who borrowed heavily for a private undergraduate degree, then borrowed even more for a private master’s in education. They could have gotten the same teaching license from state schools for a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, their social media was nonstop trips, bars, concerts, and vacations while constantly complaining about student loan payments. At no point was there any recognition that expensive choices require tradeoffs elsewhere.

That’s the part that drives me insane. The refusal to acknowledge tradeoffs.

You can marry someone overseas. Immigration may take years.

You can take out huge loans. You may have to sacrifice luxuries later.

You can tolerate rampant shoplifting in neighborhoods. Businesses may close stores.

You can skip schoolwork for four years. Opportunities later may shrink.

This isn’t oppression. This isn’t injustice. These are consequences flowing from decisions people freely made.

Somehow, we’ve created a culture where saying “your choices contributed to your outcome” is considered cruel. But personal responsibility isn’t cruelty. It’s reality. In fact, responsibility is what gives people agency in the first place.

If your choices matter, then you matter. Your discipline matters. Your judgment matters. Your sacrifices matter.

But if every bad outcome is always somebody else’s fault, then people eventually stop believing they have control over their own lives at all.

And maybe that’s what this old man yelling at the sky is really angry about.