Here's My Theory

Life Lessons Always Show Up Too Late

Throughout life, we have countless opportunities to learn lessons that will prevent us from screwing up important aspects of our lives, but we rarely take those opportunities. Ironically, we only seem to learn our lesson from the one negative experience which that lesson would have been used to prevent. The result is us “learning things the hard way” and having knowledge and experience that could only be useful with the help of a time machine.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say a man has a habit of cheating on his girlfriends/wives. There will be plenty of times where women will leave him for being unfaithful, but he’ll move on just fine. Clearly this man hasn’t learned his lesson yet because those women didn’t mean a whole lot to him in the first place. Then he ends up in a relationship with the woman of his dreams and unfortunately cheats on her as well. She finds out, breaks up with him, and for the first time he feels awful about it. Now he finally learned his lesson by losing the love of his life, but since he lost her already, the lesson doesn’t really help him. However, the only reason he learned his lesson is because he lost something so valuable. When cheating was only causing him to lose women he didn’t care so much about, it wasn’t enough to make him regret his actions.

Here’s another example:

A man has a tendency to drink and drive. His friends and family tell him not to over and over, but he doesn’t listen because he doesn’t really care. Then one night he’s out drinking and decides to drive home anyway. This time, however, there is a serious car accident and he ends up paralyzed from the waist down. Now he finally learned his lesson and will never drive drunk again. But it doesn’t really matter that he learned his lesson, does it? He can’t drive anymore anyway. It’s a more extreme case, but the point is that it took a big wake-up call to teach him his lesson.

So the two men from these examples have major lessons they’ve learned and can’t use. All they can do now is use their stories as example to others so that they won’t make the same mistake. But both of them remember how many stories they had heard and how many people told them not to cheat or drive drunk and it never stopped them. That’s because people don’t really like to listen to advice to begin with. Most people would much rather go with their instincts and find things out for themselves because only then will they know deep down which is the better choice.

Basically, life is ironic and we’re our own worst enemies. It tries to teach us many more lessons than we actually learn. It reminds me of two great quotes: “youth is wasted on the young” and “experience is something you get just after you need it.”