You Only See It in Hindsight

You never realise you are jeopardising your life in the moment you are doing it. You have no context, while committing the act, that this very act would prove fatal. There is no way to determine that in advance. A person in an inebriated state never realises that this state would become permanent. That he would crave this very state every day, and that craving would destroy everything else in his life. All forms of realisation are acts of hindsight analysis. All of your understanding, therefore, exists only in hindsight. You are running an algorithm of values and principles once the act has already passed. The person at the party trying the new drug knows it could prove fatal to his sobriety, and yet he continues to indulge. A man with a devoted wife and family keeps falling for the woman he met online, thinking she would restore the lost spark in his life. All of these moments sound simple, and yet while we are living through them, our defenses are so lowered that we seldom notice we…