Addiction--A Longcut

Friday, April 20, 2018

Cover and Title

Contents

Part 1: Principles of Agency

Chapter 1: Agency—Nothing Matters More

Chapter 2: Agency Gets Lost in Longcuts

Chapter 3: Agency, Prevention Is Better than Cure

Chapter 4: Agency, Abuse It and Lose It

Chapter 5: Agency and Perception

Chapter 6: Agency and Work

Chapter 7: Agency and Daily Life

Chapter 8: Agency and Self-worth

Chapter 9: Agency and Happiness

Chapter 10: Agency and Saying “No”

Part 2: The Chains of Longcuts

Chapter 11: Agency vs. the Longcut of Addiction

Caffeine, Alcohol, Nicotine, Drugs, Shopping, Gambling, Food

Chapter 12: Agency vs. the Longcut of Abortion

Chapter 13: Agency vs. the Longcut of Anger

Chapter 14: Agency vs. the Longcut of the Love of Money

Chapter 15: Agency vs. the Longcut of Abuse

Chapter 16: Agency vs. the Longcut of Divorce

Chapter 17: Agency vs. the Long, Long Longcut of Pornography

Chapter 18: Liberated from Longcuts by Light

Part 1: The Principles of Agency

Chapter 1: Agency—Almost Nothing Matters More

The word agency may bring to mind a governmental group such as the Central Intelligence Agency, an insurance company, becoming a free agent in professional sports, a city in Iowa, a booking company for Hollywood stars, or a television drama. There’s another meaning, however, of great significance. Agency is the freedom and opportunity each person has to choose his or her course in life; free will is a synonym for agency. The thesis presented in the next two-hundred pages is that your daily choices give you either more agency or less agency and that agency is your most precious possession, excepting your life. When agency is lost, the rest of life is spent living under oppressors’ whips either in submissive compliance or in attempts to recover your lost rights and privileges. Nations as well as individuals can lose agency. Throughout the history of the world, when a nation loses agency, the process of reclaiming agency is war, and the price of reclaiming agency is blood, the blood of the rising generation. When individuals lose agency, inner conflict and turmoil cause an internal war. Agency brings happiness, confidence, self-respect, opportunity, trust, and love. Losing agency is slavery.

When you’ve enjoyed personal and national freedoms all of your life, thoughts of living without those freedoms seldom surfaces, excepting when those freedoms are threatened. My father used to tell me in vivid detail about where he was and what he was doing when he heard the news on December 7, 1941 of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I was in my first year of college on November 22, 1963 and recall after eating lunch that day, walking into a building for a class and immediately knowing something terrible had happened. And more recently, of course, September 11, 2001. These moments become markers by which the rest of life is defined and divided. In an instant, suddenly, the normal duties and cares of the day disappear as fear for personal and national safety capture every thought. This can happen to some degree vicariously. I remember being in the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., going deeper and deeper into the museum floor by floor. At some point I blurted out, “How did we let this happen?” I felt I was suffocating and had to leave the museum.

Agency is your ability and opportunity to exercise your will, to make choices, to act for yourself. Agency is embedded in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and in “according to the dictates of conscience,” two phrases from Samuel Adams 1772 treatise: “The Rights of Men. Adams, speaking of national freedom, said liberty is a gift from Heaven that comes at a price and then links liberty to individual behavior and explains the price. He said: “He therefore is the truest friend to the Liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.... The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.…” Benjamin Franklin put it this way: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Since a nation is the sum of its citizenry, it follows that as individuals become “corrupt and vicious,” needing more and more masters, a downward spiral occurs in subtle stages. In equal but opposite junctures the rule of law takes away increasingly more freedoms and privileges to compensate for the loss and lack of individual integrity. If we fail to govern ourselves, we as citizens will progressively lose more and more rights to act for ourselves. Decade by decade, if we become more vicious and corrupt, we will be controlled by more and more masters. At some point, the portion of the populace that has maintained its integrity will yell as I did in the Holocaust museum, “How did we let this happen?” My exit from the vicarious horrors I was feeling as I viewed and read about the Holocaust was an elevator ride up into the fresh air and sunshine and was accomplished by the push of the elevator button. When freedoms are lost, the cost is all that is precious, most of all agency. Agency is liberty; loss of agency is oppression.

Many good examples could illustrate this point but airport security is easy and obvious. Who would have guessed that to board an airplane your luggage would be subject to x-ray and inspection, that you’d have to show identification at several checkpoints, that you’d have to put your shoes, belt, purse, jacket in bins and your computer, keys, coins in separate bins, and all would be placed on a conveyor belt to be x-rayed. And liquids! Only trial-size toothpaste, shampoo, and lotions would be allowed and they also would have to go through the x-ray machine. Then, holding only your boarding pass, you too would have to pass through a full-body scanner. Why? The answer is simple. It’s in consequence of evils and designs which exist in the hearts of conspiring men and women who want to deprive you and me of our agency.

As my daughter who lives in southern California and I were driving home from a shopping trip to Las Americas Premium Outlet which is located at the last exit in the U.S. before entering Mexico, we were chatting about the bargains we’d found, what our husbands and her children had been doing while we were gone, and what to have for dinner when all the cars in all the lanes on the freeway slowed abruptly. We assumed there had been an accident. Soon, however, we saw what seemed like an army of border patrol guards had formed a barrier across the freeway and were stopping every vehicle. Some people were standing outside their cars, watching as their cars were searched; others were allowed to continue on to their destinations. As we inched closer to the unfolding scene, we watched as two male occupants of a car were ordered out of their vehicle, handcuffed and forced to lie on the ground. While this was happening, other officers and what I assumed was a drug-sniffing dog searched the car. I watched the guards rummage through the men’s possessions, take what they wanted, I assumed for evidence, push the car to the shoulder of the freeway, and put the handcuffed men into a patrol car. Moments before, the two men were free to come and go at will; they had agency. Now as prisoners they had lost a significant portion of their agency.

Agency is the God-given gift of choice. When you make good choices, your agency increases; you enjoy more rights, more options, more opportunity, more liberty. When you make poor choices, such as smuggling drugs across an international border, you lose agency. But, of course, it wasn’t the border patrol who took away the drug-smugglers’ agency; it was the smugglers’ themselves. The border patrolmen just enforced the consequences of the smugglers’ unwise use of agency. Before the sting, they thought they were free when in reality being caught was just a matter of time. Most likely, their illegal conduct would have been repeated and escalated until they were caught. Cause and effect is a true law of God and man. You choose your actions but can’t choose the consequences. Even if no one ever finds out, you know. When you break a law, you live with guilt, fear, and stress that your secret deeds will be discovered. That’s not being free. Criminals create their own inner prisons, their own slave quarters. Committing an immoral or illegal act is voluntarily giving up portions of your agency, even if you haven’t been caught yet.

Oh, that this was the only way to lose agency, but it isn’t. Agency can also be lost involuntarily. Agency is taken from innocent persons who are forced into involuntary servitude to perform labor under the cruelest of conditions or to live under a regime or vile persons who dominate others. But even when a person is unjustly deprived of agency, there is still one freedom that cannot be taken, a beautiful liberty at the core of agency. In seventy or so page, we will meet Clair Cline who as a prisoner of war used is limited agency in an amazing way. You may remember Corrie ten Boom's story, as told in The Hiding Place, how she and her sister Betsie were imprisoned in Ravensbrück for harboring Jews during World War II. (Ravensbrück was the only major Nazi concentration camp for women. An estimated 92,000 died there, including Betsie, Corrie’s sister.) You recall she had a small copy of the New Testament that went undetected by the guards and how Corrie was able to read and teach others in the camp because there were so many fleas the guards didn’t come into their living quarters. Though confined in the bleakest of circumstances freedom of thought cannot be imprisoned or enslaved.

Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, tells the story of those who fought to end the slave trade and the practice of slavery in the British Empire. He tells of an historic meeting in a London printing shop in 1787 when a diverse group of twelve men assembled to discuss their common goal: how to end the slave trade in the British Empire. One of these men, Thomas Clarkson, rode 1,600 miles on horseback in two months to gather evidence and testimonials about the horrors of the slave trade, which were then printed in abolitionist pamphlets. “If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse…. Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject” (Hochschild, 7). In 1807, the British parliament outlawed the slave trade and in 1838 they ruled slavery illegal. When the Absolution of Slavery Act was passed, only Thomas Clarkson of the original twelve was alive to rejoice. The evils connected with slavery are many, but three are especially repulsive elements:

1. Africans sold other Africans into slavery. Olaudah Equiano, one of the twelve men in the printing shop, was kidnapped by slave hunters when he was ten. When he was twenty-one he was able to buy his freedom. In his memoirs, which were published in 1789, he wrote: "When a trader wants slaves, he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares. It is not extraordinary, if on this occasion he yields to the temptation with as little firmness, and accepts the price of his fellow creature's liberty with as little reluctance, as the enlightened merchant. Accordingly, he falls upon his neighbours, and a desperate battle ensues... if he prevails, and takes prisoners, he gratifies his avarice by selling them" (http://www.afbis.com/analysis/slave.htm). No one knows for sure how many men, women, and children were taken from Africa in the four hundred years of the slave trade; estimates range from 30 million to 200 million. Initially, European traders captured Africans in raids on coastal communities, but soon African rulers saw opportunity and sold other Africans. “The vast majority of slaves taken out of Africa were sold by African rulers, traders and a military aristocracy who all grew wealthy from the business. Most slaves were acquired through wars or by kidnapping” (ibid). “Ottobah Cugoano, who was about 13 years old when he was kidnapped in 1770… had no doubt the shared responsibility of Africans for the horrid business. Referring to his own capture Cugoano wrote, after regaining his freedom: ‘I must own, to the shame of my own countrymen, that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery’" (ibid). The parallel to our own lives is that we sell ourselves into slavery by choosing the longcuts of addictive and/or abusive lifestyles.

2. The American Civil War began about fifty years after Britain’s Parliament officially ended the slave trade in 1807 and about twenty-three years after the British Empire outlawed slavery. To date, the War Between the States is still the most costly of any American war. A civil war doubles the number of casualties because all casualties are from the same country. In the Civil War, deaths in the Union army were about 360,000. On the Confederate side, there were about 258,000 deaths that bring the total of United States soldiers lost, as brothers inflicted death upon each other, to 618,000. At the battle at Gettysburg 1863, the bloodiest of the war, between July first and third, 51,112 soldiers lost their lives, about one out of every three who fought. We look with horror on such statistics and ask how could a nation do this to itself, especially because the morality of the issue had already been settled in Europe years earlier. The parallel to our own selves is that by participating in addictive and/or abusive lifestyles, we often cause civil wars within ourselves. Addiction is civil war between substance/behavior and agency. Divorce is civil war between husband and wife. Abortion is civil war between mother and baby. Abuse and anger are civil wars between perpetrators and victims.

3. Slave ships were floating barges of death. The fact that humans sold other humans for money and allowed them to be ripped from their homelands is completely contemptible. The fact that the Civil War was fought over an ideology that had been declared illegal, to say nothing of immoral, is difficult to understand. But add to those two facts one more fact that human beings were forcibly transported on ships which were nothing more or less than death traps. “The slaves were then packed tightly into the slave ships, so that they could hardly move. Often they were chained down; they were allowed little exercise and they were kept in horrendous conditions in the hold of the ship. By the middle of the eighteenth century British ships were carrying about 50,000 slaves a year. Royal Navy sailors said that they could smell the stench of a ship carrying slaves anything up to 10 miles downwind.” (“www.victorianweb.org/history/antislavery.html). Sharks often trailed slave ships to take advantage of sick or rebellious slaves who were thrown overboard. The parallel in our lives is that those who participate in addictive behaviors turn themselves into slave ships, death traps. Slaves were controlled with chains. Those in addictive behaviors are controlled in chains just as real as if they were metal. We enslave ourselves with chains that infringe upon our individual agency.

In the chapters that follow, it is my purpose to show how nothing but life matters more than agency and that as individuals we must preserve and maintain personal agency. Chapters two through ten explain positive uses of agency that add to life, making life more fulfilling and infinitely less conflicted. The eight chapters that follow are the negatives that subtract from life; the ways agency is wasted and lost; the ways a person volunteers to travel on his or her own personal slave ship. Part one gives examples of how to preserve personal freedoms through wise use of agency; part two gives examples of how personal freedoms are lost through unwise use of agency. The purpose here is to empower you with more and more agency. The purpose is to repair and restore but also to prevent. Hopefully chapters two through ten will be the fence at the top of the hill. The chapters that follow will be the ambulance down in the valley.

Chapter 2: Agency Gets Lost in Longcuts

My husband and I drove nine hundred miles to Depoe Bay on the Oregon coast and stayed in a condo twenty or so yards from the Pacific Ocean. Depoe Bay boasts of having the world’s smallest navigable harbor and a resident pod of gray whales. We went crabbing on a nearby wharf, walked the gift shops and art galleries along the rocky shoreline, ate “today’s catch” in a restaurant on the water’s edge, looked at the smallest harbor, but no matter whatever else we were doing, our eyes were scanning the bay for spouts. First came the spout, then we’d see a thirty- to forty-foot whale’s back rise gracefully in an arc above the water. Several times, following the spout, we saw a large black fin and twice we saw a whale’s tale, waving in the air just like in nature films. We watched frolicking and feeding whales ‘round the clock. After three days we drove 281 miles inland to my brother’s home in Klamath Falls for another three days. From Klamath Falls, the trip back to Salt Lake City would be only 670 miles, but instead of heading home we decided to extend our vacation a day and drive back to the coast, hoping to find another gem like Depoe Bay. We pointed the car westward and started driving. In a couple of hours we were wandering in the land of giant trees where ocean mists weave in and out through redwood, spruce, and ponderosa pines. We kept driving down California 101, enjoying the elegance until reality hit and we realized we really needed to forgo anymore hope of whale-watching and find the quickest way home.

Looking at a map, I saw a road that would be much shorter than going down California 101 to finally tie in with Interstate 80, which would take us across Nevada and home. It was a shortcut from Arcata, California on highway 299, to Redding—only one-hundred and forty miles. Mapquest said it would take under three hours which equals out to be about 50 miles per hour. We could have opted to take the freeway, but that would have been so far out of our way, and any road you can go 50 miles per hour on can’t be that bad. Right? I wish I’d charted the elevation changes—sea level to over 5,000 feet, up one mountainside and down another, switchbacks, dozens of them that have a lot in common with roller coasters. And then there were construction zones, delays, and one-lane roads. It took almost five hours which was more like 25 miles per hour! Yes, you are thinking, but you saw so much more grandeur than if you’d been on the freeway. Perhaps, but it was anything but relaxing as road signs kept warning of obstacles and hazards—deer, rock slide areas, turnouts, construction vehicles reentering the road unexpectedly, when and when not to attempt to pass, and the choice to take 299 greatly increased our risk of accident. So there we were, descending a steep, narrow U-shaped turn, when suddenly in front of us appeared a speeding black Mercedes, straddling the middle line. We had nowhere to go except to the edge of the cliff, praying it didn’t collapse under us. The driver honked continuously, warning us to get out his way. A few minutes after surviving this close encounter, Richard said: “I’d call this a longcut not a shortcut.” Trying to calm my pulsing adrenalin I considered his comment. “Longcut?” I asked. “Did you just coin a new word?” “I don’t know,” he said, “but this is no shortcut.” “Hmmm,” I wondered. “Do longcuts have application in other aspects of life besides road trips?”

A longcut is a place you go where you lose your agency. As Richard and I experienced this longcut, what should we have done? We had two choices, well, three really, but we did not want to stay where we were. The only real options were keep going or turn back. So we did what you would have done. We kept going. Winston Churchill said, “If you are going through hell, keep going,” and Robert Frost said, “The only way round is through.” Recognizing road-trip longcuts is relatively simple, especially with global positioning satellites spinning around the earth, where different routes can be compared, distances measured, and destinations planned before embarking. But GPS systems aren’t fail proof. We’ve had Seri, tell us to turn onto a one-way street going the wrong direction. Another time she kept us going around and around and around an airport in an endless loop. And as our 299 experience shows, maps don’t show what obstacles may be encountered. The long and short of road trips is that no matter how bad the road turns out to be, if you press on, you will get to your destination sooner or later. And as long as you arrive safely, whether it takes under three hours or nearly five won’t make much difference by this time tomorrow. Traveling the road trip called life, however, with its unplumbed number of potential longcuts, challenges every traveler, as longcuts become mazes where there are no exit signs just dead ends and where GPS systems may keep you in an endless loop.

From time to time we make choices that take us on longcuts. It’s tempting to say that sometimes others close to us make choices that force us into longcuts, but no matter what happens to you, you are responsible for your actions. You can’t, in honesty, blame others for the time you spend in longcuts because even when bad things happen to you because of other’s choices, you still have agency to choose how you will respond. Viktor E. Frankl, a Jew, learned this truth in German concentration camps: “Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” In truth, the only way you take a longcut is if you choose it. Your attitude about whatever happens is your choice. Your God-given gift of agency grants you this greatest freedom, the one thing that cannot be taken from you.

Once you realize you are on a longcut, the appeal that enticed you to take the longcut fades; your freedom to choose other routes is limited, and as you entered with enthusiasm, if you stay long, it takes Herculean willpower to get out. A longcut can be so consuming that the longcut becomes your life. Some longcut travelers take up residency and give up trying to get out. They acclimate to their environment and think: “Well, Hades isn’t that bad after all.” Longcut victims may forget what it’s like to live in the light of day. The longer a person stays in a longcut, the harder it is to find an exit. Since we all travel near longcuts daily, we need to develop skills to avoid as many longcuts as possible. Unfortunately, none of us will be perfect at avoiding all of them; consequently, we need strategies to get out when we are ensnared because longcuts are like underground parking. Though you enter on the ground or street level, you can go down and down and down and find parking on lower and lower levels. That’s why every effort should be made to stop yourself or others from entering. That’s also why few exit a longcut unscathed; longcuts pull you down and suck you in.

Longcut entrances are the bait in the trap and appear welcoming and alluring. Think of a commercial of beautifully tanned young women in bikinis and robust, movie-star looking young men, on a sandy beach, playing volleyball as the sun is setting. Attractive, glamorous, appealing. In 1962, I remember such a setting as a college freshman. One of the fraternities had a traditional outdoor feast that included alumni, and I had been asked by a leader in the fraternity to be his date. I was from a less than prestigious high school and was so excited to go to the party. When I arrived, I met more attractive and influential people than I knew existed. I saw meats, fruits, breads, and desserts of every variety piled high on the tables. I saw ice buckets full of beer and soda pop. I had been taught by my parents and church that alcoholic drinks release inhabitations and could become addicting and are to be avoided, so I declined the beer and took a soft drink. Then I saw one of my pledge sisters who I knew had also been taught the dangers of drinking alcohol. She had a beer in her hand.

Politeness and good manners lasted about an hour and I noticed that most of the alumni had gone home. Then the food that was still on the table was used for a food fight, and the band that had been playing background music started play loud rock music. Couples began dancing and my pledge sister, her date, and another couple leaped on top of a table, stomping and yelling in time with music, the likes of which, in my sheltered life, I’d never heard nor seen. The thrill and anticipation I’d felt when I was asked to the party was quickly fading. Then I watched my obviously drunk pledge sister who seemed to be enjoying herself immensely stop suddenly, and to everyone’s embarrassment if not utter disgust, throw up and pass out. I didn’t understand what was happening to her then, but later I realized she’d chosen a path—a path I’d now call a longcut. She earned the reputation as an “easy” date and didn’t return to school the next year.

As I’ve come to understand what longcuts are, I know that taking 299 is a very minor longcut because we suffered no damage other than having extra adrenalin for a few minutes and using up two hours we didn’t want to spend in that way. Real longcuts are facades, all show, no substance, and they don’t take you where you want to go. They are like movie sets with false fronts and collapsible scenery. The outside of a longcut is staged to look fascinating and inviting, but once inside a longcut it becomes maze-like, turning the longcut into your own personal tragedy. That’s why each longcut is a battle we must win and why we should use our energies and influence, sharing the skills we’ve learned, to help others identify and avoid longcuts.

Avoidance skills: Other than the theory that all things give you experience and that longcuts can inoculate you against a worse longcut in the future, longcuts have no value. Longcuts risk the loss of miles, money, energy, emotion, potential, beauty, health, resources, peace of mind, opportunity, hours, days, years, relationships, friendships, or even life itself. If you and I can vicariously learn the lessons of life without having to personally experience the downward spiral of longcuts, we will be so much better off. The fewer longcuts taken in a lifetime, the happier and more productive the road through life will be. It seems not only practical but also wise to learn to spot the warning signs that danger lurks in a nearby longcut much like we learned to spot the whale spout and know a whale was near. You can also develop the discipline to resist the lures of longcuts.

The biggest obstacle in detecting longcuts is that light travels in straight lines, making it impossible to for you or me to see around the first curve. “So since I can’t see around corners,” you are asking, “are there ways I can know if a road is a longcut that will yield unpleasant consequences?” There are. One way is to look at the people who have been doing what you want to try. Study it out in your mind before rushing into what may be a longcut. Figuratively count the number of people going in and coming out and measure the length of time each spent in the longcut. Look at their faces as they come out. Are they happy or emotionally scarred? Do they look healthy or worn? How do they smell? Can they look you in the eye and say that longcut was truly a worthwhile experience? As you pause to assess, you will discover this truth: longcuts hide dark secrets that can be seen on the faces of those who exit. A few examples: Those entering the longcut of tobacco use look normal. They don’t look normal, though, when and if they come out. You’ll see their fingers stained with nicotine; their teeth yellow, turning brown; and they and their possessions smell. Also, their bank account balances have greatly decreased as they have literally burned up thousands and thousands of dollars on their addiction. Many stay in their cigarette-smoking longcut, trapped for life. Those who do come out, come out thin, ill, and coughing. Over the years, millions have come out in coffins. Those who enter the longcut of pornography look normal, and many, if not most, never come out. They leave a trail of victims behind—wives, children, parents, respectability, educational opportunities, jobs. Those who enter the methamphetamine longcut look normal. Almost none ever come completely out. Those who do meth age rapidly, have few teeth, blink with gaunt empty eyes—like no one is at home, and have dry, bristly, thinning hair. Here’s the truth: if you don’t want to look like these people, don’t go where they’ve been because, in all probability, if you come out, you’ll look much the same as they do. Enter the longcut if you want to look like them, feel like them, be like them, think like them. If you don’t like what you see, wake up before it is too late and run for your life in the opposite direction. Learn from the mistakes of others.

Another way to avoid a longcut is to decide how proud or disappointed you will be of yourself for traveling that longcut. If in the longcut you will do things you will later be ashamed of, if what you do is done alone and in the dark, if you don’t want others to know what you are doing, you can be certain it’s a longcut. If the longcut is a place you wouldn’t take your wife or mother or child or grandchild, don’t go there yourself. If they won’t be proud of you, in a few years, you won’t be proud of yourself either. If you don’t want what you’re doing to be published on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow morning, don’t do it tonight. If anyone tries to get you into a longcut by telling you, “No one will ever know,” I guaranteed you it will turn out to be a longcut because “No one will ever know” is the classic lie. You will get caught. Every dark secret will be found out because truth always surfaces. You cannot hide it forever. If someone invites you to try a longcut “Just this once,” know you are in dangerous territory. If this is a good thing to do, why would you want to do it “just this once?” Too many longcut victims thought they could get away with trying something “just this once.”

Still another avoidance skill is to take counsel from people in your life who love you and want you to succeed. No loving husband or wife or parent or grandparent or teacher or friend would encourage you to smoke, do porn, take drugs, or have sex outside of marriage unless they are in these longcuts themselves. A minor example from my life. When I find an article of clothing in an online catalog that I think I might buy, I read the consumer reviews and sometimes decide to order the product or not based on the reviews. There are times I’ve disregarded negative reviews, reasoning that the reviewers gave bad reviews because of this or that reason that doesn’t apply to me. When the order arrives, almost always, I see for myself that the negative reviews were accurate and I end up returning the product. If the size ran small for reviewers, it was too small on me. If the fabric was flimsy to reviewers, when I opened the package, I saw that the fabric was flimsy. I’d be more successful in online purchases, if I paid more attention when several reviewers gave the same negative review, which would save me the time it takes to return it and the disappointment. With longcuts, you can know, if it caused heartache, shame, or guilt for someone else, it will cause heartache, shame, and guilt for you too.

Just as I sometime “dis” reviews in online catalogs, it seems to be human nature to disregard advice and still take a longcut even when others tell of their negative experiences down that very same road. Arrogantly I think: “That happened to you but it won’t happen to me. I’m different.” I can delude myself into thinking the consequences that followed other people’s poor choices, for an extreme example—driving drunk, only produce bad results for everyone else. With vanity, ego, and pure foolhardiness, I think I’m unique, which allows the errors of the past to be repeated over and over again, generation after generation, and we’re not talking about online catalog shopping. As individuals and a society we often make the same mistakes because we vainly believe we are the exception, that cause and effect happens only to others who are not as talented, or disciplined, or smart, or rich, or strong, or lucky, or whatever pride whispers in our ears. These vain and self-flattering thoughts were described millennia ago in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, verses 3-10, in the New Standard Revised version of the Bible:

“What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has been already, in the ages before us.”

The laws of nature are laws because they are immutable. The sun rises and sets exactly on time each day; seasons come and go in expected patterns; gravity exerts the same pounds per square inch pull on everyone and everything; objects in motion tend to stay in motion; heavenly bodies stay in their defined orbits. There are laws of motion, energy, and thermodymanics. For example, if you are following the car in front of you too closely and don’t break soon enough, you will likely experience an accident. If you stay out in the sun too long, you get burned. If you swallow something that obstructs your airway, you can’t breathe. No matter how you try to prevent aging, you will age. You may postpone looking wrinkled with Botox or a face lift, but there is no way you will look thirty when you are sixty. The laws of health and nutrition are fixed. If you eat too much or too little, you won’t be healthy. Oh, there may be an outlier here and there; you may be the one in a hundred thousand that escapes the natural consequence of your actions for a time, but the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you because of another indisputable law—the law of the harvest. You reap what you sow. If you plant a carrot, you get a carrot. If you sow unkindness; you harvest unkindness. If you sow deceit; you reap deceit.

Just as predictably, life lived with regard to tried and true principles makes for a happier life. The patterns of history and the rise and fall of nations and individuals keep repeating and add verity to this truth: “There really is no new thing under the sun.” To avoid longcuts, we must be willing to take counsel from those who have traveled the road before us. We must take advantage of and benefit from the cumulative wisdom of the ages. Wisdom is the increase in good judgment that comes from experience. Unfortunately, experience often comes from bad judgment learned by wading through longcuts, longcuts that could have been avoided. I once heard a man pray: “Help us learn the lessons of life without having to experience them.” Learning the lessons of life from the experiences of others is one way you can gain the wisdom to identify and avoid a longcut without having to personally experience it. Learning the lessons of the past will help you avoid longcuts. Francis Bacon said: “Histories make men wise.” George Santayana said: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” You don’t have to live the experience of being trapped in a longcut to know of the dreadful physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual toll paid by those who take longcuts. History teaches that consequences follow every human action. History teaches that if you make certain choices, you cannot unmake them. Learn from the mistakes of others. Learn how past generations solved problems. Learn what worked and what didn’t. This wisdom can keep you far away from longcuts. Earlier we defined longcuts as shortcuts that turn long and waste time, miles, money, energy, emotion, potential, beauty, health, wealth, peace of mind, opportunity, even life. Now we will shorten the definition to a formula: Longcuts = chains of servitude.

One more very compelling reason to learn to develop the discipline to resist the temptations of longcuts is because once you enter a longcut, you discover that like a labyrinth, longcuts have passageways that not only dead end but also connect to other longcuts. For example, the smoking-tobacco longcut has passageways to the beer-drinking longcut and the smoking-tobacco has roads to the marijuana longcut. The beer-drinking longcut has a tunnel to hard-liquor consumption. The marijuana longcut has subway trains to stronger hallucinogens and opiates. Professional literature uses the term “gateway” to describe the interconnectedness of longcuts. A gateway activity or substance may not in and of itself be addictive but the activity or substance may lead to activities or substances that are addictive. Whether it’s the activity or the substance that increases the appetite for more or whether by participating in the gateway activity or substance you come in contact with others who beguile you down another longcut is for further research to determine. But either way, you form habits that have the potential to become addictive and pose a threatening risk of even more dangerous longcuts in the future.

(If you happen to be wondering how shortcuts figure into this equation, a shortcut is a deviation from the main path that consumes less of something valuable and yields a positive result. Shortcuts add to the cumulative whole of life. Conversely, longcuts are deviations that subtract from the cumulative whole of life and yield negative results.)

To avoid longcuts and preserve agency:

1. Take wisdom and counsel from those who have walked the road of life before you

2. Never believe you will be the exception to the laws of nature

3. Know you will harvest what you sow

4. Learn the lessons of history so you won’t repeat the mistakes.