One of the hardest parts of life is letting go of your past. They call it “baggage” for a reason: it weighs you down and holds you back. Yes, there are things that definitely do legitimately restrict your behavior: owning a home, holding a job, having a spouse, having children, and similar responsibilities and obligations. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about events that, to a robot (or what they call an “Econ” in economics—i.e., the perfectly rational actor), should have no affect on how you behave going forward. So let’s talk a little about your past and your future, specifically about how the former affects the latter.
You will make mistakes in life. Maybe you will hurt the feelings of someone you care about. Maybe you will fail at something you tried very hard at. Maybe you will destroy a relationship by taking it for granted or cheating. No matter what, those mental, emotional, or even physical scars will stay with you for a while.
This is part of our evolution. If we walk toward a bush that had a dangerous animal behind it, we will be careful about going near bushes in the future. That’s just good sense—if you experience something bad, you’ll try to avoid it in the future. Learning from your mistakes is a good thing.
Unfortunately, we sometimes learn the wrong lessons along the way. Take, for example, the idea of developing a superstition where you think you avoided that dangerous animal when you wore a certain pair of socks but not when you wore another. Obviously, your choice of socks had nothing to do with the animal being behind the bushes (unless they smelled really bad and gave away your position!), but you make that connection. So, sometimes you might do the right thing like avoid behavior that would increase your risk, and sometimes you behave in ways that do absolutely nothing.
And, you probably know where I’m going with this, sometimes you can take away the completely wrong thing. You might think that failure means you suck at something and can never get better. Or, you might think that a bad relationship means that you are unlovable. Or, you might think that you can’t change your career because you’re so far into the path you’re on and don’t want to start again (even though you’re miserable). This is where your past weighs you down from making good decisions today. In these situations, your past is not helping you…it’s hindering you.
In economics, they call this the Sunk Cost Fallacy—it’s the idea that the investment you put in to date should have no bearing on how you behave going forward since that money/time/effort is already spent and you can’t get it back…but you erroneously let it influence your decisions. In literal terms, it might be that you spent so much money on a project that you know is going to fail and so you’re better off ending it, but you keep going since you’re “almost done”—that’s the sunk-cost fallacy in action. In your life, you often let past events, decisions, actions, and investments dictate your behavior going forward when it’s erroneous to do so. It’s why so many people go through what they call becoming “born again”—it’s the idea that you’re free from your past and acting in a new way as if you were starting from scratch. It’s a great technique to escape from the gravitational pull that is your past sucking you back into bad life habits and paths.
So, I’m proposing a new mantra for you: “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done; it only matters who you’re going to become.” I want to be clear about what this means: it doesn’t mean that I’m absolving you from some horrific past behavior; it means that what you do going forward should be detached from what happened in the past if your past will lead you to make the wrong decisions for your life going forward. You might’ve been a smoker for 30 years, and so you identify as a smoker and so feel like it’s a waste of time to try to quit. However, the latest research shows that your lungs can clear up from being black and disgusting in months after you quit. So the choices you make in life do matter, even if you feel like what you’ve done relegates you to a certain life.
Criminals can reform; smokers can quit. Picking the “bad boy” over and over again can be fixed to picking a person who treats you well. Picking the wrong major in school can be fixed with getting another degree or switching from role to role slowly (where your skills are transferable) until you get to the field that you really want to be in. Failing to save someone from getting killed doesn’t mean that you can’t be there for the next person who desperately needs your life-saving skills (e.g., doctor, lawyer, soldier, firefighter). In these kinds of cases, acting with no regard to your past would lead to better outcomes than letting your past hold you back, and yet it does for so many people over and over again.
The problem is…if you let your past control you, then you are at its mercy and will live a deterministic life. It’s the difference between free will and determinism—I have this argument with fatalists all the time that the proof that we have free will is that anyone of healthy brain function can exercise his or her prefrontal cortex at any time to push toward different behaviors than he or she may have done before. Yes, it sounds awesome to say, “He’s just built different,” when you see your favorite athlete shake off a mistake and then go and win the game. The ability is largely biological, but the mental discipline required to let go of a mistake is developed and not innate.
What this means for you is that you should always be focused on what you can become. Yes, you might’ve possibly done the worst thing in the world like commit some heinous crime, and you would need to pay a debt to society for that. But you can choose to learn new skills in prison or smoke and gamble your life away behind bars. It’s your choice. There are people who spend most their lives in prison and immediately begin committing crimes again when they leave…and there are people who spend most of their lives in prison and then get out, become criminal justice advocates, and try to help people in the system (either helping victims like the ones they hurt or helping defendants turn their lives around).
Fortunately, if you’re reading this, then your past is probably not that bad. Maybe you lost the big game, experienced a career-ending injury, or ruined your life with drinking. It doesn’t matter what it is that caused you to be where you are now; it matters what you’re going to do now to move in the direction toward where you want to be in life. If you want to have a family, then clean up your life and start looking for a possible mate. If you want to do work you enjoy, figure out your first step toward that dream profession. It doesn’t matter that you’re not ready today. You don’t have to be perfect. Nobody’s perfect. All you can do is move forward. For every catastrophic accident that occurs that causes you to avoid something for your own safety are a few social faux pas, embarrassments, or other regrets that are reconcilable. You can fix your marriage, change your job, or volunteer to make up for damage you might’ve caused. You can get your life back on track and going in the right direction. All that matters is who you want to become and not what you’ve done.
While you might have to apologize, make amends, or in some other way pay your debt to someone for a huge mistake, most things holding you back in life are self-imposed based on things that were more embarrassing, scary, or emotionally painful than they were actually harmful. It’s those negative emotions that often cause you to change your behavior drastically to avoid them. And I don’t blame you—feeling bad sucks. But if you’re hurt once in a relationship and so live alone for the rest of your life, you might be miserable. Do you want to miss out on the chance to be happy just because someone hurt you one time? It seems like a steep price to pay—eternal misery—for something that is over and in the past. Make peace with your life, and move forward. As long as you are making decisions that make your life better going forward and not being self-destructive because of things that you can’t change, you’re in the right direction. And, if you have to, feel free to pay the penance of volunteer work or some other positive contribution to the world if you feel bad. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s much, much better than self-flagellation. Just be sure that you do whatever you can to move your life in a positive direction. Continuing negative, destructive behaviors in the future because they happened to you or were caused by you in the past will only keep the negative outcomes coming for the rest of your life. Let it go, or you will never get over it.