Grasp the Nettle

There’s something in Poker called “going on tilt.”

It’s what people do when they they suffer a serious loss, particular one that was unlikely given the odds. They will start to play much more aggressively, get sloppy, make mistakes, take silly risks, etc.

This is irrational, of course: the loss suffered is a sunk cost. While losing money can legitimately effect one’s play style, as one has to take into account the ratio of one’s chips to the minimum bet in poker in order to make proper betting decisions, the current ratio is all that matters — past losses shouldn’t factor into one’s play in any sort of psychological way.

People have this problem with more than Poker. A past problem in one area frequently either causes irrationalities in dealing with problems in that same area, or leaks into others.

Maybe someone decides that they wasted time and money going to school, so they get depressed and have trouble motivating themselves to find a job.

Maybe someone decides they’ve been financially irresponsible, and feel guilty about it, but continue to act irresponsibly because they feel like they’ve made such a mess of things it doesn’t matter anymore.

Maybe someone has acted meanly to their child, and decides that while maybe there’s better ways to act, the damage has already been done and there’s no point.

The problem with all of these is they treat past mistakes as if they matter. Of course, they matter in a certain sense — they can somewhat restrict the available resources and opportunities one has in the present, and they can also be learning opportunities.

But they’re hardly worth getting upset about. In fact, getting upset is counterproductive. Even if one thinks one has made unusually poor decisions, it’s far more productive to spend time figuring out how to avoid making more mistakes in the future, then it is to dwell on past ones.

Once one has identified something as a mistake, one has ceased to be the person who thinks making that mistake is ok. That is significant. One may continue having trouble acting consistently with the theory that one should avoid making that mistake (this happens a lot with overeating, drug abuse, alcohol, smoking, finances) but the acknowledgment of the mistake itself represents a serious development of moral knowledge. Instead of beating oneself up for past errors, one should spend one’s time creatively thinking up how to develop better habits and live up to one’s newly identified moral ideal.