The Externalities of life

I've wanted to write more on topics that mix my academic learnings with the lessons that life teaches us for a while. It seems the more I learn in life, the less time I have to pen down those thoughts. So this comes on a late Saturday night, after an amazing night of Stand-up and Arabic food. 

One of the concepts that always intrigued me when I was studying economics was the topic of Externalities. In simple terms, it's a derived benefit or loss from an activity. For example, if you set up an office building at some place in a city/town, restaurants and stores will eventually prop up in the vicinity of the building. That will drive further economic activity. That's an example of a positive externality. On the negative side, a factory might pollute the neighbouring water body, without bearing any consequences. That's a negative externality. 

Externality is essentially economic jargon for unintended consequences of actions. There are numerous examples of the negative externalities of economic pursuits. Whenever I read any of them in a case study,  especially about situations of negative externalities, as a naive mid-20-something, I often wondered, "How could they not have foreseen this?" 

Most of us make key life decisions in the early 20s of our lives. In fact, this is usually the first time in our lives when we're making our own decisions. A lot of the decision-making until adulthood is done either by our parents or at the very least, with their help. Similar to the case studies that I read in my economics class, the unintended consequences of those decisions come to light about a decade later. That is when the chickens come home to roost. 

When I turned 30, a couple of years ago, I went through a massive introspective exercise. The overall exercise focused on 2 areas - the decade that passed and the decade that is ahead of me. 

Life is nothing but a time series of decisions. Looking back at the last decade, I back-traced my life now to the key decisions of the past. The whole exercise was an eye-opener. I realized the parts of my life that were an intended consequence of my actions, as well as the parts that were as unintended as externalities themselves. 

I also see other people around my age in a similar place - facing the consequences of their decade-old decisions. Quite often, the consequences they struggle to deal with are the unintended ones. The decisions of the past have brought them to a situation they couldn't have imagined a decade ago. In all fairness, how much do most 20-somethings really know about the world to be able to make an informed decision anyway? 

However, a decade later, they find themselves in a situation they aren't happy with. They want something in life that they are struggling to find and quite often, the reasons for this lie in the past and not the present. Our current self is a manifestation of our past decisions.  

Hindsight is a beautiful thing, and looking back, I couldn't help but wonder the same thoughts about the externalities of my decisions as I did for all those case studies - "How could I not have foreseen this?"