You’ve accumulated $3,300.00 in credit card debt. You owe your ex-roommate $300.00. You still have monthly payments to make on your car and its insurance. Your father took out a loan to pay off your credit card debt and now you have to make a payment of $150.00 a month to the bank.And what did you accumulate all of this debt for? Going out to bars. Buying drinks for you and your friends that you can’t afford because, “You just want to have a good time.”
You don’t have a drinking problem. You just like to drink as much as possible several nights a week and sleep until 2:00 p.m. the following day. And you wonder why you’re depressed?
How do you help someone who refuses to listen to the advice given to them by the people who care the most about them? As we can learn from Norman Maclean’s character Paul in “A River Runs Through It,” people don’t always want to be helped. They want to do what makes themselves feel temporarily good, and what seems rational to them is not necessarily rational to the rest of us.
It is difficult to watch someone you care about make the same mistakes repeatedly and fail to learn that there is no such thing as a quick fix solution for any of the curve balls life will throw at you.
One message we can pull from Norman Maclean’s story is to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Someone always has it a little tougher than you. If you pick your head up once in a while instead of sulking in your own sorrow, and look around at the pedestrians you walk by every day, you might realize how good your situation really is.