True isn't it that life doesn't leave much leeway for errors/mistakes?

Nope. Nothing is forever. Only death. Can a mistake make fixing things a little more difficult? Sure, but unless you committed a crime that gets you years in jail, or you catch some sexual disease than it is all pretty fixable or at least you can adjust your dreams.
I met a young lady the other day ago who told me about how she married and divorced at the age of 18 years. Since then she hasn’t trusted anyone and hopes that some day she will.
It has been years that she is the forever run away bride. I told her that unless she is willing to trust someone, that she will never get trust in return and is making her own life difficult. She is letting a small time in her life dictate her future.

Not always. Any job in government or where diversity quotas are in effect the sky is the limit for all manner of fuck ups. Ask me how I know.

All it takes for someone to stay sucker free is to at least make an effort to pay attention and focus. It’s not foolproof my any means but so many people run into snags because they took their eye off the ball or by assuming too much. Like, there will be slack given or they used up too many chances for redemption. Yes if one takes things for granted one too many times there is the possibility for course altering consequences that could take years to rehabilitate. Short of just having really rotten luck it shouldn’t call for too much praying. People have that inside sense that sounds off right as they are about to do something unwise. We all are born with that. Keep ignoring it by exercising a little too much free will and it’s bound to come back and bite you right in the ass.

Nein… It may feel that way but stand up swinging. There is lenty of leeway for mistakes… We have no choice but to live when shit happens. The world doesn’t stop for us. But it does take us with. When your dead… that’s when there is no leeway.. But it can’t matter then.

I’m pretty sure I’d be long since dead if this were true. I’ve made plenty of mistakes. The trick is to reframe them as learning opportunities. As the saying goes, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

No. Only if you allow whatever happened to you dictate the outcomes for the rest of your life. Really, even the most terrible things can be overcome with help and support. Certainly, your life will be affected by positive or negative life events but there is nothing so terrible that it should ruin your future. It’s all about attitude in my opinion.

Oh, I don’t know. It seems to me that there’s a very wide range of workable options in a lot of situations.

If there were no leeway, I think the bodies would pile up on the freeway faster than they could be cleared with plows. Nearly every day I’m amazed at the kinds of mistakes I see—including the ones I make myself—that are somehow absorbed by the system (i.e., the world as we know it) without dire consequences.

What I do think is true, though, is that you never know which tiny little thing is going to turn out to have a huge effect on the way things go. One little slip of the tongue, of the foot, of the brain, and life may never be the same again.

But don’t forget all those millions of little slips that we get away with. Nothing bad happens even when logically it should: “Oops! That could have been bad.”

We’ve all made it this far. That’s what I always say to myself whenever I have to face something difficult – that even though there have been many difficulties up until now, I have made it this far.
I think the same goes for mistakes. We’ve all made them, but we’re still here today.

Of course certain decisions can have a big impact on your life and maybe you think it has had a bad impact. But we can never know how it could have been.

Some people clearly get more leeway for fuckups than others do.

Totally correct.

The more detailed and sensitive are your plans, the more likely it is that they will be disrupted by unanticipated events. The more resources you have to use in post-hoc course correction, the more disruption your plans can tolerate. It’s different for everyone and life is not fair.

If you are intelligent, personable, good-looking, or a sociopath, then others will sometimes help you if and when your plans go awry. In a more sensible world societies would be organized in such a way as to provide a safety net for those who dare much and fail; much innovation is stifled because the potential cost of failure is so high. Unfortunately we fear our neighbors too much, and would rather kill them and poison their wells than better ourselves or cooperate with strangers. Go Rugged Individualism.

I’m living proof you can survive nearly 7 decades of fuckups if you play your cards right and catch a few lucky breaks along life’s way. If life were all that harsh a judge, how would Neanderthals like Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, and Jim DeMint manage to hang onto it?

@ETpro “If life were all that harsh a judge, how would Neanderthals like Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, and Jim DeMint manage to hang onto it?”

Privilege. I submit that some combination of intelligence, personality, attractiveness and / or sociopathy may have played a part.

While you may be living proof of survivability, you are a statistical outlier. For everyone like you, there are a great many babies who died at birth and small children who died of malnutrition or thirst or were poisoned by their food or water. You don’t even have to make any mistakes in this world, it will come and get you, ready or not.

No matter who you are, if you’re alive then you’re lucky by definition. Of all the people who have ever lived, nearly all of them are dead.

”No matter who you are, if you’re alive then you’re lucky by definition. Of all the people who have ever lived, nearly all of them are dead”

What

the

fuck?
The fact we don’t live forever is proof that we are mortal? I must have missed that one during my stint in public schooling back in the day. thank you for that.