Bad Loans in 2017

I’ve once heard the art of self improvement being described as playing The Prisoner’s Dilemma by yourself over time. Best case scenario, present and future you do what you’re supposed to. Worst case scenario, you both do something bad. Medium case, you do something bad now and he fixes it later. Since your brain is already set up to think about the future you as another person, it’s eerie how well this works.
In another way, you could consider it as some kind of investment. You borrow from your current time to extend time in the future. You invest in yourself, hoping to see dividends later on. The higher the payout on your investment, the more likely you are to reinvest. If there’s no payoff, you can try to get others to cosign for you if your own credit isn’t sufficient, but, odds are this just leaves you deeper in debt.
For a very long time, I’d looked over my history of bad loans to myself, bad deals with the future, and all of the angry creditors glaring at me and trying not to. With a gaggle of those people, and the ghosts of a million better future selves who may-have-been, following you around all of the time, you’re not especially inclined to invest in much of anything. Too much as obviously gone wrong.
The loans were bad. And I’ve been bankrupt.

But . . . what if, suppose for a moment, what if the borrower wasn’t qualified to even apply for the loan? What if, like a true lunatic, unbeknownst to him, he was not able to fully understand the deal, no matter how well he thought that he did. What if he didn’t understand the nature of the transaction, and COULDN’T understand it, because of a catastrophic failing to which he was blind and for which he could not account. And the lender didn’t notice. Under Roman law, a loan made to a person not competent to sign for it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

So, looking back, let’s argue, for the sake of argument, that I do, in fact, have this mental condition. I’m going to get tested when I get back to Japan (next week). That means that every past failure, every past problem, every past EVERYTHING where I’ve come up short and failed again and again was happening in a context I didn’t understand, fighting an additional, hidden, enemy who I didn’t even know that I was fighting.

Who is my enemy?

In homage to Gundam Wing, how many times did I ask myself this question? What am I fighting? I kept trying to find an enemy. People. Myself. My body. My everything. Now, I have a new enemy. One that explains . . . nearly everything. So, when I decide how to fight, when I decide what to right, when I decide what to do, I can do it reasonably.
And, if this theory holds true, then it allows me to forgive myself for so much of what went wrong in the past. I’m still at fault, I did what I did and I failed what I failed, and there are still consequences. Yet . . . the failures are things that I can accept. I was going to fail no matter what, not necessarily because of any personal moral failing, but from failing to identify the real problem and what was dooming everything. I kept trying to deal with symptoms, then I’d reduce them to causes, but the “causes” were also symptoms. Now, having an enemy, having something to fight, I’ve got hope on all fronts.

It’s an odd sensation.