The Beautiful Bastardry of Consequence
by Don Hall
We live in the age of binary bullshit. Swipe left or right. Vote red or blue. Cancel or canonize. Zero or one. Happy or sad. “How are you?” is a trap because nobody really wants to hear “both.” Nobody wants to sit in the squirmy soup of contradiction. The gray area is radioactive. And yet…
Everything in life that happens has both negative and positive consequences. Always. Unfailingly. Without exception. Whether it’s winning the lottery or getting diagnosed with colorectal cancer, there’s always a damn two-sided coin flipping in midair. You just might not see the second face until it smacks you in the jaw.
Let’s stop pretending life is a morality play where good things bring halos and bad things bring doom. It’s a rigged game of cosmic blackjack where even when you hit 21, the dealer lights your hand on fire just to see if you flinch.
Let’s start with something easy. Success. Say you write a book, and it gets published. A real book. With a spine and blurbs and an ISBN that isn’t just some Amazon print-on-demand digital ghost (I have eleven of those and the sum total of cash in royalties might cover a couple of car payments on the Prius). Great, right? You should be thrilled. You should be standing naked on your porch yelling at your neighbors to buy it.
But here’s the negative side: now people can read it.
They can also not read it. Or worse, read it and hate it. Or worse still, read it and understand it. And now you’re exposed. You’re emotionally streaking through your high school cafeteria. Because every win invites expectation, and every expectation becomes a noose made of compliments.
David Foster Wallace—bless his obsessively recursive, footnote-humping heart—would call this “the double-bind of self-conscious achievement.” You crave acknowledgment, but once you get it, it rewires your nervous system. You’re now addicted to applause but terrified of the next silence.
So yes, you win. But now you’re terrified of ever not winning again. There’s no such thing as a pure victory. There’s only a new status quo waiting to be shattered.
OK. You’re gainfully employed. You go to work, do a thing, the business gives you money which then trade for goods and services (and maybe an AppleWatch). Out of the blue, you get fired. That sucks. No paycheck. No status. No routine. You go home, drink whiskey straight from the bottle, and refresh LinkedIn like a degenerate pulling the lever on a slot machine filled with HR buzzwords. You spiral.
But—and this is a big ol’ sarcastic “but”—you also get free. You get space. You get the ability to sit in a coffeeshop at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, judging the people who are clearly unemployed and wondering what they did to deserve such poetic timing. You might even find out that your identity wasn’t tied to a title after all. That maybe the job sucked. That maybe you’ve been clinging to a turd like it’s a golden idol.
Lenny Bruce said, “The truth is what is. And what should be is a fantasy. A terrible, terrible lie that someone gave the people long ago.” Losing your job is the truth. It strips away the shoulds. And with that comes pain and maybe growth. But growth doesn’t show up in a robe with a halo—it shows up with blisters and a nervous tick.
The gift of suffering is that you finally learn what kind of person you are without the costume.
Let’s talk about my personal hell on wheels—romance. That most dopamine-drenched, Pinterest-quote-riddled human experience. Falling in love feels like victory. Like you’ve somehow beat the algorithm and found another flawed meat puppet who’s willing to merge your chaos with theirs.
But it’s also the beginning of the end. The second you love someone, you introduce the possibility of heartbreak. Or resentment. Or decay. Or betrayal. Or grief. Because someone is going to die first. Or leave first. Or shut down first.
And still, we do it. Over and over. Because the positive side isn’t just cuddling and synchronized Netflix habits—it’s vulnerability. It’s the terrifying thrill of being known.
Love is choosing to be emotionally naked in front of someone who might laugh. Who might flinch. Who might fall asleep during your soliloquy on why “Rocky” is a not a boxing movie but a love story involving a boxer.
It’s suicide with benefits. And we do it because risk is the price of meaning.
Someone dies. Not metaphorically. Not a relationship “death.” A real one. A parent. A friend. A partner. A sibling. Suddenly, time gets cruel. Reality gets loud. You wake up, and there’s a shape missing from the world.
Negative consequence? Obvious. Loss. Pain. Anger. Regret. Rage at the stupid ways people try to comfort you. (“They’re in a better place” should be punishable by mandatory silence and a quick karate chop to the larynx.)
But also—positive? Yes. Sometimes, yes.
Grief carves you. It hollows out the bullshit. It teaches you what matters and what absolutely doesn’t. It makes you call your mother. It makes you say “I love you” without irony. It makes you write your will at 3 a.m. and stop pretending you’ll live forever.
And it introduces you to the strange tribe of people who’ve also been cut. Who speak the same haunted dialect. Who sit in the silence with you instead of filling it.
You lose someone, but you gain perspective. And maybe even community. Because nothing brings people together like mutual annihilation.
Instead of that AppleWatch (because you lost your job, remember?) you decide to cull together the change from your crumbling daybed and you get the latest version of that wild phone. The new app. The new digital prosthetic that promises to streamline your life.
Positive consequence? You’re more connected. More productive. You can order food, sext your ex, and file a complaint with Delta Airlines all before you get out of bed.
Negative consequence? You are now the product. You are now being emotionally manipulated by code. You are more anxious. More distracted. More prone to doomscrolling through existential horror while pretending you’re “catching up on the news.”
The algorithm doesn’t love you. It studies you like a lab rat with dopamine levers. Every like is a hit. Every notification is heroin in a tiny red bubble.
But still—you’re also more informed. More entertained. More empowered. The phone is a demon and a muse.
It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.
You get another job and it’s perfect. The bank account starts to fill and the grimy anxiety of not being able to afford that last pack of smokes before payday disappears. You’ve made it. Whatever “making it” means to you—money, fame, influence, a blue checkmark that once mattered.
The upside? Validation. Resources. Clout.
The downside? You’re now an idea, not a person. You’re projected onto. You get misquoted, misunderstood, meme’d into oblivion. You don’t get to be “off” anymore. Every misstep is recorded. Every bad day is a scandal.
Ask any rockstar post-rehab. Ask any Instagram influencer whose followers turned on them for having a muffin top in Cancun.
And ask Lenny Bruce—oh wait, you can’t, because the guy got arrested so many times for saying words that he overdosed with the sting of censorship in his veins. Fame gave him a mic. And then it choked him with it.
Even the mundane stuff has two faces:
Coffee: Alertness + anxiety.
Exercise: Health + sore knees and crotch chafing.
Marriage: Companionship + negotiated compromise on everything from how to properly do dishes to how to give gifts to the very special meaning of polyamory.
Art: Expression + exposure.
Truth-telling: Integrity + unemployment.
Every action—big or small—carries a suitcase of contradiction. There is no purity. There is no clean win. Even joy can be a trapdoor. Even pain can be a doorway.
And if this sounds depressing, it’s because you’re still clinging to the myth of simplicity. That old American dream of cause/effect as a linear, moral universe.
But the truth is—life is a goddamn flowchart scrawled by a drunk philosopher on Adderall. It loops. It contradicts. It eats itself.
And that’s what makes it bearable.
Knowing that every blessing has a blade and every curse has a lesson can lead you down two very different roads:
Cynicism.
You shrug. Nothing matters. It’s all a wash. Why try?
Maturity.
You try anyway. You show up knowing you’ll get cut. You love knowing you’ll grieve. You tell the truth knowing it might get you fired.
Because maturity is accepting the duality without needing to resolve it. It’s not “looking on the bright side.” It’s knowing that light creates shadows and stepping into it anyway.
It’s embracing ambiguity as your co-pilot instead of trying to stuff it in the trunk.
The thing whispered in hallways and in (formerly) smoky bars must be spoken aloud and it is this: the world wants you simple. Brandable. Digestible.
But actual lived human experience is more like an out-of-print Choose Your Own Adventure novel, except every ending leads to a tax audit, an unexpected blowjob, or a mysterious rash.
And if you really pay attention, if you really watch your own life instead of just starring in it, you’ll see it: the pattern of contradiction. The heartbreak that led to your best friend. The layoff that led to the road trip. The divorce that led to self-respect. The tumor that made you appreciate Tuesdays.
Not because there’s a grand plan. But because life is sloppy and glorious and allergic to neatness.
So yeah. Everything that happens in life has both negative and positive consequences.
Sometimes at the same time. Sometimes one trailing behind the other in a trench coat like a sad vaudeville act.
We are all trapeze artists swinging between “this is incredible” and “what fresh hell is this?”
We are all haunted by our blessings and healed by our disasters.
We are all walking contradictions just trying to make it through the next damn weekend.
And that, friend, is not a reason to despair.
It’s the only reason to keep going.
Because the shadow proves the sunshine.
Because both sides of the coin are real.
And because this mess is where all the beauty lives.
