Daily Lessons from Life 3 March 2010

"Wed, Mar 03, 2010 - AsiaOne 'Cool' to leave restaurant without paying, says teen

One teenage girl not only left a restaurant after a meal without paying, but had the audacity to blog about the 'funny' and 'cool' incident.

In an email to citizen-journalism website, STOMP, a netizen complained about the girl's attitude that she displayed on her blog.

In her entry, she bragged about how she joined her friends at a restaurant and then managed to leave without paying. She also mentioned that friends had made a mess at their table by throwing food at each other."

Teenager can be reckless and stupid. No doubt about it. Teenager can act in a very immature way. No doubt about it too. At the same time, teenager has to face the consequence for acting in a risky, stupid, and immature way. Sometimes, the act spins out of control, and the consequence too grave to pay for, in hindsight.

Lessons for me are:

1. you can act in a reckless, stupid, and immature way. It is natural. For some people, they learned faster while for some longer. For some people, they learned without having to pay a big price while for others they need to in order to get it stick in their minds and brains!;

2. the key question then become: can that someone afford to pay the price if the act created a grave consequence! It will not be a rational argument that will convince the person to realize this potential danger. It has to be understanding the emotional motivation for behaving in such an manner;

3. it is easy to label the people with such behaviors as: irresponsible, stupid, misbehaving, rotten, etc. These people will hear these remarks and will CONTINUE to behave as labelled. Strange response indeed. But that is how it will be!! So, if we want to help someone in that situation, we need to be impartial and objective. We need to understand why they behaved in such a manner. We need to unemotional in order to ask questions that will help a very emotional person to flash out the root causes. It could be peer pressure, rebelliousness, boredom, stress, etc that caused such irrational and risky behaviors. Once we get the root causes, and get them to agree to it, we can then begin to involve them to resolve the issues.

It will take patience and time. At the end of the day, they still have to PAY the consequences for their actions committed prior to realization that they were indeed, foolish, stupid, reckless and immature!

When that realization dawned on them and they can see it as more other see it, they have matured. They have grown. That is the end result we seek to achieve. Patience and then realization.