This question is so generic I can't help but feel there is a more specific idea behind it. Can you talk about what made you want to ask this, what kind of answers you're expecting?
Figure out exactly what undesirable life consequences means to you. Some people dream of a quiet life with pets and hobbies, some would call that a failure.
But no, you can’t avoid all negative life consequences. Even if life is a 1:1 totally predictable processing machine (it’s not), you still can’t control all the inputs
If you have an offsite copy of your files (and not in a sync service like Dropbox) you are already in a better position than most.
Restoring from offsite takes time, even with Backblaze’s option of shipping a hard disk. You may also have data corruption troubles, companies may close all of sudden. It’s just not as convenient as local copies.
A further copy that is locally available is simply a better strategy. Adding more copies after these two is not a bad idea but you start getting hit by the law of diminishing returns.
Or things like your offsite provider taking a shit and corrupting your backups without realizing, meaning when your local backup goes kaput your 2nd backup has already silently failed. That exact thing hitting one of their off-site providers was what convinced one of my clients to let me fix their backup procedures (or at least try)
Well, if you’d like to reduce your risk of losing data to a minimum, you should still test your backups anyways. Shit happens, even to the good people at Backblaze sometimes.
Step 1. Analize what's the possible consequence / event that you find undesirable
Step 2. Determine whether there's something you can do to prevent it: if there is, go to step 3, if there's not go to step 4
Step 3. Do it, do that thing that you believe can prevent it. And after you've done it, go back to step 2 and reevaluate if there's something else.
Step 4. Since there's nothing else you can do to prevent it, accept the fact that this consequence might happen and adapt to it... you already did all you could do given the circumstances and your current state/ability, you can't do anything about it anymore, so why worry? just accept it. Try and make it less "undesirable".
Step 5. Wait. Entertain yourself some other way.. you did your part.
Step 6. Either the event doesn't happen, or it happens but you already prepared to accept the consequences.
Step 7. Analyze what (not) happened and how it happened (or didn't). Try to understand it better so in the future you can better predict / adapt under similar circumstances, and go back to step 1.
Yes. There is an entire field of risk management devoted to this topic. It’s complex.
There are some strategies that you can use in a wide variety of situations: commit as late as possible, figure out how to undo something before you do it, imagine the worst consequences to an action and then decide if you can accept that worst outcome.
How to do those things? It depends on the situation. What else can you do? It depends on the situation.
Use a password manager, and invest in a hardware security key. Other than that totp, aka autheticator apps, is your friend when it comes to 2fa unless you can use your hardware security key. Stay away from sms and email authetication unless its the only choice. Besides that practice the 3,2,1 rule as others stated especially for your password manager vault and your totp seeds.
I usually recommend bitwarden for strangers since I dont know how discipline they are with backups, but currently I use keepassxc on desktop and keepassdx on my android. For hardware security keys, yubikey is kinda held at the highest honor but theyre are a bit on the pricer side. Since you would need to get at least 2 (one as a backup), their more budget friend model would run you 50-60$. They also go on sale time to time but imo its worth the investment and basically a must if you use a cloud based password manager.
Not happening. Every action and decision you make or don’t results in a consequence. Cause and effect. These consequences aren’t always obvious, negative, or noticeable right away but if you look far enough back on your life you will probably see how your choices snowballed to where you are now.
Some people think they are tragic characters living some Shakespearean tragedy where all the bad things happen to them are just the universe/fate giving them a bad hand. This choice to be nihilistic determinist leads to self fulfilling prophecies where they make no effort to improve their life.
Some people think they they are the masters of their own destiny and that despite there being bad parts of the world that are unfair they do the best they can to find success anyways and not throw a never ending self pity party. These people tend to get farther in life and are much more satisfied.
These differences in philosophies are indeed a personal choice everyone subconsciously makes. Whether to be the captain of the boat that is your life and steer it to the destination you want or to be a helpless passenger pushed by the oceans waves adrift until you crash.
A person in an abusive relationship chooses not to leave it through inaction. despite how much they think they have no choice because of X reasons. A severely overweight person who blames their genes and makes no effort to try and loose it. An unhappy married couple who want to divorce but convince themselves not to ‘for the kids’ so they live a decade or two of an unhappy existence subjecting their children to second hand misery when the better option for the kids long term wellbeing was to indeed split. There are consequences to hard decisions, sometimes its not even a right or wrong decision. The pieces just fall where they lay.
Not doing something to change the trajectory of your life is also a choice whether you want to recognize it as one or not. Its the choice of inaction that you justify to yourself.
The problem is that nobody wants to be at fault when things go wrong. Its much easier to scape goat blame to fate and all of life’s unfortunate circumstances. When you do point the finger at yourself for at least some of it you gain much more control over the direction of your life.
I agree with all of this except your example about choosing not to leave an abusive relationship. The most dangerous time for an abuse victim is when they try to leave their abuser. Often, there is a very real threat of death hanging over them. It’s an over-simplification at best and straight up victim-blaming at worst to say that a victim’s inaction is the reason they continue to be abused.
Start saving money while you’re young if you’re in a position to do so.
I can’t believe the number of colleagues I’ve had in the past that were making good money without having responsibilities (living at their parents’) and spending most of it at the bar or to go party in Cuba only to hear them complain years later that they didn’t have enough money saved to make a 10k downpayment…
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