In our lives, there are always things that we want to remember, and things that we want to keep a distance from, but not everyone is lucky enough to actually stay away from the "filth" that may cost you dearly. You may lose things that are valuable to you, like your happiness, your own life and the lives of the ones you love. The ones that failed doing so always have reasons for making those horrible decisions, which would definitely change their lives into something worse. Just think about it, do we want that to happen to us as well? In this column, we will uncover some major causes, effects, strategies to prevent us from making immoral life decisions. The people that sink in the endless river of disastrous life decisions usually step into the river because of a few major causes. Major causes include depression, and unfortunate choices of friends. Depression plays an enormous role in unfortunate life decisions. In most cases, people are depressed because of emotional depressions that they suffer in life, such as death of a loved one and the desire of respect. When people are depressed, they would start making dreadful decisions in order to use it as a depression reliever so that they would be able to keep their minds off events that they would like to forget. Slowly, they would realize that they cannot abandon once they began. Some people fell in the dark river because of the unfortunate choices of friends. Friends always play an important role in our everyday life, and they are one of the biggest influences that we get. Our friends are able to influence us in many ways.

 Small things like what to read next and vast things like what job to take in the future. Unsuccessful choices of friendships may lead to loss of well quality and length of life, damaged physical health and beyond. Also, more importantly, unsuccessful choices of friendships may lead to disastrous life decisions that are almost impossible to end. Being in these flabbergasting situations, it is not impossible to believe that some people would sink into the endless river of ruinous life decisions, but what are the potential effects of doing so? There are countless numbers of potential effects of sinking into the endless river of rotten life decisions. Some may seem positive to the addict but it actually also have negative impacts. Some are so terrible that we can’t even look at it with our own eyes, and some are things that we would never want to lose. Physical health, family and future employers are just some examples of things that we may lose. Physical health is very significant to all human beings. We wouldn't even be alive without it. Can you imagine how we are supposed to live with damaged or fragile physical health? In reality, this is exactly what’s happening after the wave of positive feelings fades.

 After we make those ruthless life decisions, we may get a variety of cancers and diseases, like skin cancer, lung cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Some people may even receive an early death for making these ruthless life decisions! Doing so is like putting your life carelessly at the death’s doors. Another effect that is unbearable is family and future employment relationships. After we started making these ridiculous life decisions, it is putting your family in great danger, because we may influence our younger siblings and cousins to do the same, or affecting their health, like second hand smoke. After a period of time, our family is very likely not to respect us, they would distance themselves from us, and they may also lose their faith and hope in us. It also affects our future employment, because we may easily be distracted at work and we may be demoted and/or fired, and it would be hard to find a job that we want because we may have a bad reputation. As you may see, these are only some of the effects. Imagine what it’s going to do to your friendships, freedoms, finance, etc. Don’t worry; most of us won’t face these consequences, since we know exactly what to do to prevent this nightmare from happening.

After we sink to the bottom of the evil river, it’s almost impossible to climb back to the shore again. So it is important for us, the next generation, to learn from these mistakes and learn to avoid even going near the river of misery. In my opinion, to be fully safe, we need to know the reasons, the consequences, but most importantly, how to prevent making tragic life decisions. There are many methods of preventing us from making bad decisions. We can get help from professionals, like therapists and psychiatrists. We also need to understand that we don’t have to listen to what someone says when we know that it is wrong, and we have to learn to say “no” from peer pressure. We can do this by finding friends that truly cares about our well beings; it would certainly act as a good influence. We can also try to stay busy to keep our minds off attempting to make prohibited decisions by staying focused on the future, and hang out with friends, etc. Most importantly, we need to learn to accept ourselves the way we are because no matter how we change and what we change into in the future, we are still the same person as we are right now in countless ways. So there’s no reason for us to think that by making tragic life decisions, we are able to make our life better. You can use these prevention strategies to help keep your life safe, happy and successful.　Therefore, bad life decisions can lead to many dreadful consequences that would change your life entirely. So why change into someone that you know would have an unsuccessful life when you can do much better? Now that you know the reasons, the results and the prevention, decide yourself how you are going to live your life, because you are the one who will take full responsibility of whatever decisions that you make in your life. But would you rather live at the bottom of a wicked, endless, dark river accompanied by tears, pain and regrets or under the sunshine with your loved ones with a huge smile on your face for the rest of your life? Decide for the life that you would want to have.