Slippery Slopes

My Mum died last year. In her last years, one theme was her unwillingness to accept small defeats. She was determined not to be admitted to a nursing home. She tried to walk outdoors every day. Every available gadget for the house was steadfastly refused for a while. She attempted to stay on top of her own affairs.




To her family, reluctant to see her suffer unnecessarily or to take reckless risks, this was frustrating. But I could also see why she did it. She was aware that each step down was not going to be followed by a step up, but was more likely to put another downward step into focus. By fighting against each step, she felt she was slowing down her own decline. Mentally, it also gave her purpose, and sometimes enabled her to enter denial of things she did not want to face up to.



She saw the last phase of her life as one long slippery slope, and her role to cling on to solid ground as long as she could.



If you have an ageing parent with a similar attitude, I have no idea how to advise you. If anything, doctors tended to support Mum’s approach, while at the same time offering help when she felt she needed it. Perhaps that is all we can do. If we take the alternative approach of forcing comfortable solutions, most likely the speed of decline would have been faster. Her last years might have been more comfortable physically, but they might have been shorter and caused her more anguish.



This is just one small example of how society has so far by and large failed to address the new challenge of longer lifetimes. More people grow old, indeed very old, and declines are slower. But most declines involve anguish, physical pain, and doses of shame and humiliation, not to mention the effect this has on the quality of life of families and carers. Careers, housing, pensions, health remedies: these are all still designed for former times.



I have few solutions. But actually, I wonder if this is just one example of a wider problem with the human psyche. Let us call it the fear of the slippery slope.



Take careers. While our competence follows some sort of bell curve, with experience and energy combining best in middle years, our job requirements do not, with demotion or stepping down into less demanding jobs almost unheard of. As a consequence, nearly all of us rise to our level of incompetence, and the PETER principle shows no sign of being addressed.



Why? It is partly vested interests of senior people wielding power. But it is mainly ego, recognising our inability to deal with any declining powers. Rather, we enter denial, and people around us tolerate it. This costs corporations millions, while also adding stress and humiliation to those publicly seen to fail and finally pensioned off before they are ready.



Retirement itself is seen in the same way. People are frightened that it is some sort of backwards step, so fail to prepare and fail to see the benefits. It may be a strategic retreat in some areas, but it opens the way to advance in so many.



In both cases, this is fear of the slippery slope. The mentality we seem to have been taught, or maybe inherited, is that if we are not going forwards than we are going backwards. Going backwards is dangerous since it becomes a habit. Stay off that slippery slope!



There are many other examples, from all aspects of life. Staying within corporations, whoever heard of a budget or plan that accepted any sort of decline? Yet on average half of all divisions have to go backwards! Harvesting is an important part of any business cycle, and the only bit which generates cash, yet companies generally have little idea how to manage that phase. In the case of monopolies or historic strengths, there is a lot of skill involved in carefully protecting advantages. Yet often good managers want no part of this, planning processes cannot cater, and ambitious chief executives turn to value destroying acquisitions instead of taking the cash.



With a few notable exceptions, the same happens to sports stars and sports teams. Most sporting careers end in failure – though Ryan Giggs seems to have proven an exception. Teams seem readier to destroy what they have with reckless change and risk than to protect what they have built – just look at Blackburn Rovers. People like to complain about Wenger’s Arsenal, but perhaps we should instead be celebrating what they have achieved.



In politics, it is even a saying that all careers end in failure, and just look at the average age of prime ministers and presidents! When records slowly emerge years after their retirements, it is a common theme that we learn that they had lost it mentally or physically (including addictions) while still at the helm. All to avoid those slippery slopes!



Even countries have the problem, given how difficult it seems to be to return from temporary leadership into solid mid-table performance. Bless us, the Brits still can’t cope with losing the empire, and some even think that leaving the haven of the EU will resurrect greatness rather than threaten oblivion. The USA even starts on the same course.



We might follow the same trend in family relationships, but for sure we do in health, and not just in the way my Mum did. We prefer to pretend we can still do everything, committing damage to our bodies in the process. Many of us even refuse to visit doctors, just to maintain our denial. We claim everything is OK, we refuse to face up to things or to seek help, and in the end we just collapse. This is how addiction starts.



It is the same with debt problems: we keep trying to improve our lifestyle, feeding our ego and our desire to impress. Many of us think we achieve this with material purchases. When we run into trouble, we enter denial. My friends the banks are very happy to help us into a cycle that is hard to reverse.



In summary, many trajectories in life follow an unhealthy cycle. Rather than up-slopes and down-slopes of similar gradient, we go up, then we cling on, then we fall off a cliff. And often we fall so far that we can’t climb up again.



What are the solutions? At an individual level, most of them lie close at hand and within our control. Recognise denial and fight it. Accept and strategic retreat and find new places to grow. Always fight the ego. When we have a problem, face up to it. Keep measuring. Adjust goals. Ask for help. Count our blessings. Recognise that peace outweighs achievement in the end. We can also use this mantra as friends and relations to others.



At a wider level, it is more difficult. Perhaps retreat really is something evolution has de-prioritised as contrary to survival of a species. But avoiding or mismanaging it sure messes up individuals. Perhaps the simplest of the solution set to change at a wide level would be the one about asking for help. It astonishes me how education and training systems often regard asking for help as some form of cheating. When we do ask, we don’t learn to do it well, with open enquiry and a mind to hear uncomfortable answers.



A campaign to ask more and ask better might be our best single answer to the consequences of fear of slippery slopes. Perhaps we can even change the terminology: why not relaxing slopes, or happy harvesting? Slopes don’t have to be slippery.