There’s a concept in accounting called Going Concern. It’s more of an assumption, really. Accountants, charged with the duty and privilege to translate the world’s businesses’s operations in a manner that an average person equipped with basic set of accounting knowledge can understand and rely upon, assume that the businesses they are “translating” will exist for the foreseeable future. On the surface, it seems like quite an obvious assumption. Why would you assume otherwise? It’s important to realize, of course, that an obvious concept isn’t always unimportant.
Everything on the financial statements that accountants produce (and audit) requires this assumption that these businesses will continue on. Otherwise, everything on the financial statements will lose any and all meaning. What’s the point of spending minutes (for some of us) and hours (the rest of us) on studying the financial statements of a company we can’t readily assume to be existing by the time we could do anything meaningful with the information we extracted from those minutes and hours?
My most recent attempt to apply the Going Concern assumption in my life, which appeared to be fairly applicable at the time, crashed and burned–badly. It should make sense, I initially thought. I live today believing that I will live to see another day–going concern. In my entire life, I haven’t lived a day thinking that my heart will come to a screeching halt tomorrow morning–ah, the miserable source of my incessant penchance for procrastination, I chuckled. My stark realization of how I never thought too much about how I always lived today for tomorrow sparked an important revelation about my past–for a period of time, I convinced myself that I could live today for a tomorrow which would never materialize. For a period of time, I convinced myself that I was happy knowing that my patience and my struggles could potentially be for naught.
It was like rubbing sand paper against another sand paper–the application of Going Concern to my own personal life was met with frustrating and knarly (yet so obvious!) resistance. So I took a step back, and shed a bright light on the drivers that enabled me to live with such a conviction, only to sit here and now and ponder about why I thought I was so happy. There were definitely certain aspects of my life to which I was able to seamlessly apply Going Concern, one of which was my career. So my choice of career wasn’t the problem. Then I realized why my career wasn’t the problem–I saw growth and more importantly, potential for further growth. This meant that I wasn’t able to vision growth or potential for growth in other aspects of my life to which I could not even begin to apply Going Concern. And that, as they say, was that. I figured it out.
During a period of my life, I lived knowing with absolute conviction that I did not like what lied waiting at the end of that period. Yet I lived on towards that end, convincing myself that I was happy traversing upon it. I was the dramaking of my own made-up fantasy land, where I was the martyr and the victim. I was the sacrificial lamb and somehow at certain point in time, I firmly believed, there was suppose to be a saving grace. When the reality came crashing down on my parade, leaving behind chilling voids where warm memories happily resided, I moved on from that end as if nothing happened. I pushed the disatisfaction aside and shoved it away, not knowing that it would tirelessly push back and eventually blow up on my face. And, boy did it blow up.
It was my fault–I convinced myself to act in such a manner. And that is why I am unable to regret it. Whether it’s true or not now, I was content enough to walk the “path to doom” with my own two legs. The only thing left to do now is learn from it and figure out what and who made me truly happy–and voila! Not only was I able to remove the disastrous friction disabling me to apply Going Conern to my life, I was able to visualize my happiness. Now if I could only put it to action… :).
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