Tax fraud (On burning bridges)

They say only two things are certain: death and taxes. It’s tragic, funny, but also not true. You can always evade taxes; the problem is whether you can get away with it. And you can evade death too. Become immortal, at least figuratively, by, I don’t know, discovering some new immutable law of physics, or crafting a very good meme.

The single thing we really can’t avoid instead, is change. It comes for all. Actually, it’s already here; it has always been. You just can’t see it yet, and when one day you’ll think it’s past, you’ll still be changing. Still blind to it.

We change in little, unnoticeable ways: we get older, some get balder, the best of us get wiser. Some changes we can do nothing about, some others we can take into our own hands, but you know how hard that is, even after watching all those YouTube tutorials.

You have to burn bridges. Leave your job, change career, end a relationship, move to a new city, get a dog, have a kid or two, set your phone on “do not disturb”… forever…

Sometimes it ends in disaster, and sometimes we backtrack, scrambling while the bridge still stands. We never hear about it because it doesn’t make for an exciting story. Everyone knows how to fail just as well as how to blame it on the circumstances.

What I make of it is that the bridge we need to burn first is the one to our old self. There’s a value gap between who you are and who you want to be. You walk over the gap by acknowledging your values, and you burn the bridge by accepting them and then living them. We all have our values but are more or less aware of them. Too often we’re selective about how we live them. We value health but eat trash. We value family but never call. We value community but gossip. We value honesty but if only we could get away with tax fraud…