The Blog

There is a post doing the rounds on social media at the moment. You have probably seen it, or something very close to it. “Major cheat code for life,” it announces. “Stop dragging yesterday into today. The argument. The mistake. The missed chance. It’s already gone. Stop reliving it. Learn fast. Forgive yourself faster. Move forward. Life happens in the direction you face.”

I stopped scrolling when I hit it. Not because it moved me, but because it made me think about why it didn’t.

The advice itself is not wrong. There is nothing in it to argue with. But calling it a cheat code suggests it is something hidden, something most people don’t know about, a shortcut discovered by the few and now being generously shared. That framing is the problem. This is not hidden knowledge. It is something we should be taught before we are old enough to have much to regret.

What It Is Actually Saying

Strip the motivational packaging and what you have is a straightforward observation about time. The past is fixed. You cannot alter it. You can only carry it or set it down. Carrying it costs you something. Setting it down does not mean pretending it didn’t happen.

That is the distinction the post glosses over. “Stop reliving it” can be read as an instruction to suppress or dismiss, which is not the same thing as processing and releasing. The Stoics were precise about this. Marcus Aurelius did not advise people to forget their failures. He advised them to examine failures honestly, extract whatever was useful from them, and then return attention to the present, where action was still possible.

The difference matters. A man who suppresses a mistake without examining it is likely to repeat it. A man who examines it, understands what went wrong, adjusts accordingly, and then genuinely moves on is doing something harder and more useful. The post collapses those two very different things into a single instruction.

Why I Stopped Scrolling

I spent a quiet morning recently with that post sitting in my head, and I found myself thinking less about the content and more about the delivery. The word “cheat code” is doing a lot of work. It borrows the language of gaming, of finding a backdoor, of getting ahead without doing the full thing. And there is an audience for that framing because it implies ease.

But getting genuinely free of the past is not easy. I know from my own experience that it is one of the hardest things a person can do. Forgiving yourself, specifically, is not a switch you flip. It is more like a decision you make repeatedly, on some days several times before noon, until the weight eventually lifts. Calling it fast, as the post does, sets an expectation that most people will fail to meet, and then feel worse about.

The honest version of the advice would acknowledge the difficulty. It would say: this takes time, and the time it takes is not a sign that you are doing it wrong.

What We Should Have Been Taught

Here is where I find the post genuinely wanting.

If this is valuable guidance, and it is, then the real question is not why more people don’t follow it but why more people were never properly given it. I was not taught, at school or at home, how to process failure in a way that was honest without being punishing. I was not taught the distinction between guilt, which can be useful, and shame, which rarely is. I was not taught that the past is a fixed point and the present is the only place where anything can be changed. I found my way to those ideas, as most people do, through trial and error over many years.

The Stoics had worked all of this out roughly two thousand years ago. Epictetus, a man who spent a significant portion of his life as a slave, had a clearer view of what was and wasn’t within a person’s control than most of us manage in considerably more comfortable circumstances. His central argument was simple: some things are up to us, some are not, and the failure to distinguish between the two is the source of most unnecessary suffering. What has already happened is not up to us. What we do next is. That boundary is not a cheat code. It is basic orientation.

The fact that these ideas are not taught routinely, not to children in school, not in the contexts where people first encounter failure and disappointment, is something worth being mildly angry about. We teach mathematics that most people will never use in daily life and leave people to stumble into the most practical philosophy there is by accident, usually after they have already paid the price for not knowing it.

The Personal Part

Running a small business, which is what I do, gives you a more than adequate supply of material to practise on. Things go wrong regularly. Decisions turn out to be mistakes. Opportunities appear in hindsight that were invisible at the time. The version of myself from five years ago made choices I would not make now, and I have had to make a deliberate peace with the fact that he made them with the information he had.

That process of making peace is not fast. It is also not a cheat. It is work, and it requires a degree of honest self examination that is uncomfortable enough that most people prefer to avoid it. The avoidance is usually what turns a mistake into something that follows you. The examination is what ends it.

What the social media post gets right, and credit where it is due, is the directional point at the end. Life happens in the direction you face. That image is genuinely useful. Not as a motivational flourish, but as a practical description of how attention works. What you attend to is, in a meaningful sense, what your life is made of. A person who spends their attention rehearsing what went wrong yesterday is not living today. They are living in a reconstruction of the past, and reconstructions are always partial, always coloured by current mood, rarely accurate.

Facing forward is not optimism. It is not a refusal to learn. It is simply placing your attention where it can do something.

The Problem With Cheat Codes

The cheat code framing matters more than it might seem. It belongs to a wider tendency in the self improvement space to package hard, slow, uncomfortable work as if it were a trick. As if the people who manage to let go of the past and move forward have found a shortcut the rest haven’t noticed yet.

They haven’t. They have just done the work. They have probably had to do it more than once for the same thing, because that is often how it goes. And they have almost certainly not done it quickly, whatever the post suggests.

There is something worth protecting in being honest about difficulty. If you tell someone that forgiving themselves is fast and easy, and they try and find it isn’t, the most natural conclusion they draw is that something is wrong with them. That conclusion is worse than the original problem.

The ideas in that post are worth taking seriously. They are genuinely worth knowing, and knowing early. But they deserve a more honest container than the one they arrived in. Not a cheat code. A practice. One that takes time, requires honesty, and is worth doing precisely because there is no shortcut.