Little By Little...

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They say give a man a yard, and he’ll take a mile. One of the first things you’ll notice about humans is their penchant for pushing boundaries. Nothing ever happens suddenly, we take it little by little, in tiny increments that would be considered to be inconsequential. These little changes usually end up compounding eventually, and at the end, we’d find ourselves encumbered with a problem that seems to be bigger than us.

This is a habit that has taken over, and just as it works for good, it also works for bad as well, and we see evidence of it in every area of our lives. People want something from you, they know that taking it all at once would fuel resistance, so they take it little by little, pushing to see how much you’ll endure until you snap.

It’s kind of like when you tell a child not to do something, they don’t stay away from that particular thing, they instead go close to it. They’d watch you watch them. They’ll move close, testing their boundaries. They play around the perimeter to see if you’ll say anything. If you say something, they’ll back off, if not, they’ll push it further by playing around the very thing you asked them not to do. Then, they’ll mistakenly ‘brush’ against it.

If you still don’t say anything, they’ll eventually end up doing that one thing you told them not to do, right under your eyes. At that point, you know it had happened right before you, but you might not even know for sure when exactly you allowed such a thing to happen. It simply did.

This is a similar case with insecurity and even inflation. The prices of goods over the last ten years have more than tripled, and some have even quadrupled. But if you take the time to study and find out when exactly that happened, you won’t have an answer. I don’t know when exactly I started paying N50 for a satchet of water instead of the N5 it used to be. I don’t know how exactly we got to N865 for fuel from the N65 that it was years back. You then ask yourself, how exactly did we get here?

This is because in one day, they can’t just up the prices. You can’t just increase the price of something by 1000% and expect people to go with it. So, what do you do? You sneak it in and you increase it little by little, gently pushing their tolerance range. And that’s how sachet water moved from N5 to N10, to three for N20, and now, by some weird dark magic, N50 for one!

That’s how everything is. That’s how it is with criminals as well. Research shows that many serial killers don’t just start all of a sudden; there are always signs. Maybe when they tortured their first animal as a child, the adults did nothing, when they finally graduated to murder, the law enforcement did do well enough to catch them. And thus, they started pushing their boundaries.

That’s who we are. We don’t stay within the confines provided for us, we simply always want more. We keep pushing boundaries, until it’s too late and by then, the problem has grown and can’t be stopped. That’s how sects are formed, that’s how gangs are formed and how they got so powerful.

And that’s why no matter what, we should always try to call something out. If it’s bad, the instant you notice it, speak up. Because the longer you let it simmer, the stronger it gets and the harder it’ll be to stop.

If not, you’d end up wondering how you allowed it get so bad.

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_{Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, I would love to know what you’re thinking. Till we meet in the next post.}

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_{N.B: All images used in this post are mine. The thumbnail was designed using Canva.}

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