Decisions, Decisions, Decisions.....

People make many difficult decisions throughout their lives and must live with the consequences. Whether it’s deciding what to eat for breakfast or the people you’re going to surround yourself with, there are always consequences to the decisions you make. Whether someone eats pancakes with syrup or without has consequences, just like if someone decides to go out with a group of friends and drink or do something illegal. There are still consequences to both, but the consequences are very different. Whether or not someone puts syrup on their pancakes may only make them hyper for a little while. If someone goes out and drinks, or do something illegal, the consequences could be very great. A person could get arrested, or even killed. There are consequences to everything a person does; they just have different severities to them.


During The Old Man and the Sea, the benevolent and confident main character, Santiago, makes many critical choices. One choice that he makes is deciding not to allow anybody to go out and fish with him. This was a dismal mistake because he’s an elderly man. He’s still strong and long-winded, but he still needed help. It would have been better had people been nicer to him and had more sympathy for him, but instead, everybody just made fun of him and said he was a terrible fisherman. He could have used a lot of help when he was trying to catch the marlin and when he was trying to fight off the shark that was trying to eat his marlin. It would have been helpful to have someone there when he was fighting off the sharks because it’s easier to fight off a shark when there are two people, rather than just one. “If the boy were here he would wet the coils of line, he thought. Yes. If the boy were here…” (83). He was starting to cramp up and get sore. It also would’ve been a wise decision to take somebody out with him because he probably felt lonely. He’s out at sea for days at a time with nobody to talk to. It would have been a very intelligent decision to take somebody with him, so he didn’t have to do everything all alone.


Another critical decision that Santiago made was chasing the marlin so far out into the Gulf of Mexico. This was a very naïve decision because he had no clue where he was. He should’ve just stayed close to shore and let the fish go when he started to realize how far out he was. “I shouldn’t have gone out so far, fish, he said. Neither for you nor for me. I’m sorry fish…” (110). He should have stayed close to shore, so he could actually find his way back home. He got caught up in the moment, knowing that he had hooked an aggressive, majestic fish and wasn’t paying enough attention to how he was frantically being moved around.


Another decision that the old man made was eating the marlin. This was a good idea because he was probably very hungry. “He leaned over the side and pulled a loose piece of meat of the fish where the shark had cut him. He chewed it and noted its quality and its good taste. It was firm and juicy, like meat, but it was not red. There was no stringiness in it and he knew that it would bring the highest price at the market. But there was no way to keep the scent out of the water and the old man knew that a very bad time was coming…” (106). It would have been better if he had saved the remaining marlin meat and try to sell it and make a lot of money. This marlin was huge and he could have gotten lots of money had he saved it and sold it at the market when he made it back to shore. He could have gotten enough money, so he could have bought a nicer house and probably wouldn’t have had to fish again for a long time.


The choices people make in their every day lives can be as simple as what they want to wear that day, or as complicated as what they’re going to do if they can’t work, or lose their job. They are both choices, but they have completely different consequences to them. The choices you make can be very important and be decisions that affect you for the rest of your life, or they can be small, trivial decisions that affect you for just a few minutes. People have to make decisions every day. The only thing that is different about them is what kind of consequences the decisions lead to.