What I've Drawn From Bad Blood

I started yet another gangster TV show, Bad Blood. Judging by how much budget seems to be allocated to this genre, I don’t think anyone is getting sick of these.

I like them for a few reasons.

The first is that the mafias and cartels depicted are incredible businesses, just with an illegal product. The leaders, and arguably, everyone through the ranks, have tremendous entrepreneurial spirit. And I love that. If you take away the illegal product, there’s a lot to be learnt from them. They're raw entrepreneurs at heart who play with high stakes.

The second is the interesting question of:

Even with the inevitable prospect of jail or death, and/or when they're about to lose it all,  why do the people in power continue to strive for more? 

In the ‘legal’ world, death is rarely a consequence. Yet, if it were, would the drive to want more continue the same? In the ‘illegal’ world, the ego chooses to ignore the possibility of death or jail, with hope of riding the fine line to get away with it one more time. 

In an episode of Bad Blood I watched yesterday, the narrator described it perfectly (I’m paraphrasing): “For a year everything was going well, then as always, someone got greedy and wanted more. So we entered a bloody war, yet again”.

Why are some people wired to ignore all (potentially bad) consequences in the pursuit of more?

In our own strive for high performance, these ‘potentially bad’ consequences are the breakdown of relationships, our health and our mental health. It’s usually one or all of the three.

So really, we’re not too dissimilar to the mafias and cartels of the world. If anything, we might be more masochistic because it doesn’t quite need to be this way. Right?

That’s a question I think about a lot. As you can probably tell, I’m yet to crystallise my answers.