Consequences May Vary
Past Obedience Is No Guarantee of Future Results
Today you will obey a few hundred rules. You will price almost none of them. This book is about the pricing.
Paperback $16.99 · Kindle $9.99 · Jacketed hardcover $26.99 this fall
Coming soon to Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and library apps.
About the book
Its claim fits in one sentence, and it gets misheard every time it is said out loud: there are no rules, only consequences. That is not permission. If anything, it will make you harder to liberate. Every rule you have ever obeyed was standing in for something else, and the something else is the only real thing in the room: what happens next, to whom, at what cost. Some of what stands behind your rules is real and patient. Some of it expired decades ago and still collects. Some of it was counterfeit on the day it was printed, and you are still paying.
Theofanis Pantelides heads a federally regulated brokerage in Manhattan, where pricing risk is the day job. Consequences May Vary takes the discipline home. It begins with a rescue dog who could never learn rules and learned consequences perfectly, and ends in the most regulated room in America. In between: a swimming rule that died twice, a statute from 1313 still standing guard, the two questions that sort every rule you obey, and the honest arithmetic of who paid for the life you are proudest of.
No worksheets. No steps. Twenty-three chapters, five interludes, one warning label, and the instruments to audit the fine print of your own life. Past obedience is no guarantee of future results.
From the opening pages
Chapter One · The Dog Doesn’t Know the Rules
Mochi would not go through the door.
Not dragged, not called, not baited. She would take a treat from my hand anywhere in the house, follow me room to room, and stop at the doorstep like the world ended there. She is a rescue, a mutt, and the shelter could tell us almost nothing. Age, approximate. Breed, unknown. History, blank. Whatever the outside was to her had been decided before we met, somewhere I will never see, by a world I could not ask. She arrived with the verdict already written: out there costs more than it pays.
I did what everyone does. I explained. I stood in my own doorway telling a frightened dog that the street was fine, that nothing would happen, that I was right there. She watched me the way you watch weather. Noise from the tall one.
You cannot explain anything to a dog. Everyone knows this, yet I stood there explaining anyway, because explaining is the only tool most of us have ever used. Every instrument we point at each other, the warning, the promise, the reassurance, the rule, the threat behind the rule, travels by language, and she had none. I could not tell her the street was safe. I could only arrange for the street to happen to her, in doses small enough to survive, and let her own accounting do the rest. To the sidewalk, then home. The mailbox, then home. The corner. Nothing bad ever collected. The fear never heard a word from me. No words were sent. It just got outvoted, slowly, by what happened.