Was the bad option the best choice?

In a rainy season in 2018, when a group of boys had finished football training, they had no idea that the road home would turn into a fight for survival. They sought shelter from the heavy rain in the nearest cave, unaware that it would seal its doors around them and swallow them whole. The situation grew worse with each passing day, with no trace of them — as though the earth had consumed them.

Thai authorities launched a search operation in which thousands of volunteers took part, including soldiers, engineers, and cave divers from around the world.

After more than 9 days, they were found at a depth of nearly 3 kilometres underground in a cave in northern Thailand.

Anaesthetist and professional diver Richard Harris, one of the children's rescuers, recounts in his book The Art of Risk that they found 13 children in a dire situation — trapped in pitch darkness, without food and with only limited amounts of oxygen.

Harris goes on to say that there were no rational options to consider for getting the children out of the cave.

Waiting for the rain to stop, or pumping out the water, could take anywhere from weeks to months.

When the decision was made to bring the children out using diving equipment and under anaesthesia, it was the least bad option — despite all indications suggesting their chances of survival were close to zero.

The journey out alone took between 3 and 6 hours per child, diving through narrow, water-filled passages. In the end, all of them survived.

Imagine making that dive after two weeks besieged in a cave, not knowing how to swim, and being under 15 years old.

Some situations are like that — they force you to choose between bad and worse, where bad becomes the best of all available options.

If you do not succeed afterwards, that is all right, because there was no better choice. And if you do survive, history will immortalise that moment in the pages of books and on its walls.

What if bad truly is the best option available to you in certain situations? What if you come to realise that you will only know whether you have succeeded after you have taken that risk and lived through the experience?