Getting caught early can be a mercy. It’s cheaper than getting away with it for years.

Being found out early is a cheaper outcome than it feels like at the time. The alternative is years of the same thing getting bigger, better hidden and more entangled with everything else in your life, until the eventual reckoning takes far more with it. Consequences now are small. Consequences later are not, and by then the habit has had time to become most of who you are.

If you have been caught in something, treat it as information rather than catastrophe. Deal with it fully this week instead of working out how to be less detectable next time.