Learn This Lesson from the Death of John Nash Over the Holiday Weekend

John Nash and his wife Alicia were killed in an auto accident  over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. The Hollywood movie, "A Beautiful Mind," starring Russell Crowe attempted to portray his life and struggles. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Nash, his wife, and their family and friends. While he was 86, a sudden death still shocks loved ones.

Nash struggled with schizophrenia throughout much of his life. While his contributions to economic theory, specifically "game theory," brought him a Nobel prize, he "lost" many years that could have been intellectually and academically productive due to his disease.

Nash was honored for his early insights, still widely used in economics, into how rivals shift or maintain strategies and allegiances. The Nash Equilibrium describes the moment when all parties are pursuing their best-case scenario and wouldn’t change course even if a rival does. It has been widely applied to matters including military face-offs, industrial price wars and labor negotiations.

Both his professional and personal life suffered greatly. During those years, his brilliant rational mind concocted illusions and delusions that caused him to give up his esteemed academic position at MIT.

Wandering through Europe, he “feared he was being spied on and hunted down and he tried to give up his United States citizenship,” Nasar wrote. Back home, he separated from his wife and spent time with his mother in Roanoke, Virginia. He tried to resume his research during what he called his “interludes of, as it were, enforced rationality.”

His rational mind turned irrational for long spells because of his disease. But there's a lesson her that the rest of us mere mortals ought not lose sight of. It's another example of the rational turning irrational. Mr Nash and his wife likely - almost certainly - died because they did not have their seat belts secured, riding in the back of a taxi. If you remember, this is what caused the death of CBS reporter Bob Simon; he also had not buckled up and was killed when the car in which he was being transported crashed.

This idea of not using one's seat belt when one takes a taxi or other car service is apparently not unique to Nash and Simon. The theory is that if you're in the back seat, somehow you don't really need the safety restraint. Otherwise rational people flip themselves from the rational world to the irrational in this belief. Clearly it makes no sense. And yet some of us hold to it.

Do yourself a favor and stick with the rational behavior of buckling your seat belt whether you're driving your own car, sitting in the front seat as a passenger, or being driven about by a professional driver in a taxi, or other car service. At the very least, if you decide to remain untethered as you're driven about, remember that such a choice is irrational. You're putting your life at risk. Professional drivers have accidents, just like the rest of us.