Regret Is the Price of Having More Than One Possible Life

Every major decision you make closes the door on a life you could have lived.

Marry one person, and you’ll never know what life might have been like with someone else. Move across the country for a job, and you’ll never experience the version of your life where you stayed close to home. Have children, and you’ll never know what you might have done with all that freedom. Don’t have children, and you’ll never know what raising a family might have felt like.

That’s the uncomfortable reality of being human. We have the imagination to picture a hundred different lives, but we only get to live one.

And because we can imagine those alternatives, we inevitably wonder whether we chose correctly.

The problem is that we tend to compare our actual lives, with all their frustrations and disappointments, against imaginary lives where everything somehow worked out perfectly.

In the life where you took that other job, you made more money and loved your coworkers. In the life where you married someone else, you never argued about the dishes. In the life where you pursued your dream, you succeeded spectacularly.

We conveniently leave out the possibility that those alternate lives might have been just as complicated as the one we’re living.

But here’s something worth remembering: regret doesn’t necessarily mean you made the wrong decision. Sometimes it simply means you recognize that choosing one good thing required giving up another.

You can love your family and occasionally miss your independence. You can be grateful for your career and still wonder about the road you didn’t take.

Those feelings aren’t contradictions. They’re part of having a life filled with possibilities.

The goal isn’t to reach the end without regrets. That’s probably impossible.

It’s to build a life you appreciate enough that you stop constantly mourning the ones you never lived.