Requiem for a life unlived

They don’t tell you, when you’re young, that choosing is a subtractive art.

It’s presented instead as progress. As expansion — doors opening, paths multiplying, a horizon that keeps obligingly retreating the closer you get to it. There is talk of freedom, of possibility, of becoming.

The implicit promise is that more options will yield a better life, in the same way that more toppings, up to a point, seem like they should improve a pizza, right up until the slice collapses under the combined structural burden of extra salty and fishy anchovies.

Because what choosing actually does — quietly, efficiently, and without much fanfare — is to eliminate.

To pick one life is to decline all the others, and to do so not abstractly but permanently.

This is difficult to comprehend in youth, when time appears to be a renewable resource and identity something you can revise the way you revise a résumé: by selective emphasis and occasional embellishment, occasionally deleting entire summers that in fact happened but did not photograph well.

In early adulthood, decisions carry a provisional quality. One takes a job in one city instead of another, dates one person instead of someone else, considers graduate school in a field that sounds impressive and just opaque enough to discourage follow-up questions. Each decision — even to marry — feels reversible, or at least correctable.

There is a widespread, largely unexamined belief that the “real” life — one’s true trajectory — will assert itself eventually, like a homing instinct, or at worst a mildly delayed package.

It does not.

If you’d been paying more attention in Grade 3, instead of sticking that eraser up your nose, you’d remember Miss Dahl’s explanation that while addition is commutative, subtraction is not.

When adding, you can swap the numbers in a sum without changing the result. Thus 4 + 6 = 6 + 4. When subtracting, however, juggling the numbers changes the result. Irrevocably. Irreversibly. 4 – 6 ≠ 6 – 4.

In the subtractive arts — life, for example — once you’ve made a decision, that ship has sailed. Done. Finito. Kaput. No mulligans allowed. Past a certain age, repeating Grade 3 ceases to be an option. Ditto for retrieving that eraser.

Choices accumulate. They sediment. A person becomes, over time, the sum not just of what they have done but of what they have not done, and the latter category grows quietly but prodigiously. As my buddy Kurt was known to muse: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

By midlife, most people could, if pressed, identify several plausible alternate selves: the teacher, the entrepreneur, the artist, the person who moved away, the person who stayed, the person who married differently or not at all, the person who finally figured out how to properly fold a fitted sheet instead of balling it up and pretending this counts. (As my long-suffering wife can attest, some of us are still working on that last one.)

This is where the rubber (not in the eraser sense) hits the road not taken. Roads.

By later life — by the time the knees begin offering regular commentary and the future shortens into something more legible — these alternate selves acquire a faint but persistent presence. Not vivid enough to be called hallucinations, certainly, but not so faint as to be entirely dismissible.

They are less like ghosts and more like administrative records: versions of a life that were filed but never activated, each one bearing a timestamp and a note that says something like “user declined option while mildly distracted.”

This is not, for most people, a source of acute anguish. The majority of men and women who reach their seventies and eighties with reasonable health and a measure of stability will, if asked directly, say they have had good lives. (Assuming their hearing aids are fully charged and they understood the question.)

They will mean it, too. There will have been work that was tolerable or even satisfying, relationships that endured (for better or for worse), small pleasures that accumulated into something like contentment: morning coffee that reliably tastes like morning coffee, a chair that has become, through long use, collaboratively shaped and accommodating.

And yet.

There is often, alongside this contentment, a secondary awareness — less urgent but more persistent — of the lives not lived. Of the eternal sunshine of the spotless subjunctive. What might have been.

It does not usually present as a dramatic regret.

It is subtler than that, and in some ways more durable. A kind of ambient wondering, like the low-level awareness that there is always one drawer in the kitchen that contains whatzits, thingamajigs and doohickeys whose purpose you cannot fully fathom but which you are reluctant to discard.

Consider work. Many people spend decades in professions they did not so much choose as accept. The choice, when it occurred, was made under conditions that now seem almost comically constrained: limited information, financial pressure, a desire to appear sensible to parents or peers.

Sometimes that decision was based on nothing more than the immediate need to respond to something trivial and persistent, like a phone vibrating in a pocket or a microwave that will not stop beeping until its existence has been acknowledged.

There is often a specific moment — remembered with a level of sensory detail that feels disproportionate — when another path was briefly available. A conversation, a letter, an offer that could have been accepted. And what is striking, in retrospect, is not just the decision itself but the contingent context in which it was made.

A person might recall declining an opportunity while standing in a bedroom, attempting to fold that bloody fitted sheet with the strained optimism of someone who believes that this time, finally, the corners will align in a way that suggests an underlying geometry rather than a personal failing.

The elastic resists. The fabric twists. There is a brief, absurd struggle with something that should, in principle, be simple. The phone rings. Or someone asks a question from another room. Or the decision is made — quickly, almost reflexively — because there is a vague sense that one should not overcomplicate things.

Years later, the fitted sheet remains difficult, though one develops techniques — strategies that work well enough if not elegantly. The decision, however, has become fixed. It no longer admits of adjustment. And so the memory attaches itself not just to the abstract idea of that road not taken, but to the very specific sensation of fabric slipping through one’s hands, of corners refusing to meet.

Romantic choices (forgive me, but all this talk of fitted sheets has me hot and bothered) tend to carry an even more complex residue, because they involve not just paths but people — specific faces, voices, modes of being that remain surprisingly accessible to memory (hence the popularity of all those wistful songs about the softness of her lips. The colour of her hair. The memory of her touch that remains when she’s not there …. ).

Most long-term partnerships are formed not from a single, cinematic decision but from a series of smaller, mutually reinforcing choices: to continue, to commit, to build something shared. To buy furniture from Leon’s that is heavy enough to discourage impulsive relocation.

No payments for 18 months.

For many, these choices result in relationships that are stable, supportive, and, over time, deeply interwoven with the fabric of daily life. There is real satisfaction here, and often real gratitude, expressed not always in words but in the quiet logistics of coexistence: the way groceries are acquired without discussion, the way one person learns the other’s preferences about things that, to outsiders, would seem too minor to catalogue.

But alongside this, there can exist a quieter counterfactual: the relationship that did not solidify, the person who represented a different configuration of life. Not necessarily a better one — often, in fact, a more volatile or uncertain one — but undeniably a different one.

In retrospect, it is possible to see that the qualities that made that alternate relationship compelling are the same qualities that might have made it unsustainable. This, however, does not entirely diminish its imaginative pull, any more than the knowledge that the fitted sheet tends toward maximum entropy makes the attempt to fold it feel optional.

Which is why the temptation to reach out to old flames via social media is so tempting and has caused so many relationship dumpster fires.

What complicates all of this is that, in a world of abundant choice, regret becomes less about outcomes and more about comparison. Even a good life — a demonstrably frigging fantastic life — exists against a backdrop of other conceivable good lives.

Each unchosen option becomes a kind of silent benchmark, impossible to verify and therefore impossible to dismiss, like a recipe one never quite tries but continues to believe would have turned out exceptionally well under slightly different circumstances and with better cookware.

Modern abundance, in this sense, manufactures a particular kind of low-grade, persistent regret.

Not the sharp regret of clear error, but the diffuse regret of multiplicity. The sense that, no matter how well things have gone, they might have gone otherwise, and that those otherwise-paths were not merely hypothetical but genuinely available at some earlier point — even if they were declined while one was preoccupied with something as mundane as whether the elastic edge goes over or under.

There is also, if one looks closely, a more unsettling undercurrent: the question of how much of any life was actively chosen at all.

When people look back, they often discover that many of their most consequential decisions did not feel especially momentous at the time. They were made quickly, or by default, or under the gentle but firm pressure of circumstance … or simply because the alternative required a level of effort that, in that moment, seemed disproportionate to the stakes as they were then understood.

A career was entered because it was available. A city was stayed in because moving seemed inconvenient, especially given the number of books and LPs already accumulated. A relationship continued because ending it would have required not just emotional clarity but also the practical ordeal of dividing shared objects — including, inevitably, at least one fitted sheet whose proper folding technique remained a matter of quiet disagreement.

In this way, a life can take shape less through decisive authorship than through a series of acquiescences. This realization does not typically produce panic — at least not in later life. It is too late for panic to be useful, and in any case panic tends to require a belief in imminent corrective action.

Instead, it produces a kind of wry, slightly bemused recognition on those nights when one is having trouble falling asleep: that the narrative of one’s life, which appears so coherent in retrospect, may have been assembled from decisions that were anything but deliberate, made in moments that were crowded with other, smaller concerns — laundry, schedules, minor irritations, the ongoing and largely unresolved question of how a piece of fabric with four corners can behave as though it has many more. (I promise that’s it for my references to being up sheet creek without an underpad).

And yet, despite all of this — despite the unchosen paths, the alternate selves, the lingering questions about authorship — most people do not experience their lives as failures or even as particularly compromised. The human capacity for adaptation is considerable. So is the capacity for finding meaning in what is present rather than what is absent.

The awareness of other possible lives tends to surface intermittently, often prompted by something trivial: a familiar song, a particular quality of light, the rediscovery of an object whose significance is not immediately clear but feels important nonetheless.

It arrives, lingers briefly, and then recedes. It does not demand resolution, because none is available.

If there is a resolution of sorts, it lies in a gradual shift of emphasis. The question moves from “What else might have been?” to “What, given what was, could reasonably have been expected?”

This is not a triumphant conclusion. It is quieter than that, and perhaps more honest.

Now it’s possible, of course, that every conceivable choice unfolds in the fullness of time on an infinite number of platforms.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in its most stripped-down, no-frills form, says that the universe (or rather, the multiverse) never collapses its uncertainties into a single outcome. Instead of picking one result when something quantum and ambiguous happens, reality just … keeps all the options, each in its own newly minted universe, like a compulsive hoarder of possibilities who refuses to throw anything away.

Now imagine that every time you hesitate between coffee or tea, or say something suave instead of something catastrophically awkward, the cosmos — already sweating under the weight of its own complexity and another disappointing ending to a Leafs’ season — just gives up on choosing and does both. Not metaphorically, but literally: it splits, clean as a bureaucratic memo, into parallel realities where each possibility gets its own fully furnished existence.

So there’s a version of you who made the better joke, and one who absolutely did not, and both go on with the quiet, crushing conviction of being the “real” you.

The mildly unsettling punchline is that these universes do not text, call or even subtweet each other. They are sealed off, hermetically, like Tupperware of alternate regret and triumph — no crossover episodes, no cosmic group chat, just an ever-branching archive of yous, each stuck with their own choices and none the wiser about the others.

But even if that were true, here you are again. Clowns to the left of you, jokers to the right, here you are. Stuck in the middle with me.

Supposing there are an infinite number of worlds out there with different versions of everyone who has ever existed, running madly off in all directions, this has absolutely no bearing on the price of tea in China in this one.

Which brings us back to the mezzanine floor where we all get off.

And where to choose at all, it turns out, is to accept a certain kind of loss — not catastrophic, not even necessarily painful, but real. A life is shaped as much by its exclusions as by its contents. The abundance that once seemed like pure freedom reveals itself, over time, as something more complicated: a system that offers many possible lives while permitting the experience of only one.

And so people make their peace, not because the alternatives cease to matter, but because they cannot be retrieved. The unlived lives remain present in outline, faint but persistent, like sketches beneath a finished painting, or like the memory of a fitted sheet that, despite years of effort, never quite folded the way it seemed it should.

It is not, in the end, a tragedy. But it is not nothing, either.

Just kinda batsheet crazy.

Play us out, Mr. Berra:

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.