Every achievement creates a ghost.
When we imagine success, we picture the doors that open. We rarely consider the doors that close. The acceptance letter arrives, and with it comes an invisible funeral for all the futures that will never happen. The student who moves abroad leaves behind the student who stayed. The writer who chooses economics leaves behind the writer who chose literature. The university we attend replaces the university we imagined.
Yet the abandoned futures often remain emotionally vivid. They visit us in daydreams. They appear in quiet moments and ask a simple question:
“What if?”
Economists call these alternatives counterfactuals. & Schrodinger well, Schrodinger’s cat. They help us understand choices by comparing reality to imagined outcomes. The expense of life that is, is the life that could’ve been, however may equally better or worse, we can never know, making it the schrodinger’s outcome, the other decision could’ve been infinitelty better or worse, the worst part though, you will never know till you actually go.
But counterfactuals have a dangerous habit. We compare our real lives, with all their complexity and imperfections, against fictional lives that exist only in ideal form. The imagined university has no bad days. The imagined city never disappoints. The imagined future contains only its advantages.
Reality, meanwhile, arrives with paperwork, uncertainty, loneliness, and compromise.
The comparison is unfair from the beginning. Perhaps maturity is not learning to stop imagining alternate lives. Perhaps it is learning to appreciate the life that exists without constantly putting it on trial against the lives that never did.
There is another cost to counterfactual thinking: it turns gratitude into a performance.
We tell ourselves that if we are fortunate enough to receive an opportunity, we must be grateful for it at all times. Any disappointment feels ungrateful. Any regret feels selfish. Any longing feels like a betrayal of the life we have been given.
But gratitude and grief are not opposites.
A student can be grateful for a scholarship and still mourn the university they could not afford. An immigrant can love their new home and still miss the one they left behind. A person can celebrate a dream fulfilled while grieving the version of the dream that never materialized.
Yet we often deny ourselves these emotions because they appear contradictory. We expect our feelings to be coherent, as if they are presenting a quarterly earnings report rather than responding to the complexity of being alive.
The truth is that every choice contains a sacrifice. The more significant the decision, the more significant the sacrifice.
When we choose one future, we do not merely gain its possibilities. We inherit its limitations. We trade certainty for uncertainty, familiarity for growth, and one set of dreams for another.
Perhaps this is why major transitions feel strangely lonely.
Friends and family celebrate the visible achievement. They congratulate us on the acceptance, the promotion, the move, or the success. What they cannot see are the invisible futures we are quietly burying.
No one attends those funerals. No one sends flowers for the university we imagined attending. No one writes condolences for the city we never moved to. No one acknowledges the life that remained hypothetical.
And yet those losses are real enough to shape us.
Maybe the goal is not to eliminate counterfactuals altogether. They are, after all, a natural consequence of imagination. The ability to picture alternative futures is one of humanity’s greatest strengths. It allows us to dream, plan, and aspire.
The challenge is learning to visit those imagined lives without moving into them permanently. To wonder what might have been without becoming trapped by it. To appreciate the roads not taken while continuing to walk the one beneath our feet. Because eventually, every real life acquires something no imagined life can possess: reality itself.
And reality, despite all its imperfections, has a remarkable way of surprising us.
how much sorrow can i take geeeeeeeeez
as someone on the verge of leaving for college half way across the globe at the ripe age of 17, which she always wanted but never imagined would happen, this video made me weep,