Something you notice about a lot of older people is that they really can’t think of any regrets they have. While this might be just because of a sampling error (shoutout AP Stats), YouTube videos showing off the happier members of the older generation, getting more clicks than some bitter old guy, makes me notice that with age, most think less about the bad parts of their lives. While we can’t go through our lives without making terrible mistakes, and cringey Instagram moments from 7th grade that still keep me awake at night, I have reached some sort of peace with all of these things. It is what it is.
Oh I know, it’s not revolutionary in any way, and as the saying goes hindsight is 20/20, some things in the past we simply cannot change. And even if we somehow made a time machine, we still wouldn’t be able to change because of the alterations it makes to the present, or creating a timeline shift or whatever. But it makes sense. We can constantly torment ourselves on past missteps and decisions gone wrong, criticizing ourselves for the pain of our current situation, or missing out on something that would have “changed the way things turned out. But what great is that now, who knows, or who cares about what “could’ve happened.” Stop thinking about it. My friend Gabe Sorenson made the analysis that the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost isn’t really about being a free-wheeling, risk-taking, individualistic adventurer, it’s more about the complexity of regret. The poem of one taking the road less traveled maybe at the end causes the narrator some feelings of pain, and regretting that decision. But now that it happened, it led to where they are now, and while maybe in the metaphor they can traverse backward, through time, one cannot.
This brings me to my second point, the road taking us where we are now. Looking back, I have many regrets, especially for the things I’ve done during high school. Angry at a younger me for acting the corny way that I did, mad that my life now hasn’t gone the typical Hollywood direction. But thinking about it, maybe it’s a cope, but who cares, it’s likely that any slight change in my past steps would have had butterfly effect-esque consequences for life now. And things are fine! I swear! But really, if the things I had wished had actually happened, it wouldn’t really matter, because if I had taken the other road, I’d still have regrets.
There’s no way to avoid missteps and difficult, or simple choices. But it’s not like we’re able to predict both outcomes. Like a big Schrodinger’s cat problem (gratuitous deep – but decently well-known enough science reference, yet one that I don’t even quite understand enough to write or even analogize it), there’s no way we know the position or outcome of an event until the event is performed. So… what’s done is done… and I can either wallow in the pain or be like that one old guy in a Sociology class video I saw.
