We make decisions every day. You made one yesterday. You decided to get up early and jog before class. Now, as you sit in your bed with dishevelled hair 40 minutes late for class, reading the texts from your classmates, you regret it. Perhaps you forgot to call your friend, unknowing that it would be the last time you would ever speak to her.
Whatever you did or didn’t choose, do you regret your decisions?
I often think about the lives I would have lived had I not made a certain decision. Or, to be more precise, the choices I’ve made that permanently shut doors to possibilities and experiences that I might never encounter again. The number of hours I spent studying for exams to get into universities I decided not to go to. The time that I wasted doing nothing when I could have learnt something that would have made me feel more confident introducing myself during icebreaker activities on the first day of university.
Had I invested the countless hours devoted to schoolwork in things I genuinely enjoyed doing, would I be a better person today? It feels as though I perpetually bear the weight of a funeral, living the consequences of these choices everywhere. Sometimes, when they appear in my dreams, they rattle me, resembling ghosts of each misguided decision lying in wait, prepared to seize the moment my mind succumbs to anxieties.
Reflecting on the potential experiences and alternate realities that will remain unexperienced is an endless cycle. How frequently have you contemplated the possibility that your life would be perfect now if you had just made one choice differently? Chances are, you probably said way too often than you’d like to admit. Considering the distress and turmoil these thoughts bring, why do we continue to dwell on the lives we might have led instead of appreciating the lives we currently live?
When you look back into the past, you would probably point out multiple decisions you wish you had made differently. You likely beat yourself up about it, wondering how you could have thought a decision like that would have brought you joy, hoping you could go back in time and fix it.
But if it was that obvious, why didn’t you just make the decision differently back then? Reflecting on the past involves contemplating the alternate outcomes we could have had because we’ve lived life on those different paths, enduring our own mistakes. We now understand what the “right” choices would have been, and the expansive nature of time allows us to completely drown ourselves in regret about our past. This duality—the beauty and horror of being human—stems from our remarkable capacity for introspection and profound contemplation. However, is going through the cycle of making a choice and then hating yourself for it truly a bad thing? Of course, there are many things that I wish I had done differently in my 17 years of existence now that I truly know the outcome of my choices. But then, would I really be the person I am today?
We are made up of our experiences. I have a scar on my knee from the time I decided to race my friend with my shoelaces untied. I have an ugly mirror in my room because I thought it was pretty when I originally bought it online. My head hurts a little because I decided to wake up early to eat pav bhaji today. But at the same time, we make good decisions all the time, and we don’t even know it because we don’t give ourselves enough credit for things. Talking to that one girl in the beginning of school was a great decision. Buying that really pretty pair of jeans that my friends always compliment was a great decision. Skipping that one class to sleep in was a great decision. So should I really put myself down for all the bad decisions I’ve made? Should you?