The Big Think

(Just random thoughts, fairly unfocused at the start of a new year.)

The New York Times has a very interesting article this morning. Among other things, it discusses how each choice we make necessarily extinguishes other choices, and thus other versions of ourselves that might have been never get to be. It’s sort of the anti-many-worlds theory of reality.

Ghosts roam around down there, after all, and they are the worst kind — alternate versions of oneself. The one who did not quit graduate school, for instance. The one who made the marriage work. Or stuck with singing, playwriting or painting and made a career of it.

Lost possible selves, some psychologists call them. Others are more blunt: the person you could have been.

Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run…

Yet it is partly from studies of lost possible selves that psychologists have come to a more complete understanding of how regret molds personality. These studies, in people recently divorced and those caring for a sick child, among others, suggest that it is possible to entertain idealized versions of oneself without being mocked or shamed. And they suggest that doing so may serve an important psychological purpose.

Researchers find that people think about past foul-ups or missed opportunities in several ways. Some tend to fixate and are at an elevated risk for mood problems. Others have learned to ignore regrets and seem to live more lighthearted, if less-examined, lives. In between are those who walk carefully through the minefield of past choices, gamely digging up traps and doing what they can to defuse the live ones.

Glenn Reynolds has this to say:

I think this is an interesting subject. Even if all your choices turn out well, they’re still choices, and you only get to live one out of many possible lives; in doing so you necessarily extinguish many other possible lives. In fact, as long as the value of those possible lives is more than zero, it’s theoretically possible to be in a situation where you have so much potential that anything you do is in some sense a net loss…There’s even a mathematical model of life satisfaction as a function of options not exercised

I think it’s interesting, too, especially as we start off a new year. Everybody has regrets, but what’s done is done. Done. It reminds me of this, one of my favorite poems by Gwendolyn Brooks:

Exhaust the little moment
Soon it dies
And be it gash or gold
it will not come
Again in this identical disguise.

I know someone who lives most of his life in a state of semi-permanent reminiscing and regret about the past. How the past is gone, how this-and-such was such a great time. I’m always saddened by the fact that this person is letting irreplaceable time pass while living in an unchangeable past.

So 2008 is starting, and 07 is gone. I always like years ending in 7. I graduated high school in 1987, got married in 1997. I clearly remember new years’ eve on Dec 31, 1986. The calendar flipped and we saw the big “87″ in Times Square. I said-and it was caught on videotape at my friend Linda’s house-”1987! Now I get to graduate!”. If I could have seen my future self 21 years later I don’t know what I would have thought. At that point the future was such an unknown landscape that I tried not to think about it. Hard to imagine that once a similar amount of time has passed I’ll be almost 60. I’m beginning to see what it was all those oldsters were talking about. It really goes fast.

I’m going to make a list of things I did in 2007, like Barry does (or did! He’s been skipping out on the last few years, and I think he’ll regret not having the record sometime in the future). Suffice it to say, 2007 was another great year. Here’s to a great 2008.