Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I think most of us spend way too much time haunting the graveyard of our own decisions. Standing there staring at all the little headstones marked “what if.” What if I took that job? What if I stayed? What if I left sooner? What if I said yes? What if I said no? What if I made one different turn twenty years ago and suddenly I’m living in some beachfront house with lower blood pressure and better knees?

But that’s not life. That’s fan fiction.

I know I’m guilty of it too. I replay conversations like there’s some director’s cut version of my life hidden somewhere in the archives. Maybe if I had chosen differently, I’d be happier. Maybe I’d be richer. Maybe I’d still have certain people in my life. Maybe I’d have avoided certain scars. Human beings love to imagine that somewhere out there is an alternate timeline where every choice magically worked out perfectly.

We’ve been obsessed with the multiverse long before Marvel turned it into a two-hour CGI migraine. The idea isn’t new. Hell, It’s a Wonderful Life was basically a “what if” story decades ago. What if George Bailey had never been born? What if one missing piece changes everything? It’s the same concept dressed up in black-and-white sentimentality instead of superheroes punching holes through dimensions.

And honestly, I get the appeal.

Because reality is heavy. Choices are permanent. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, you don’t get to politely ask life to put it back in. So our brains create these little escape hatches. Parallel universes where we were smarter, braver, luckier, thinner, less stubborn, more patient, or just happened to be standing in the right place at the right time.

But eventually I had to realize something uncomfortable.

“What if” doesn’t count.

It just doesn’t.

If “ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas.” My grandparents used to say that, and I hated it when I was younger because it sounded dismissive. But now I understand it. You cannot build a life on hypothetical bricks. You can visit the land of what-if once in a while, but you can’t move there permanently. Too many people do. They unpack their bags and start decorating imaginary lives they never actually lived.

Meanwhile, real life keeps happening without them.

I think sometimes we romanticize alternate outcomes because we only imagine the good parts. We picture the road not taken like it comes with perfect lighting and a movie soundtrack. We never imagine that maybe taking that other job would’ve made us miserable. Maybe marrying that person would’ve ended in disaster. Maybe moving across the country would’ve left us lonely and isolated. Maybe the thing we regret avoiding was actually the thing that saved us.

We don’t know.

That’s the whole point.

Every choice closes certain doors and opens others. That’s being alive. Nobody gets every version of life. We only get one. One messy, confusing, occasionally beautiful timeline where we do the best we can with incomplete information and exhausted brains and emotions we barely understand half the time.

And honestly? Sometimes surviving your choices is more important than perfectly optimizing them.

I’ve started realizing that maturity is understanding there’s no cosmic scoreboard comparing your life against all the alternate versions that never happened. There’s just this one. This imperfect, weird, complicated existence where we stumble forward making decisions we hope make sense at the time.

Some choices will absolutely haunt me forever. I’m human. I know that. There are conversations I wish I’d handled differently. Opportunities I should’ve taken. People I should’ve appreciated more while they were still here. I don’t think anyone reaches adulthood without carrying at least a few ghosts around.

But I also know this: constantly staring backward keeps you from seeing what’s still in front of you.

At some point, you stop asking, “What if?” and start saying, “Well… this is where I ended up. Now what?”

And honestly, that question matters a hell of a lot more.