4/6/2025 - Paths Not Taken

How is everyone not consumed by thoughts of what could've been?

There are so many things we could've done with our lives. Endless branching paths, endless decisions that could've been made differently that would have drastically altered our lives. I often think about how if I had simply chosen a different college, my life would have been so very different. I'd be in a completely different region of the country, I never would have met any of my college friends, I'd be in different student organizations. I wouldn't have gone on dates with the same people, I wouldn't have made random memories on these streets and in these buildings. Everything would just be different!

It's so wild to think about how different my life could be if I had gone to a different school. Once I'm older and have a career I'm sure I'll be thinking about what could've happened if I had accepted a different job position. The real scary part of all this is the fact that we will never, ever know what our lives would look like if we had taken those other paths. I have the unfortunate habit of assuming the grass would have been greener when, really, the grass would not have been greener in the slightest. I see things in my life that I am unsatisfied with and my brain immediately begins to think about how these things may have been remedied "in another life." Maybe in another life I don't have these problems because I did X, Y, or Z differently! Which is simply incorrect! God knows that problems occur no matter what city you live in or what school you go to. A life where all my dreams came true would still have shittiness!

There's just not enough time to do everything I want to do. I want to live in New Hampshire and Minnesota and Chicago and DC and Boston and Portland and Germany and Italy and Switzerland and I want to be a lawyer and a game designer and an artist and a writer and a city planner and web designer and tattoo artist and GODDAMN! There are so many things I want to experience, but due to limitations of the human body, I am only able to stick around for a certain number of years. Fuck, there's just so much I want to do! For as much as I shit on everything all the time, this world has so much wonder to offer. Sometimes I'll be sitting at a coffee shop in my city on a warm summer day, and just think to myself "fuck, life is great!"

It's hard to accept the limitations of how much we can do in one lifetime— it's not as much as we'd like! I had to choose a high school, choose a college, and a career. And one day I'll have to choose a city and choose a neighborhood and choose a home and choose a husband (hopefully). Decisions will be made, and branching paths of my life will be left behind. And that's okay.