The Illusion of the Road Not Traveled

Understanding the Illusion of the Road Not Traveled

We all go through life making a series of choices. We face a fork in the road and must choose to go in this direction or that direction. We continue our journey, choosing one way or another over and over again. Some of these forks in the road are trivial, and some are major crossroads. We decide to go after this career instead of the other one. We choose to marry this person rather than another, or not to marry at all. We have children, or we don’t.

Our capacity for vivid imagination can help us to imagine solutions to problems or to plan for things. Sometimes we use our imagination to consider how life might have been had we chosen another road. We often imagine that road unfolding in a much better way than the road we chose. This vision of the road not traveled can be very detailed and often meets all our essential needs. The more we focus on this road, the more we grieve that rejected choice where everything worked out great.

??The problem is that road only exists in our imagination. We are grieving the loss of something that never existed. We have only one path. It unfolds as a cumulative result of all the choices we have made along the way. We don’t know the consequences of other choices, because those paths do not exist. We imagine everything would have turned out great, but we can never know in truth.

??The illusion of the road not traveled often leads to grief related to losing that imagined path. It can also fuel a sense of regret. I regret my choice, because I now experience the outcome of that choice. We often use regret as a stick to beat ourselves with whenever we revisit the choice. Regrets are a heavy load that weighs us down as we move along the path we have chosen. But regrets can be helpful if we transform them into an intention to realize or learn something from the regret, and to use that understanding to move forward and avoid making the same mistake again.

I don’t think that people intentionally make bad choices. "Hmm . . . Door #3 is full of suffering and will turn out badly . . . yeah, I think I’ll pick that one. "? Nobody does that. In the light of all our competing needs and considerations, Door #3 seemed like the best choice. Maybe we could not perceive at the time that Door #4 might have been a better choice, or maybe we couldn’t perceive Door #4 at all.

When evaluating our prior selves, we often beat them up with some form of What were you thinking?! Door #3! Really! What an idiot. It may seem well-deserved, but it conveys a profound unfairness toward your prior self, who did not have the knowledge that your current self possesses. Your current self knows how the road unfolded. Your current self asks your prior self: “Couldn’t you see that coming?” Prior self could respond, “Well, no actually. I couldn’t.”