Regret

A friend of mine recently asked me a question related to a quote he read: "The definition of hell on Earth is meeting the person you could have become." He wanted to know how do you remain focused on your north star knowing that your decisions right now have a big impact on the type of person you could become.

It all goes back to regret. Do you regret who you could have become if you just had [insert knowledge/task/habit] when you were younger?

I was listening to a series on Sam Harris’ Waking Up app entitled Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals where he talks about JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) and how it’s not just unavoidable, but also can give you meaning to life.

He quotes the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to show the total extent to which we are defined by our finitude:

"By our capacity as we perceive through life only ever to choose one path at a time from a multiplicity of possible paths."

Burkeman goes on to say that any human life, even the most successful life you could possibly imagine, is inevitably a matter of constantly waiving goodbye to possibilities.

Relating back to what my friend said about meeting the person you could have become…I don’t think it’s that binary. Meaning, there’s you and then this other person that you could have become.

Instead, there are an infinite number of people you could have become based on the millions of decisions you make throughout your life. And every decision you make is creating a single life and at the same time closing off the possibility of countless other lives, forever.

FOMO is inevitable and will happen to all of us because we haven't figured out how to live forever...yet. Burkeman argues that it’s this fear of missing out that gives meaning to our experiences and makes life worth living. This is what gives weight to our choices and makes them matter.

So instead of focusing on what version of yourself you could have become if you chose X over Y, you should spend more time enjoying and learning from the choices that you are making right now, every day.