It’s midsummer, hot and still. I’m on the bench outside an ice cream parlor. My now-wife (then fiancee) is inside ordering. Peanut butter for her, black raspberry for me. Our dog tries to sit on the bench beside me but his back legs slide on the wood, so he stands again, then tries again. People pass. A contractor with paint on his cuffs. A teenager with a tennis bag. A dad lifting a stroller over the curb. I watch them and, for a few seconds each, I try to imagine their lives. Not the whole story, just a flash. How their mornings start. What time they think about dinner (or do they call it supper?). Whether their phones are full of lists or photos.
Others have done the work in mapping this territory. Joshua Rothman, at The New Yorker, gives it a plain name, unlived lives, and points out why they glow: we see an edited cut of the path we did not take and mistake its neatness for inevitability. It is a narrative trick and once you see it, you notice how often the mind swaps in a cleaner version of someone else’s day and assumes it is reality, which is why the alternate route often looks wiser after the fact. Kieran Setiya, who teaches philosophy at MIT, offers two words that help sort the feeling. Telic is about finish lines and goal posts, the map part of us that wants routes and endpoints. Atelic is ongoing, the weather part, the quality of the air while you are inside a day. Miss the second and the first starts to run your life. Taken together, those two lenses are enough context for what follows and they keep me honest about what I am really comparing when I try on other lives from a bench in the heat.
The usual argument goes as follows. When you are young the options sprawl out in front of you. Then work and place and people set a shape, and switching tracks gets costly or complicated or impossible. Careers reward compounding and moves get harder. A city begins to fit, and other cities get reduced to candidates for weekend visits. You keep the friends you can actually see. You are in a corridor that is tightening around you. It explains the tug you feel in a lobby when you see a different logo on a badge at check-in and remember the route you did not take. It explains the small ache when you meet someone who stayed in one place for twenty years and can tell you who taught their kids to play piano on that block. Or the equal ache when you meet someone who never stayed and carries a pocketful of stories that start in one country and end in another. The corridor model allows for loss without drama. You choose this and not that, and the not-that feels real.
Still, it is not the whole story. The corridor is a map. It shows roads and intersections and cul-de-sacs. It makes it look like if you had taken the other road you would have ended up in a fixed town with a known climate. Life has not worked that way for me. The lives I imagine when I look at other people are clean. The lives I have actually lived are not. The difference is something akin to the weather.
These maps tell you where the roads are but the weather impacts your day. You can stand on the same corner two days in a row and one day will feel possible and the next will feel like a chore, and nothing on the map has moved. We forget this when we look at the lives we did not pick. We imagine road and destination. We skip the cold front pushing through at 3 p.m., the bad light in the room, the week you get nothing right. From the bench, the contractor walks like the stress and anxiety have lifted after rain. The teenager’s stride has gusts in it. The stroller dad looks like a fog advisory and a pocket of sun at once. None of that is on the map.
Sometimes I picture a teaching track. Chalk dust, office hours, a few students who surprise you in ways you can describe to no one else. The scene in my head is quiet and specific, a door cracked open, a stack of esoteric books. It leaves out committee meetings that start at four and run long. It leaves out the fight over who gets what course. It leaves out the fifth paper in a row that cites the introduction to a theory and never quite lands. The image is tidy because I made it tidy. That is how the mind can cheat us.
People who study regret and “what if” thinking keep circling the same point. Neal Roese is one of these people and his research shows how we trim the rough edges from our mental edits. We cut to the best parts and we mute the friction. It is the director’s cut with the hard scenes missing. Daniel Gilbert studies how we predict our feelings and finds we are not very good at it. We overestimate how long regret will sting, then adapt faster than we expected once real life arrives. Put the two together and you get a simple caution. The imagined version looks great partly because we are holding a highlight reel, and the pain we fear inside the real version tends to fade. You can see this in your own history. Think of a decision you once dreaded. Now think of how ordinary it feels in memory. That shift is adaptation doing its work. Which is another way of saying my professor daydream leaves out the long meetings on purpose, and maybe the dread would lessen with familiarity, or perhaps it would just become part of the weather.
I don’t think the solution is to shame the imagination. Wondering about other roads is not a moral issue but rather a standard feature. If anything it is a sign that the machine is running. You are paying attention. You recognize that every decision shapes the next field of view. You look up from your phone and a contractor in paint-streaked cuffs gives you a full paragraph on a way of living you did not test. You see a teenager and remember the exact tilt of your own head at that age when a narrow thing felt like the whole world. You watch a dad bounce a stroller wheel down from a curb and you can feel the small calculation he makes in his body, and the worrying soundtrack that never stops. The point is not to stop doing this. The point is to be honest about what kind of feedback it is giving you.
There is also the simple fact of drift. Weather shifts plans. It creates new roads and closes off old ones. People you meet change the probabilities in ways you cannot model. A health issue appears and the thinking you did about the next five years becomes a different kind of thinking. A company merges and the team that made sense last spring does not make sense now. A friend moves back to your city and every Friday changes shape. None of this is redemption or tragedy on its own. It is the system. If you stand in it long enough, you see the patterns. Pressure builds, pressure releases. You get a run of days when you think in straight lines. Then you do not. This does not make choice irrelevant, it makes it honest.
I have heard the counter that weather is an excuse, a way to avoid owning your map. I do not buy that. The point is not to make choices lighter. It is to right-size the stories we tell about what we did not choose. If the picture of the unlived life is going to have any use, it should at least be true to the way days feel when you are inside them. Otherwise you are comparing a shelf display to a used thing. You will always pick the display.
Back on the bench, the small things keep happening while the big idea tries to take over. The door opens. The door closes. Someone laughs at something you didn’t quite catch. A car creeps past trying to decide if that spot is a spot or if there’s a motorcycle hiding. The dog turns, plants his front paws on my knee, and looks at me with the face that means he has adjusted his plan from sitting like a person to being treated like a person. He tries to sit again and fails again. He stands, resolved. I check the time.
Suddenly I realize the contractor has crossed the street and is gone. The teenager props the racket bag against a hydrant and ties a shoe and then is gone. The stroller dad makes it down the curb, checks the baby, nods once at no one, and is gone. I keep doing the same thing, trying on their days like jackets you would not buy because they do not quite fit but you like how they feel in the moment. I remind myself that I am picking lining and buttons and ignoring the seam that digs in under the arm.
What about the lives I could still take on, the side corridors that are technically open. Those exist. They always exist. You do not have to torch your map to walk a different block. You can add a course without quitting school. You can work with a different set of tools and see if the work feels different. You can spend more time in one neighborhood of your own life and see whether depth gives you something breadth cannot. I do not think of these as grand pivots. They are local moves. Weather moves. You feel a front and you close a window. You see a break in the rain and you go around the block. No slogans needed.
If this all sounds obvious, it’s because we know it and forget it on a loop. The corridor story returns because it is simple and it feels fair. You picked A and not B, so you cannot have B. The weather story takes more patience. It asks you to accept that a big part of how a life feels sits outside the lines. It changes while you look at it. It will not hold still for your comparison. It is hard to put on a slide. It is easy to live and hard to summarize.
There is one more piece that matters, which is that gratitude and the small mourning can sit next to each other without canceling out. You can be happy and still feel the loss of a road you did not take. You can feel the loss and not make it into a verdict on the road you are on. If you accept the weather model, this gets easier, not harder. You stop acting like you missed a perfect day and start remembering there are not many of those. Most days have a mix.
My wife comes out of the ice cream parlor with the cups. Peanut butter for her, purple for me. Somehow it’s already running down my thumb. I miss it with the napkin and now my hand is sticky. The dog finally stops trying to sit. The bench creaks. It is still hot. The corridor narrows. The weather keeps changing inside it, and the forecast looks good to me.