Late Night Musings: Speculating on Alternative Choices not Made.

Do you ever find yourself wondering about how your life might have turned out if you had made a different choice at a particular point in your life, rather than the choice you actually made to get to where you are right now?

In a sense, it's the classic "what would have happened if I'd turned left instead of turning right" dilemma.

I have always enjoyed these kinds of "alternative reality" speculations, although I find that the most difficult part of engaging in such speculation is deciding which life choice it is you would have made differently.

I can look back across my life and ponder how it would have turned out if I had chosen to stay in Europe when I was 20 years old, instead of packing up everything I owned and hauling it across the Atlantic to go to University in Texas.

Without a doubt, my life would have turned out very differently!

That said, just how much do our choices inform the eventual outcome of our existence? If we are predisposed to choose certain things, will the long tern difference actually be that great?

I say this against the backdrop of considering how my life might have turned out differently if I had stayed in Europe but essentially made all the other basically same choices since age 20 to my current state of being 60+.

Will just one turn in a different direction result in our lives diverging over time, or is there a basic nature so ingrained in us that the one choice might diverge a lot at the beginning, but eventually we end up very close to the same path as we would have taken otherwise?

A bit like driving around an unexpected road accident sends us on a detour, but eventually we end up back on the original road

I suppose you could argue that it is just a waste of brain space to even contemplate such things! After all, history is history, and there's nothing we can do to actually change that history.

But I think it is an issue a lot of people actually think about. If that weren't true, why are there so often movies and TV series made about alternative realities?

Just in the last year we've watched a couple of quite interesting and very well produced TV series. One is "The Man in the High Castle" which depicts a world in which Germany and Japan won World War II. The other is "For All Mankind", which depicts a reality in which the race to the moon in 1969 was won by the USSR rather than the USA.

However, both of these shows exist and extrapolate at a global level, rather than at the level of an individual person. Surely, the choices we make on our own would not have such universal ramifications. Or would they?

Regardless... it's a fun mind exercise!

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful Sunday!

How about you? Do you ever speculate how your life would be different if you'd made other choices? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 2024.01.21 01:05 PST
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