I noticed a while ago that it's really difficult to imagine a different reality than the one you currently occupy. Not like aliens and time travel and whatnot, but like imagining how things would be in the present if things in the past had gone differently.
For example, sometimes I wish I drank more in college. This sounds ridiculous, but give me a minute. Cheap beer and crappy shots flowed freely in those days, but I held off until I was 21. If I had started earlier, I could've gotten a few mistakes out of the way early (like Southern Comfort) instead of making those mistakes later in life when my body was older and less inclined to recover from a hangover.
But if I drank at that time in my life, I probably wouldn't have been hanging out with the people I was hanging out with, which means I probably wouldn't have met my wife, which means I probably wouldn't have had the self-confidence to quit religion, etc. The point is that we're all essentially a product of our experiences, and it's nearly impossible to imagine how things would've turned out if we changed just one of the many variables. #psychology |