Abandoning Ourselves
Original article by Tasha Kleeman for Aeon
Since living requires choosing, we will always feel regret about the paths not taken. But what matters is the future we forge
Little is more paralysing than the fear of making the wrong choice. I see this in my clients, many of whom feel stuck in cycles of indecision and procrastination. And I recognise it in my own life, which, until recently, meandered noncommitally between possible futures, preferring the safety of uncertainty over the risk of decisively forging a path that I may one day live to regret.
Regret is so frightening because it confronts us with our most fundamental anxieties. It reminds us of our finitude: that we can do this thing only once. It speaks to the responsibility we bear as architects of our lives, and what the 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) as our ‘dizzying’ freedom to make finite choices in a world of infinite possibilities. And, perhaps most disturbingly, it calls into question our authenticity, articulating the gap between the person we would like to be, the life we would like to have lived, and the reality of our day-to-day actions.
If this is all feeling a bit existential, I’ll explain. I’m training to become an existential psychotherapist, so death, the passing of time, and all things ‘existential angst’ are my domain. One of the core tenets of existential psychotherapy is that many of us spend a great deal of energy distracting ourselves from the anxiety-provoking conditions of our existence. Writing in Existential Psychotherapy (1980), the existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom splits these ‘givens of existence’ into four universal categories: mortality (that our time is finite), existential isolation (that we are ultimately alone), freedom (that we bear responsibility for our lives), and meaninglessness (that we look for meaning in a world that continually presents itself to us as senseless).
According to existential psychotherapy, if we are able to confront the reality of our fragile human existence, rather than absorbing ourselves in what Martin Heidegger called the ‘everydayness’of life, we can live more bravely and authentically. Encountering death can help us live richer, more intentional lives; acknowledging our existential anxieties can limit their power over us; and confronting our regrets can help us move forwards more courageously and decisively.
Of course, some degree of regret is unavoidable. Choice inevitably involves loss: a path not taken, a parallel life unlived. Condemned to make choices, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it in Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), we must navigate a world of infinite possibilities, and find some way to make peace with paths not travelled. And yet, not all regrets are created equal. Why do some regrets fade, while others persist with increasing intensity? Why can some of us let go of the past, while others are engulfed by it?
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