This is where the past becomes a prison.
Our choices, in fact, never emerge from nowhere. They are the product of the trajectory that came before them. Our beliefs, our fears, the way we interpret the world, what we consider possible or impossible, the people we trust and those we distrust, even the way we imagine our future—all of these are the result of a long accumulation of experiences. Whenever we make a choice, we carry this invisible inheritance with us.
That is why every life is truly unique and unrepeatable. Even the lives of identical twins, who may be nearly indistinguishable in appearance and share the same genetic makeup, will never be exactly the same life. All it would take is for one of them to meet someone the other never met, for one to receive a job offer the other never received, or for one to be in a particular room when something decisive happens while the other is somewhere else. From that moment on, their trajectories would slowly begin to diverge.
The family we are born into is already a first lottery. So is geography. So is historical time. Even the moment of our birth matters. A child born into a financially secure and culturally stimulating family starts from a different position than one born into poverty, conflict, or a broken home. A young person born in a major city will encounter different opportunities and people from someone born in a small town. Someone entering the workforce during a period of economic expansion encounters possibilities that are different from those available to someone turning twenty during a recession.
And then there are the people we meet.
A person we encounter by chance can change an entire life. A teacher can convince us that we are capable of doing something we had never imagined. A friend can take us somewhere where we meet the person who will become our spouse. A colleague can introduce us to someone who offers us the job of our life. But the opposite is also true: we can meet the wrong person at the wrong time and spend years trying to escape the consequences of that encounter.
How much of all this can we really control?
And yet, when we reach fifty and look back, we tend to tell ourselves the story of our lives as though we had once possessed a complete map. As though every crossroads had been clearly marked. As though we had known that a particular phone call would matter, that a certain person would betray us, that a company would fail, that a relationship would end, that an opportunity would never come again.
But we didn't know.
And this is precisely where what economists and decision theorists call bounded rationality comes into play: human beings make decisions based on the information available to them, their cognitive abilities, the time they have, and the emotional context in which they find themselves. We do not possess perfect knowledge of the future. We are not omniscient. We cannot calculate every consequence of every decision.
Every choice, therefore, is made inside a cone of shadow.
And regret often begins when we forget that.
Imagine a twenty-five-year-old man who turns down an opportunity to move abroad because he wants to stay close to his family. At fifty, he looks back at his life and discovers that the foreign company he turned down has become a multinational corporation, while the colleagues who left have built extraordinary careers. He might tell himself: “I was an idiot. If I had left, I would have a house abroad, more money, and a completely different career.”
But there is a trick hidden inside that reasoning.
The twenty-five-year-old did not know the future of the company. He did not know it would become a multinational. He did not know that some of his colleagues would succeed. He did not even know whether he himself would succeed. All he knew was that, at that moment, he had a family he was deeply attached to and that leaving seemed like too great a risk.
The fifty-year-old is judging his twenty-five-year-old self using information that the younger man could not possibly have possessed.
It is a profoundly unfair process.
The same thing happens in romantic relationships. How many people, after a marriage or relationship ends, torment themselves by saying, “I should have realized sooner who that person really was”? But how could they have? At the beginning of a relationship, we never completely know another person. We know what the other person shows us and what we are capable of seeing. Some behaviors are interpreted differently because we are in love, because we trust, because we need the relationship to work.
Then something happens.
A sentence, a betrayal, a decision, a sudden change in behavior illuminates, in retrospect, even episodes that had previously seemed insignificant.
“It was all obvious.”
No. Often it wasn't obvious at all. It became obvious afterward.
That difference is enormous.
The same applies to career decisions. We may remain for years in a place that is slowly consuming us and later blame ourselves for not having had the courage to leave sooner. But perhaps ten years earlier we had two young children, a mortgage, financial insecurity, and no concrete alternative. What looks like cowardice today may, from that person's perspective at the time, have been a form of responsibility.
This does not mean it was necessarily the best choice. It simply means that we should judge it by considering the information, constraints, and responsibilities that existed at that particular moment.
The same is true of missed opportunities.
How many times do we tell ourselves, “I should have tried”?
I should have written that book. I should have confessed my feelings. I should have taken that job. I should have moved away. I should have studied harder. I should have started that business. I should have returned that phone call. I should have said yes.
Maybe.
But every “I should have” conceals a question we rarely ask ourselves: What did I know then?
Because the decision was not made by the person we are today. It was made by the person we were back then, with his fears, his beliefs, his inexperience, and his needs.
This is why regret can become a sophisticated form of retrospective narcissism: we imagine that our past self should have been smarter, braver, more farsighted, and stronger than it was actually possible for him to be.
We demand from ourselves a better version of who we were, as though that version had always been available.
It wasn't.
This, however, does not mean that every behavior should be forgiven or relativized. There is a fundamental difference between understanding a choice and justifying it.
There are actions that can be recognized as morally wrong even before we know their outcome. Deliberately harming an innocent person, knowingly betraying someone who trusts us, exploiting another person's vulnerability, torturing, persecuting, or killing for personal gain do not become good actions simply because we later find an explanation for them.
The complexity of circumstances does not erase responsibility.
The same applies to collective actions.
A government may order its soldiers to kill people it considers enemies and may call that action “necessary,” “legitimate,” “patriotic,” or “defensive.” But changing the name of an act does not automatically change its moral nature. Political and legal responsibility can be complex; propaganda can construct competing narratives; the reasons put forward by the opposing sides may be radically different. But the fact that an action has been authorized by an authority does not mean that every individual act committed within it is morally innocent.
So this is not about saying that “everything is relative.”
It is about making distinctions.
There are mistakes we make because we did not know the future. There are mistakes we make because we misjudged a situation. There are mistakes made under pressure. There are mistakes made out of fear. And there are actions we know are wrong and choose to commit anyway.
Putting everything into the same category means giving up on understanding human responsibility.
Perhaps we should also begin to look at our wounds differently.
A wound is an opening through which pain enters, but it can also become a slit, a narrow opening through which we can glimpse what might have been.
The word “slit” seems particularly appropriate to me because the past always contains an alternative possibility. A life is not only what happened; it is also the sum of everything that could have happened but never did.
We could have married someone else.
We could have lived in another city.
We could have had a different career.
We could have had more children—or none.
We could have made more money.
We could have written that book.
We could have said those words.
We could have remained silent.
We could have left.
We could have stayed.
Every real life is surrounded by an enormous constellation of possible lives that never became real.
And that is precisely what makes growing older so difficult.
We do not suffer only because of what we have lost. Sometimes we suffer because of the people we never became.
The doctor we never became. The writer we never had the courage to be. The entrepreneur we gave up on becoming. The person who might have lived in another city. The father we might have been. The woman or man we might have loved.
They are ghosts without bodies, and precisely because of that, they can become perfect.
Real life is full of flaws. The alternative life we imagine, on the other hand, never had the chance to fail.
It is a life constructed with hindsight.
Perhaps that is why regret can be so cruel: we compare a real life, full of mistakes, with an imaginary life to which we have granted nothing but success.
But we have no idea how that alternative life would have turned out.
The person we did not marry might have betrayed us. The job we did not take might have destroyed us. The city we did not move to might have made us miserable. The book we never wrote might have been a failure. The investment we never made might have cost us everything.
The past we imagine is often a carefully selected past.
We remember what we might have gained and forget what we might have lost.
And perhaps there comes a moment in life when we have to stop asking the past to give back what it can no longer give.
We cannot go back.
We can only change our relationship with what happened.
Making peace with your shadow does not mean absolving yourself of everything. It means ceasing to be your own jailer.
It means being able to look at a wrong decision and say, “Yes, it was a wrong decision.”
But also: “Back then, I didn't know what I know today.”
It means looking at the person we once were without hating him because he failed to live up to the person we wished we could have been.
It means recognizing that, at certain moments, we did the best we were capable of doing, while at other moments we could have done better and didn't.
Both things can be true at the same time.
Perhaps maturity consists precisely in being able to hold these two truths together without turning either one into self-absolution or self-flagellation.
I was wrong.
I shouldn't have done it.
I could have done things differently.
But also:
I couldn't have known everything.
I didn't yet know what I would eventually learn.
I was a different person from the one I am today.
And finally:
I tried.
That seemingly ordinary sentence could become one of the most important sentences of our old age.
I tried.
I loved as well as I knew how to love.
I worked with the tools I had.
I raised my children with what I knew at the time.
I pursued some opportunities and let others go.
I was afraid.
I was brave.
I trusted the wrong people.
I wasted time.
I started over.
I won sometimes and lost many other times.
Not every doughnut came out with a hole.
But tormenting ourselves over the ones that came out wrong will not put them back in the oven.
And above all, it will not give back the years we spent punishing ourselves.
Perhaps this is the real danger of remorse: not the pain caused by what happened, but the transformation of the past into a permanent sentence.
A mistake can last a day, a year, even a lifetime in its consequences.
But the trial against that mistake can last even longer, because we are simultaneously the defendant, the judge, the prosecutor, and the jailer.
And so we risk spending our old age in hell not because of what we did, but because of what we continue to do to ourselves because of what we did.
Perhaps, at some point, we have to lay down our weapons.
Look at our shadow.
Recognize it.
Do not deny it.
Do not idealize it.
Simply accept that the person we once were was also us.
And then turn toward whatever stretch of road remains.
Because the past can explain our trajectory, but it does not necessarily have to become our destination.
The true act of reconciliation with ourselves, then, does not consist in saying, “I didn't do anything wrong.”
It consists in being able to say:
“I was wrong. I suffered. I learned. And now, finally, I can stop punishing myself.”
