There is an infamous passage in the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s book Either/Or that declares:
Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will also regret it; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret it either way. Believe a girl, you will regret it; don’t believe her, you will also regret it; believe her or don’t you will regret it either way. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all life-wisdom.
That’s a lot of words just to say “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” (and, for the record, I’ve actually taken a few redundant sentences out of the quote), but it’s also an unattractively bleak assessment of life: whatever you choose, you’ll regret it, up to and including suicide. Thankfully, it’s not actually Kierkegaard’s own view of things. Kierkegaard, rather unusually for a philosopher, wrote much of his most important work in the voice of a range of characters, each with their own competing worldview, rather than his own authorial voice.
These particular words about the futility of choice are attributed to a young man known only as ‘A’, who lives in what Kierkegaard calls the ‘aesthetic’ sphere of existence. In this mode of life, we simply go wherever our inclinations take us, pursuing pleasure (whether base or refined, physical or intellectual) from one moment to the next.
The aesthetic life, as Kierkegaard quickly shows, is ultimately self-defeating. No matter how hard you chase pleasure, boredom and meaninglessness will always get you in the end.
Thankfully, as A’s older friend, Judge William, points out, life doesn’t have to be that way. The choice to get married, for instance, certainly can be a fulfilling one. It just takes commitment, choosing marriage through bad times as well as good. It’s through such choices, according to William, that we become integrated, stable personalities across time, rather than just being a bundle of whims. Judge William points out that, insofar as A just follows his impulses, he doesn’t really choose things at all, any more than a feather caught in the wind chooses to float left or right.
But perhaps we’re dismissing A’s view of choice too quickly here. The young aesthete is arguably right, in ways he himself does not quite understand. It’s not necessarily that any choice we make will turn out to be disappointing, as he seems to think. Rather, it’s that any choice we make demands that we give up other things that might well have been worth pursuing – otherwise it wouldn’t really be a choice at all. Every time we choose to go one way rather than another, we’re not just making a positive commitment to one option. We’re also rejecting a vast, perhaps near-infinite number of other possibilities.
Say you decide to go to law school. You’re not just choosing a profession, you’re choosing not to pursue any number of other careers. You were probably never really going to be an astronaut or a rock star – though who knows? – but there’s no end of other jobs you might have chosen instead. You might tell yourself there will be time later to change course, but even choosing to do things later in life, rather than earlier, has consequences for what will and won’t be possible.
Nor can you ever really be entirely sure of just what you’re saying ‘no’ to. Marry, and you’re not just marrying one person. You’re also “forsaking all others”, as the traditional vows have it, without any possibility of knowing who the vast majority of others you’re forsaking are. That’s an awful lot of people you just forsook; just how sure are you that none of them were worth another glance?
Not all choices are this momentous, of course, but even the most trivial ones come with abandoned possibilities. Cereal for breakfast? That’s a piece of toast foregone. Taking the dog to the park for a walk? Think of all the other parks you could have visited, or all the other dogs you could have walked. Watching the latest superhero blockbuster this evening? An evening you can’t get back for any other purpose, even if you really liked the movie.
This all sounds frivolous, but there’s an ethical dimension to such choices too. As Jacques Derrida said, when I feed my cat, I’m failing to feed every other hungry cat in the world. More significantly, as utilitarians have pointed out, every dollar you spend on entertainment could be spent on alleviating poverty or sickness somewhere else in the world instead.
Perhaps what’s astonishing is not that we feel regret over some of our choices, but that we’re not constantly weighed down by regret for all of them, or paralysed with indecision and FOMO: ‘Fear Of Missing Out’. It seems like we’re constantly slamming the door on uncountably many more options than we select. Perhaps the wisdom of A’s “you’ll regret it either way” is not that all our options are bad, but that we’ll regret all the things we give up every time we choose. How can we reconcile ourselves to a world that’s constantly making us pass up almost everything?
Here’s one possible consolation – and it’s one that by historical accident was not available to the young aesthete, or to Kierkegaard himself.
We can think of making a choice as evaluating a range of possible worlds. Trying to decide whether to have cereal or toast this morning? You’re choosing between the nearest possible world in which you eat toast and the nearest possible world in which you eat cereal, and determining which world is better. (‘Nearest possible’ just means a world that’s as close to the world as it is now, only changing your choice of breakfast plus whatever flows from that one change). When you opt for toast, you actualise the toast-world instead of the cereal-world, or other worlds in which you eat pancakes, eggs, spaghetti, gravel…
But if you choose the toast-world, what happens to the cereal-world? Here’s where it gets weird.
‘Modal realism’, as championed by the twentieth century American philosopher David Lewis, infamously argues that all possible universes are equally real. The world in which you eat toast is the actual world, but that’s no more significant than saying that you ate breakfast here rather than over there. Just as other places besides ‘here’ still exist, Lewis argued that other possible worlds are just as real as the actual world. The cereal-world may not be actual, but it’s as real a world as any other. There are unimaginably many possible worlds, and some of them are horrible (including worlds where life never evolved on Earth). But they’re no less real than our own.
Needless to say, modal realism was, and still is, hugely controversial. Many reject it, arguing that possible worlds are mere ideas rather than real places. But for those who accept the theory, there’s a rather comforting result: all those options you had to give up when you made a choice are not simply lost. Rather, we can think of an infinite range of universes beside the actual one, worlds in which you took all those other forks in the road. So in that sense at least, none of your possibilities are ever really lost. They’re just elsewhere.
We can never, of course, know what our lives would have been like had we pursued those other choices, so it can be hard to know what to regret. But if Lewis is right, there is always some universe out there where you made a different choice. And in at least one of them, you’re a rock star.
