@philosophyminis: There is no such thing as a painless life. There is no way to avoid grief and regret. Yes, every choice creates a new version of you and diverts your life onto a new path. But every path will have its loss. This is something that Matt Haig talks about in his fantastic new book, The Midnight Train. There are many deaths in life. There is the death of your youth and the death of your ideals. There is a death of a relationship, a friendship, a connection, and we are the ones that killed them with a choice. Haig's character, Wilbur, is a ghost on a train riding through the stations of his life, and he looks back at all of the crossroads that could have been. He thinks about all of the messages he didn't reply to, the Sundays he said he was busy, and the doors he shut, and the people he left outside. And when he looks back on his life with the 20/20 vision of the dead, he sees that these choices, which once seemed small and trivial, actually created a new version of himself and led to the death of others. But Wilbur reflects that there is no way to avoid this. Every life will have its own flavour of regret, and we will mourn the life that we didn't get or the life we didn't choose. Even if you went back in time to those crossroad moments and chose differently, even if you chose something that might have seemed better at the time, that life would still lead to a station made dark with regret. And so, the question is not which choice or which life would have ended up painless, because there is no such option. The question is how I can cherish and love my life as it is, without the fear of making a wrong choice ruining all that there is to enjoy.

Jonny Thomson

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Friday 29 May 2026 13:11:44 GMT