There is a version of your life that did not happen, and you know it well. It began with the other job, the one you turned down at twenty-six. Or the year abroad you talked yourself out of, the business you nearly started, the city you visited once and could have stayed in. It does not visit often. It turns up late, after a flat week or a long drive home, and it arrives with a verdict already attached: this is not the life.
The verdict feels like a judgement on the present. It is a comparison, and the other side of the comparison has never been examined. The life you have is being measured against the life you did not live, and only one of them has ever had to produce a record.
A Rival With No Record
Your life has a record. Every year of it happened, the bad ones included: the redundancy, the eighteen months when money was tight, the injury, the stretch at work that took the colour out of everything, the arguments over nothing at eleven at night. The record is complete, and you carry all of it.
The other life has no record. It never went through a recession. It had no illness in the family, no dull middle decade, no manager who took against you, no morning when the commute was more than you could face. It consists of an opening and a feeling, and the feeling is that it went well.
Ask what would have happened if you had taken a different path, and the answer arrives at once and in its best light, because none of it has ever had to happen.
Other people keep it stocked. The friend who did move abroad is seen at his wedding and on his holidays, never in the month his contract was not renewed, and each glimpse of him is added to the life you did not choose.
A life with a record will lose to a life without one every time. No level of success closes the gap, because the rival is assembled fresh on each visit from whatever you currently lack. Earn more and the other life becomes the one with more freedom. Gain the freedom and it becomes the one with more standing. It improves at exactly your rate and stays a step ahead, because it has never had to be lived.
This is why the dissatisfaction survives good years. It measures the distance between a real life and a fiction, and a fiction can be refurnished at no cost.
The Life You Did Not Live Has Never Had a Bad Year
Why It Stays a Sketch
You will spend weeks comparing two cars. You can carry an alternative life for fifteen years without once working out what it would have paid, where it would have left you, or who you would have become inside it.
The vagueness is no accident. It is maintained, because it is useful.
As long as the other life stays a sketch, it holds a belief that costs nothing to keep: that you were meant for more, that you are wasting your potential where you are, and that the ceiling belongs to the place rather than to you. The job is too small. The town is too small. The limit sits outside, in a decision taken years ago, which means it can be regretted without ever being faced.
Detail would end that arrangement. Work the other life through properly, with its own bad years left in, and one of two things happens. Either it is still clearly better, and the regret turns into a plan that asks something of you. Or it comes out roughly where you are now, reached by a different road, and the story of wasted potential goes with it. Whatever limits the present then has to be looked for closer to home, and there is a fair chance it would have travelled with you. Both outcomes are expensive. The sketch avoids both, and that is the whole of its value.
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