One of the stranger realizations I've had recently is that I often evaluate my own life using standards of evidence I would never accept in my research.
Imagine a researcher studying a creative project that unfolded over six months. The researcher observes the final outcome and concludes: This entire result can be explained by one interaction that occurred in week 2.
Most of us would immediately have questions.
What happened before that interaction?
What happened afterward?
What prior experiences shaped the participants?
What constraints were operating?
What other influences accumulated over time?
How did people interpret and respond to what happened?
In other words, we would resist a simple causal explanation for a complex developmental process. Yet many of us tell stories about our own lives in exactly this way.
If only I had chosen a different major.
If only I had taken a different job.
If only I had moved to another city.
If only I had made a different decision at that moment.
The impl,ication is often that a single choice explains far more of the trajectory than we would normally allow.
As a researcher, I spend a great deal of time thinking about trajectories. My work examines how small interactions accumulate over time, gradually reshaping representations, decisions, and outcomes. I don't believe a single interaction explains a complex creative outcome. I believe trajectories emerge through many iterative influences.
Yet when evaluating my own life, I sometimes switch models entirely. Instead of asking how a trajectory emerged, I search for the pivotal fork in the road. Instead of examining accumulated influences, I focus on a single missed opportunity. Instead of seeing development, I see a decision.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that many regrets are not really about alternate outcomes. They are about alternate explanations. There is something deeply appealing about the idea that one missed decision explains everything. It turns a complicated life into a solvable puzzle. If we can identify the right moment, perhaps the rest of the story becomes coherent.
The problem is that lives rarely work this way.
Most trajectories emerge from countless interactions between circumstances, choices, opportunities, constraints, accidents, and learning. The person evaluating the decision years later is also operating with information that was unavailable at the time. This creates another asymmetry.
The alternate timeline often receives perfect hindsight, selective memory, imagined benefits, and few tradeoffs. The actual timeline receives every disappointment, inconvenience, and imperfection.
That is not a fair comparison.
Perhaps a more useful question than Was that the best possible decision? is Given what I knew then, was the trajecgtory reasonable? That question doesn't eliminate regret. It does, however, acknowledge the complexity of development. And when I hear myself thinking If only I had chosen differently there, I am increasingly tempted to respond to a graduate student making an overly confident causal claim. That's an awfully strong causal claim.
Sarah, remember: this is allowed to beunfinished. If it were finished, it wouldn’t be a Research Note.
As always, these notes reflect my ownintellectual work. AI was used for organization and conceptual scaffolding,both as support of and as an object of iterative inquiry into the creativeprocess and cognitio