The Midnight Library and the Seduction of “What If”
Have you ever looked back on your life and wondered how it might have unfolded differently if you had chosen another path? Perhaps you regretted not taking certain actions at particular moments?
I did. Sometimes.
The assumption is usually the same: if we had made a different choice, the rest would have become nice and smooth — better school, better relationship, better career, perhaps a bigger bank account and a bigger house.
When we encounter unfavorable outcomes, we often fantasize about an alternate universe in which we made the “right” decision at a critical moment. After that, our lives would have been put on the right track, and we would have lived happily ever after.
What if we had an unlimited number of options leading to an unlimited number of different lives?
That is what The Midnight Library by Matt Haig wants to explore.
A Library Between Lives
Nora Seed has a miserable life. It seems that everything goes wrong — she gets laid off, breaks up with her fiancé, loses contact with her brother and best friend, and then her favorite cat dies. All these unbearable events add up one after another, and finally she is crushed one night. She attempts suicide and finds herself in a huge building where she meets her school librarian, Ms. Elm.
Ms. Elm shows her many books in the library. Every time Nora opens one, she is immediately sent into a different life. Again and again, she chooses a book that seems designed to solve one particular problem, believing that a different choice would have led to a better outcome. Yet each time, she finds one or two — or sometimes several — unexpected problems, and it turns out that life is not what she thought it would be.
So she returns to the Midnight Library over and over again until she finds one seemingly perfect life that she does not want to leave. Yet she eventually realizes that she is not equipped to live that life either, and she exits that one as well.
Does Less Regret Produce a Better Life?
The first book Nora is asked to open is the Book of Regrets. When she first arrives and does not know which book to choose, she is advised to start there and look for clues.
The logic seems simple: if she could make a different choice and remove a particular regret, her life would be altered and the failure would disappear.
But that is not what happens. Even when Nora fixes those regretted moments, she is still not satisfied with some aspects of those so-called “fixed” lives, and eventually chooses to leave them as well.
This is exactly the point.
We usually feel regret when we are disappointed with a situation and wish we were in a different one. Those regrets are often simple edits in our minds, because we seldom consider the unexpected outcomes or later disappointments that might have come with that different decision.
In other words, regret is a mental exercise that adds to our emotional burden without producing any actual result.
Worse, it often makes us even more miserable, because regret tends to paint an unrealistically rosy picture of both present and future possibilities. That is poisonous to the way we look at our existing life.
Regret is backward-looking. It does not help us change the life we are living today.
Obviously, removing regret does not guarantee a more satisfying life either.
The Trap of “What Ifs”
Another topic the book deals with is “what-ifs.” Of course, disappointment and regret often lead to a “what-if” scenario as a kind of remedy.
In the story, Nora also tries several “what-if” scenarios that are not directly tied to a particular regret. And what happens? Those lives, too, turn out to be unexpected, complicated, and far less enjoyable than she had imagined.
We all, from time to time, indulge in “what if” thinking. These imagined scenarios can be comforting because they allow us to picture alternative lives. And those alternative lives are easy to admire. Those lives never need to pay rent, look for parking spaces, go through performance reviews, or face difficult in-laws. They exist only in the mind.
Comparing real life with imagined life is fundamentally unfair and unwise. Too much “what-if” thinking is not deep reflection at all. It is just a daydream, and often a waste of emotional energy.
Remember the fable The Milkmaid and Her Pail? The girl imagines selling the milk, buying eggs, raising chickens, and turning that into a better future. Then she tosses her head in delight, drops the pail, and loses everything. She mistakes an imagined future for a reality she already possesses, and the fantasy collapses the moment she acts as if it already exists.
That is exactly what makes “what-if” scenarios attractive: they seem to grant us something we never actually had. In regretful situations especially, we are prone to believe that, if we had made a different decision, we would have gained something important. This very thought often makes us dissatisfied with the life we already have.
That is not so different from the milkmaid daydreaming about the eggs before they even hatch.
Regret creates those hatched eggs in our minds.
Lessons Learned
I am not going to disclose the ending of Nora’s story, because I do not want to deprive readers who have not yet read the novel of that pleasure.
To me, this story highlights three important truths about the unlived life.
First, whether it originates from regret or from a “what-if” scenario, the unlived life is always attractive, even seductive. It has emotional power, and it is very easy for people to dwell in it.
Second, the unlived life is only an imaginative exercise with no reality behind it. Dwelling too long in such an imagined state will not help us change reality at all. Worse, it will only make us more disappointed with our existing life and distract us from making any real difference within it.
Lastly, the unlived life is illusory and should not be treated as if it were a possession we once had and then lost. It never existed in the first place. We do not truly gain or lose anything in such daydreams.
The life that was never lived does not exist. Only the life we live does, and it is the one worth living.
中文版：《午夜圖書館》與未曾經歷的人生
Comments
Post a Comment