Reply to Specific midlife crisis issue: playing "what if" with your life?

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[quote=Anonymous]Sending you lots of compassion, OP. I’ve been in your place and it’s hard. Reading The Happiness Curve helped me understand how prevalent these feelings are in midlife and that helped relieve my guilt for feeling unsettled by “what ifs” when I have a great life.

I also remind myself that “what ifs” are necessarily false premises. If you can glean something helpful from them like another poster suggested, that’s great! For me, though, they tend to be totally unproductive and realizing that helped me stop getting bogged down in them. I’m now in a place where “what ifs” don’t hold much/any interest because I know there’s just no way to know how things might have turned out differently.

Your moral/spiritual beliefs might also help. If you believe in reincarnation, there’s nothing lost by a path not taken in this life. If you believe in a heaven-type afterlife, maybe whatever career/spouse/other path you’ve chosen won’t matter to you once you get there (think Beatrice seeing Dante in The Divine Comedy - she’s happy enough to see him, but her focus is on worship). And regardless of afterlife beliefs, depending on your moral views, maybe none of those choices matter as much as how you treat people. [/quote]

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