The first time I learned about opportunity cost as a bolded vocabulary word in the pages of an economic textbook, it struck in me an uncomfortable psychological chord. This shamelessly pragmatic reality of life was epitomized so bluntly. It had a sobering feel. What did it amount to? The loss of potential gains from the road not chosen.

Every pivot, every decision we make in life accrues a cost — we know this consciously but avoid the visceral contemplation of it. What a chilly, hallucinatory hallway of the mind to go down.

Opportunity costs show up in the shadow trajectories that we could have chosen but did not. Like ghosts, alternative paths linger on the fringes of our minds but are usually banished out of sight.

Is it any wonder? The angst and sometimes regret from from these parallel non-realities would weigh us into inaction. The crisp snapping-off of different paths is inevitable, you see. Without it we would not get anything done.

Does everything really happen for a reason?

One feature of our decision-making is that we turn it into a story, we display it in a kind of art-gallery manner as a narrative that was meant to happen the whole time. Every time I hear the phrase “everything happens for a reason” I am reminded of the strength of the story-impulse in humans.

I hear the quivering need for the ironic comfort of fate. If everything happens for a reason, everything automatically is slapped with the label of meaning and we are relieved of the individual burden of locating, crafting, and contemplating meaning.

I am not so sure “everything happens for a reason” is an enlightened understanding of the world as much as it is a subconsciously convenient one, though we are loathe to admit the latter.

It is this particular mantra that dabbles in outsourcing autonomy of our lives — albeit retrospectively — at the expense of shouldering the terror of our own freedom set against the finality of our own choices.

Not that there’s significant upside to the individual quest — we have to get through life somehow, doesn’t a mild alliance with fate take the edge off?

I am ambivalent, if that’s not obvious, about the innocent utility of the narrative impulse, of the lean on fate. It does not strike me as true per se, but it does strike me as helpful.

And so I am torn between whether we as humans have a greater loyalty to cold, unflinching truth or a kind of cutting-corners self-preservation.

I am reminded of the poet Kait Rokowski’s breathtaking words:

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”

It is only in retrospect that we turn around and bend everything that happened into a story arc as the sheer need to embalm our lives as something that was meant to be.

Tales of battlefield glory come to mind when I read that quote. Combat is a psychologically bruising ordeal. Ties to heroism or national loyalty may override the suffocating morass of chaos, futility, and the grisly sacrilege of the human body in the heat of war but it is this underbelly that always, always remains.

The reality rising up from the earth cannot fully be conquered by the abstract myth-making of noble bloodshed, you see. What does this teach us? We tell ourselves stories in order to save ourselves.

Stories assuage the lightness of being by making meaning out of madness, something coherent out of irrationality and disarray.

Simultaneously, however, stories assuage the heaviness of being with their seemingly preordained outcomes. Heaviness and lightness — if weight is not the central pillar of existence, I don’t know what is.

Parallel Ghost Lives

Do you find yourself pummeled by the random thought, “what if x event five years ago would have changed everything?” This uninvited visitor of a thought causes us to break out in a hot sweat. If we are brave enough (or masochistic, take your pick) we may extend this thought experiment by imagining parallel versions of ourselves, had we made different choices.

These ruminations can feel haunting. Parallel versions are also fundamentally liquid — that is, they are hardly static or predictable either.

Life, remember, is made up of a thousand pivots a day. As much as some are comforted by life as fate, there is an equal sect of people comforted by life as a driver’s seat deal. The reality is that life is neither of these things.

It is a paradoxical jumble of both. We are at the whims of nature, at the mercy of the invisible, delicate webs of interaction of everyone else on the planet, at the behest of luck and chance.

But on the flip-side, we are principal authors of our own reality, capable of making momentous life decisions that swing our trajectory decisively in one direction over another.

From an existentialist perspective, we humans are burdened (or gifted, depending on how you look at it) with both freedom and finality. We possess the creative consciousness that gives us self-awareness, imagination, theoretical cognition that lifts us out of the dreary, repetitive rhythms of the animal world.

But we also have finality, or the knowledge of our own mortality and finitude. We can only do so much in one life. And we can only live one. As Milan Kundera remarks in The Unbearable Lightness of Being,

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. [. . .] We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”

All we can do is accept our human lot. To stare the opportunity-cost conundrum in the face, to a point. To feel the heaviness and lightness of being in all their simultaneously disquieting and fulfilling fluctuations.