Choices, Games & Branching Paths

The Selves I Might Have Been

Also called: Counterfactual thinking

Personal interest
Observed in experiments
Personal metaphor
Working interpretation

I wonder about the versions of me who made different choices. Imagining them can make regret, gratitude and ambition clearer, without assuming those other versions physically exist.

What can an imagined other version of me teach me about the life I am actually living?

The idea

Imagining a different version of my life is a normal mental tool. Psychologists call it counterfactual thinking. Picturing how things could have gone better can sting, but it points to what to change. Picturing how things could have gone worse can bring relief and gratitude. Both are acts of imagination, not records of anything that happened.

Why it attracts me

I picture several futures growing out of each choice (Mapping the Futures a Choice Opens), so I also picture the pasts that did not happen. An imagined self who chose a different field, or said yes instead of no, can show me what I still want. That self also tests what "me" even means. Which traits would carry across every version (What Makes Me Still Me)?

An example

Imagine replaying one ordinary Saturday with a single change: accepting an invitation instead of declining it. Playing out that version honestly, with its costs as well as its gains, often teaches less about the road not taken than about what is missing on the road I am on. Engineers do something similar with computer models of a factory, testing alternative histories without claiming they happened (Digital Copies for Testing What-Ifs).

What I think (and don't know)

I find these imagined selves useful, and I try not to make them more than they are. They are not evidence of other worlds, even though branching-world ideas in physics (The Many-Worlds Reading of Quantum Physics) use similar pictures. I do not yet know where healthy reflection ends and endless brooding begins.

What this does not establish

Imagining other versions of myself does not show that they exist anywhere. Many-worlds ideas in physics do not turn my imagined selves into real people, and imagined pasts are not memories.

Questions I'm still exploring

When does imagining another path help me learn, and when does it just feed regret?
Which imagined self do I envy, and what does that reveal about what I want now?
What stays the same in me across all the versions I can imagine?

Sources and further reading

Neal J. Roese, "Counterfactual Thinking," Psychological Bulletin 121(1): 133–148 (1997)

Working interpretation: drafted from my notes and interests for review. It is not a direct quotation, and I may still change it.

In short

Psychologists call it counterfactual thinking: imagining how things might have gone if something had been different. "If only I had left earlier" looks at how things could have been better, and it often stings. "At least nobody was hurt" looks at how things could have been worse, and it often brings relief. Both are imagination, not memory. Used well, they help people learn from the past and plan better.

Why this matters to me

I think about paths not taken partly because I think in branches. Imagined selves are useful to me when they turn into questions: what did that other choice offer that I still want, and what do I have now that I would not trade? I want to use them for learning and gratitude, not for endless regret, and without treating them as people living in other worlds.

Connections

What Makes Me Still MeIdentity

Imagining other versions of me tests what it means to stay the same person across different possible lives. Imagining the people I might have become helps test where the edges of my identity lie: what would have to change before that person was no longer me?

Digital Copies for Testing What-IfsMetaphor

What-if models make imagined alternative paths useful to think with, without claiming those paths, or other versions of me, physically exist.

Life as an Evolving GamePart of

Imagining the selves I might have been is a way of looking back at the branches of the game I did not play.