Timothy Andersen in Aeon:
hen I was in my mid-30s, I was faced with a difficult decision. It had repercussions for years, and at times the choice I made filled me with regret. I had two job offers. One was to work at a very large physics experiment on the West Coast of the United States called the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Last year, they achieved a nuclear fusion breakthrough. The other offer was to take a job at a university research institute. I agonised over the choice for weeks. There were pros and cons in both directions. I reached out to a mentor from graduate school, a physicist I respected, and asked him to help me choose. He told me to take the university job, and so I did.
In the years to come, whenever my work seemed dull and uninspiring, or the vagaries of funding forced me down an unwelcome path, or – worse – the NIF was in the news, my mind would turn back to that moment and ask: ‘What if?’ Imagine if I were at that other job in that other state thousands of miles away. Imagine a different life that I would never live.
Then again, perhaps I had dodged a bullet, who knows?
Every life contains pain. Even the perfect life, the life where you have everything you want, hides its own unique struggles. Writing in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche said: ‘Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering.’ A life apparently perfect but devoid of meaning, no matter how comfortable, is a kind of hell.
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