by Lei Wang
If not for COVID, I would have moved back to China after my MFA instead of staying in Iowa City. Instead of not seeing him for three years, I would have married my fiancé at the time, an Italian kung fu master in Shanghai who had the peculiar fate of teaching Chinese people their own lost esoteric spiritual practices. I would have then moved with him to an island off the coast of Portugal, where he now lives and teaches at a martial arts retreat center.
But because things happened the way they did, I am not on an island off the coast of Portugal, enjoying the best temperate weather in the world. I am not writing overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and considering the travails of America from the vantage of Europe. I am not married.
I am here, but also if I were there, I would still always be here, wherever I am. And then perhaps I would be dreaming of Iowa, of living five- to ten- minute walks from my friends, all artists of some sort, all expert cuddlers. Perhaps I would be bored and lonely in Portugal; there is only so much good weather one can take.
In a recent newsletter, the writer Suleika Jaouad writes of a What If thought experiment game she plays with a friend that imagines into the other lives they could have lived:
It usually starts when one of us says something like, Remember that guy who wore a lot of vests? and suddenly we’re spiraling: What if I married him and lived in a yurt in Montana, labeling mason jars of lentils in flowery live-laugh-love cursive? What if I had gotten that soulless business consulting job in Dubai and wore pantsuits the exact shade of despair and office lighting? What if I stayed in Vermont instead of moving back to New York City and became a homesteading influencer who films sourdough tutorials with my roommate, a potbelly pig named Meredith? What if I had five children and a timeshare in Sarasota and a minivan full of crushed graham crackers?
What if I hadn’t for some mysterious reason gone down a notoriously financially unrewarding delayed-returns path of writing and instead been a corporate consultant like many other achiever-type humanities majors? On the one hand: oof. On the other: who knows? What if I had simultaneously pursued writing with a career in therapy or even interior decorating? What if I had studied neuroscience and now had my dream alter-ego job, teaching empathy to robots (which sounded far-off a mere few years ago)? Who would I be?
Note too that I am not saying: What if I were the prime minister of Mongolia? What if I were a tiny baked goods influencer? What if I were a professional opera singer or volleyball player? I just don’t see myself being me in those lives: I’m just not that into classical music and not that freaky at jumping. I don’t see myself as a politician or even a baker. “There are an unending number of lives I’m not leading, so why do I fixate on this one or that one? Why is this life the one I care about not living?” Andrew H. Miller writes in On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives. “I’m not a podiatrist, not a landscape designer, can’t play the flute, and haven’t married a Canadian. I don’t live in Kansas. So what?”
What we seek, even in our imaginations, is not so far off from who we are or want to be. Not completely parallel lives so much as branching ones, what once was plausible or at least possible, but for the missed chance, the forks in the road, choices. But because these what-if lives are close-ish to possible, their not existing feels sadder, too: not a total fantasy, but an almost.
Because I fear missing out on the other lives I could have lived, I want the solace of its opposite, but it’s hard to know what that is. What is the opposite of FOMO? Sometimes I think this is why people came up with the idea of reincarnation: you only have FOMO because YOLO.
Amy Weiss, the daughter of psychotherapist Brian Weiss, who for decades now has been working with clients on past life regression therapy, recounts a lunch with her dad when she was 35, single but wanting children and despairing. He just looked at her and casually said, “But you’ve had hundreds of children already.” He was referring to her past lives, which were completely self-evident to him. Still, this was no real consolation to her in this life. And may be no consolation to us, even if, as a reader of this blog, you are probably living a pretty good life, whatever it is that you still lack, whatever itch it is you can’t scratch. A friend of mine said if he had the option to be reborn, right now, he wouldn’t want to play the lottery again. When I imagine an alternate life as a robot love researcher, this same friend says, “But then you wouldn’t have met us.”
Why is it that when we imagine our unlived lives, we assume they are not only different, but often better in some way? But our paths not taken may very well be worse. Another friend of mine says that sometimes on sleepless nights, she goes through a list of people she once envied for some genius or another, who then turned out to be morally corrupt. An enviable mathematical mind who later murdered his girlfriend. Sam Bankman-Fried. Whoever Sarah Wynn-Williams writes about in that new bestselling Facebook exposé, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. It’s a cautionary tale because even if we don’t think we would, in their positions, we could have. In another life, I might not be a better self, so thank goodness. The alternative to the What If game is the At Least You Didn’t game.
Meanwhile, the mindfulness club (of which I am a member) would probably say the opposite of FOMO is the Power of Now. But the funny thing about the Now is that it isn’t some totally isolated moment, not at all: both the past and the future are also both experienced in the now. In fact, that’s the only way you can experience them.
Whatever it is that we are now includes all the things we actually are not, that we have chosen not to be. The world narrowing with our choices. The cutting away of all the pieces of the marble that are not David: except we are not at the end of our lives yet, so we are not yet sure what shape we’ll ultimately take. I used to be—perhaps still am—scared of this: the loss of the state of pure potential, the untouched block of marble. Even though I very much want to meet my life partner, there is still some comfort in the seeking stage because in the state of potential, there still exists some platonic lover. The idea of the person, the idea of the life, versus the very concrete person, the very concrete life, that has these qualities but not those qualities. To pursue anything at all is to move away from the platonic state, to doom ourselves to a kind of FOMO; and yet to not pursue at all is to doom ourselves not to live.
The same thing happens for books as for lovers, as for lives. In The Condition of Secrecy, Inger Christensen writes, “As the text is being written, it comes to seem more and more necessary, as it gradually develops rules, proportion, and order, while the finished text, laid out in final form, will appear random. Because it’s not until afterward, when the text is finished, that we can say with certainty that it could just as easily have been different. And to the degree that it could have been different, to that degree it is random. Everything that a writer writes could just as easily have been different—but not until it’s been written. As a life could have been different, but not until it’s been lived.”
I love the idea here that writing or living is inherently an “impure,” perhaps even inefficient act, riddled with randomness: the opposite of machinery. We may try as much as possible to have control, but we don’t, not really. It is only in acting at all that we can remain in the pure space of possibilities. With language, it’s only once you make an utterance that you can say, “it could have been this other way.” In this way, writer’s block (or avoidant attachment) is just the refusal to commit to one road or expression—wanting to stay in pure language—and yet it is only impure language that can start a creative act. Life is only pure before you live it, and after that it’s a bunch of “it could have been’s” without which you won’t have lived.
My favorite living philosopher, Bernardo Kastrup, gave this consolational hack in the age-old debate between determinism and free will: to simply treat everything in the past as determined and everything in the future as still free to choose. In a way, determinism or not is irrelevant. Despite everything that has been determined—by our genes, our histories, everything that has already happened—because life itself is still too complex to predict, the best way to predict the future is still by acting. So regardless, we must live as if we had free will.
I once met a Yoruban Ifá priest who told me that in the Yoruban sense of destiny, you can’t escape your life lessons no matter what, but the form in which they come is still up to you. That is to say, if you are meant to learn humility, you could learn it as a doctor or you could learn it as a homeless person. Even as a doctor, you could learn it the easy way, by being humbled by your patients, or the hard way, through malpractice suits. Whichever way, you will meet your destiny, no other guarantees and no promise of personal comfort.
The sense of destiny may be the ultimate antidote to FOMO. It is why we want so badly to think in romantic love that we’ve found “the One,” that even our careers are fated in some way. We want the right path, because we think there could be wrong ones. We think there could be a life better than ours that we are missing out on. But what if we thought much bigger than that?
In Bernardo Kastrup’s most recent book, The Daimon and the Soul of the West, he argues for the idea of a life that is not really about you: your personal narrative and comforts. Why should we humans think we’re so special, as if our individual lives mattered so much, when we are just part of nature, part of the universe expressing itself? All other beings operate this way: after all, the apple blossom, he writes, doesn’t know its purpose in the grand scheme of apple trees. Nietzsche didn’t even know he was going to be Nietzsche, nor van Gogh van Gogh. Neither of them were famous in their lifetimes. Instead of asking, “What do I want from my life?,” Kastrup suggests asking instead: “What does life want from me?”
Whatever it is that life wants from us, it is something we can’t quite see or know yet. And yet to feel that we are part of this greater web of being is not so much the Power of Now as it is the Power of Eternity. All our problems seem to come from being finite beings who can imagine the infinite. But to imagine our lives from the point of view of nature, of infinity, to imagine that we are just one out of all those possibilities: that takes the pressure off, like being one child in a family of hundreds of billions. Let your brother be the cancer researcher, your sister the rock star. You can do whatever it is that you do, even if it is frittering; perhaps nature wants to experience the life of a fritterer. You don’t need to be anybody else. Even if YOLO, there need be no FOMO.
I imagine sometimes that my life is a book some higher dimensional beings in the universe are reading, the way I read novels. You don’t want everything to go perfectly for the main character in a novel. That’s boring. You don’t want a totally platonic character, trapped in a vacuum, a block of marble. You are okay, just for the moment, in this one, specific life.
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