Un-Lived Lives and Tame Fantasies

Joshua Rothman just published a haunting piece in The New Yorker: “What if you could do it all over?” He explores the concept of looking back at one’s past and considering lives one could have led.

Rothman notes that as we grow older, the menu of possible life choices grows narrower, our range of possibilities shrinks, and we become increasingly locked into whatever life we are living.

There are still decisions to be made and options to pursue, but that time in our lives when anything seemed possible – which some of us were lucky enough to have had when we were younger – is gone.

The problem is particularly acute for secular people, Rothman notes, because we don’t believe in an afterlife or reincarnation. This life is the only one we can conceive of, and in one’s mid-50s, there is less room for innovation.

Yesterday, my 17-year-old daughter asked if I thought we should have stayed in Mexico, where we spent a year’s sabbatical and where I had received a permanent job offer from an excellent local university.

I thought about that carefully. Had we stayed, my ex-wife and I might not have divorced, saving me and my kids enormous heartache. But then again, I would never have met my current partner and would never have experienced a relationship with none of the sadness and frustration that had infiltrated our 20-year marriage.

Had we stayed in Mexico, the kids would have grown up speaking Spanish and their friends would have been Mexican and other internationals. They would be comfortable in Latin America but would have no US identity.

Does that matter? It’s just as good to have a Mexican identity; perhaps even better, because you grow up free of the hubris of living through the end times of the world’s largest superpower.

Things got even trickier when my daughter’s question, and Rothman’s New Yorker piece, made me think of my early 20s, when I had become disenchanted with Israel because of the country’s treatment of Palestinians.

I had served in the Israeli military from 1985 to 1988 with over-zealous dedication, gravitating towards high-risk combat units out of a commitment to Zionism and – more importantly –  because of the interpretation I’d then had of the meaning of masculinity.

Serving in an elite infantry unit was a valued identity in Israel in the mid-1980s, and I pursued that niche with all the enthusiasm I would have devoted to getting into a top US college had I grown up in the States.

All the Israel/army/status stuff came crashing down in the late 1980s, however, when I began working for the Associated Press in Jerusalem, and later Human Rights Watch.

I was (over?) exposed to the harsh realities of Palestinian life under Israeli military rule, and never really recovered. Those few years of touring the West Bank and Gaza on my own, meeting victims of the same security services that I had recently revered, changed me forever. They drove a wedge between myself and my family, friends, and everything I’d grown up with, and that wedge has never fully disappeared.

I cringe today thinking of my 25-year-old self-righteous self, telling all and sundry they were human rights monsters. As I fled to the US and then to Canada and Mexico, I lost touch with who I was, remembering only occasionally when stumbling across the rare North American restaurant with decent falafel.

Sometimes, those Middle Eastern meals triggered the lost identity, leading to a binge of hummus over-consumption and, later that night, anxiety and indigestion.

What would my life been like had I stayed in Israel? Like Walter Mitty, I often dream of the possibilities. My dreams are less adventurous than his, but the fantasies are no less real.

To be sure, some big things can still change as we get older. My ex, for example, made a truly life-altering choice when she abruptly moved out three years ago, divorced without discussion, and decided to start an entirely new life.

Still, for the most part, big shifts of this sort are no longer feasible.

I will never become an opera singer (I used to think about that when singing to my infant children), a restaurant owner (good for being surrounded by friendly people), an investment banker (lots of those fantasies following the financially painful divorce), or an international humanitarian aid worker (a more distant fantasy, nurtured by relationships with admirable friends).

My real brain and physical being, instead of my fantasy brain and body, can’t go there. I don’t have the knowledge, training, instincts, or contacts, and neither my body nor my brain is up to learning it all from scratch.

My father likes to say the only constant in life is change, but as we age, those changes present themselves in an ever-narrowing funnel.

The sooner I accept this, the sooner I’ll reach Nirvana.

About James Ron

Learn more about James on his website and LinkedIn profile. To read his scholarly articles, please visit James' ResearchGate and Academia.edu profiles. To learn how other scholars have used his work in their own research, visit his Google Scholar page. You can read James' social science blog here and his personal blog here. 

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