If Only I Had Time For The Future: how to beat counterfactual thinking

My dear reader, come with me to the world of make believe.

You’re driving along a familiar street, heading home from work. In the middle of making a left turn, your phone rings. You look down toward the center console to see who it is, but just as you’re making out the name, you hear the honking of another driver’s car horn. You look up, in sudden shock, just in time to see the car with which yours is now colliding.

Nobody’s hurt, but both cars are banged up and will need repairs. You’re rattled, the other driver is angry, and there are now onlookers holding up their phones.

What’s going through your mind right now?

You already know what it is:

If only I hadn’t looked down at my phone.

Why did I do that?

If I’d simply waited until after I’d completed the turn to check it, none of this would have happened.

Whether or not you’ve been in this scenario, you’ve done something that’s triggered an almost identical cascade of thoughts.

Maybe it was something you said during a first date, or an argument, or a job interview. Maybe it was caused by something you didn’t do – forgetting a birthday, the right answer for an exam question, a good point you meant to make in an online newsletter (hey now), or, I don’t know, forgetting to properly close the only door standing between your cat and the Christmas tree before you left for work.

We’re describing a specific form of mental activity, and it has a name: counterfactual thinking.

A concise definition from RMJ Byrne, in Rational Imagination: how people create alternatives to reality (2005) reads,

“Counterfactual thoughts are mental representations of alternatives to past events, actions, or states.”

The study of counterfactuals goes pretty deep, and has a highly technical, mathematical side that deals with probability equations, and is used to create, among other things, software for Poker games.

I say this to drive home the point that when you and I engage in idle thoughts of what might have been, we are, in those moments, as we so often are, standing at the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Creating an alternative version of reality in one’s mind, and taking the alternative versions seriously, can affect our lives in profound ways.

An oft-referenced example is the person who comes in second place in a competition. Suppose there are three finalists, gold, silver and bronze.

The gold medalist is the happiest, unless he has a psychiatric condition. The second happiest person is…. Silver? Nope. Actually, the bronze medalist is happier than the silver medalist. He or she feels great about making it all the way to the top 3 finalists, and is probably looking at his or her performance in a very complimentary light.

Silver, however, is just one or two better decisions away from the gold, and this is maddening. Instead of enjoying a victory over all but one competitor, the silver medalist is sunk in regrets over having fallen short of the ultimate victory.

This is counterfactual thinking spoiling what should be a proud moment.

There are more serious examples. Parents who lose a child to the reckless driving of a third party, where their own child had no fault at all, nonetheless blame themselves in their counterfactuals, not the drunk or distracted driver.

And you can see, counterfactual thinking not only has the power to rob you of deserved feelings of accomplishment, but it can also compound your suffering.

More commonly, counterfactual thinking can send people into spiraling thoughts, also known as “beating yourself up.” Commonplace exchanges can provoke people to loop the event in their mind, mulling it over, imagining alternatives, and feeling worse and worse as it goes on.

One example of this might be passing by a friend or coworker and seeing them fail to greet you in the customary manner. You start to wonder what’s going on. Asking yourself if maybe you’d done something wrong, or wondering if he or she is actually harboring negative feelings toward you.

So, replaying the past can cheat you of the good times, worsen the bad times, and burden everything in between.

What do we do about this?

Let’s start with the example of the silver medalist.

Think in terms of “next time.”

I’m a musician. I play electric guitar, and acoustic guitar when an electric is unavailable. I also compose music. When I was at UCLA, there was one quarter when I was enrolled in three composition courses. I was required to submit four completed pieces of music each week, for ten weeks. That’s a lot.

If I was going to meet my deadlines, consistently, there was no room for hesitation, only execution. Rather than slow down to get everything just right, I did the best I could and addressed what would have been regrets toward the future. When I invariably saw things I wish I had done differently, I used the next assignment and an opportunity to do what I should have done.

You cannot change the past, but you can honor the past, and your feelings about it, by creating a future that demonstrates a mastery of the past’s lessons.

Whatever it is that’s not sitting well with you about your last performance, take those feelings seriously. Don’t let them sink you into a depression, but pick up those feelings and carry them into the future. Invest them into future actions: identify the next opportunity you have to do a similar action, and use it. Make the better choice, employ improved skills.

Taking this seriously means putting pen to paper.

Do I know what to do differently next time?

Am I capable of doing that?

If not, what skills do I need to learn in order to become capable?

Do I need to read a book, adopt a habit, break a habit, or raise my standards?

Who are the authorities on the relevant topic and what are their most popular or highly rated books?

I’ll take a page out of Patrick Bet David’s book and say that if you take a full year to read 20-25 books on a subject, all of which having over a thousand four star reviews on Amazon (as the determinant of whether or not to purchase it), you will be operating at a completely different level.

If you subscribe to the 10 best YouTube channels on the subject, and follow the Twitter accounts of the top authors, you will be digesting helpful information around the clock.

This is how you attack a problem seriously. This is how you change from idly wishing you had done a better job to being someone who is doing a better job.

Unless you believe that winners win by accident, you can study and copy the behaviors of winners and begin winning more often and by larger margins fairly quickly. But wishing is impotent. Action is everything. What I’ve laid out above will solve any deficiency in skill and make regret a thing of the past (see what I did there?).

Now, let’s move to the more serious example of experiencing a personal tragedy or trauma.

Because we’re not talking about performance of an iterative activity, there is no sense talking about skill sets, habits, and what to do next time. This is a matter of emotional coping: what’s done is done, and you need to heal.

This is a good time to remind you that I’m not a therapist, and this is a mere newsletter, not medicine or medical advice. If you think there is something in your life that requires the assistance of a professional, by all means go that route.

That being said, here are some tools that can help put the past behind you, and clear the path for the future.

Make sense of the past through writing.

Writing is different from other activities like speaking aloud or pondering in your head. It forces you to construe ideas in a logically coherent sequence. In a sense, you are decluttering your thoughts by making them conform to the demands of the written word. Just as no new objects are added, and no old objects are taken away, but an orderly room is a very different place from a disorderly one, so too is your mind a different place once your thoughts have been subjected to the rigor of writing. Embrace this process the same way you embrace basic habits of hygiene – this is mental hygiene.

In addition to journaling about the event, make deliberate plans with friends and family. Be in supportive environments. I put this after the exhortation to do journaling for a reason. If you make time for writing first, you won’t use your friends for therapy or for ruminative venting. Instead, you can have intelligent and productive discussions about what’s happening in your life, because you’ve already done a good deal of the work before meeting with them. They can help you see what’s in your blindspots, or simply show you by their presence that you’re not alone.

But, your own participation in your healing has to come first – leaning on others without doing everything you can to right yourself first is codependent behavior, and people with healthy boundaries will not respond well to that.

Make sure you’re being a good friend to yourself, and then let your friends be there for you.

Lastly, let’s discuss the idle counterfactual thinking that seems to randomly pop up and spoil the moment. The self defeating thoughts. The idea that the present is negatively constrained by the past.

I used to be terrible about this kind of thing. I used to think the solutions to my problems were all located in missed opportunities in the past. Wishing I’d been born with different genetics. Wishing I’d gone to different schools. Wishing I’d been parented differently. Wishing I’d worked harder and cared less about the approval of the opposite sex. Wishing I’d never discovered drugs and alcohol. And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Much of what I said about the silver medalist can be applied here. Goals in the future are a surefire way to draw your thoughts away from the past.

But, sometimes, deeper transformative work is necessary. I actually found that the reading of history books dramatically changed my relationship to the past, as well as my relationship to society and even to western civilization itself.

First of all, when you read history, you stop thinking about the little things, the arbitrary circumstances that could have been better. You are confronted with a mountain of worse. The past is nothing but a litany of worse circumstances. Poorer options. Lower likelihood of success, unimaginably greater likelihood of tragedy.

Specifically, I did a bit of reading into Greek history: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon’s Hellenica, the histories of Herodotus, and Plutarch’s writings on Sparta.

One thing that happens really quickly? Your capacity for complaint dries up, like ice cream hitting a hot sidewalk. The majority of Xerxes’ army died of dysentery, dehydration, diarrhea, hunger, and weather exposure on the way back to Persia following the unsuccessful military campaign. For this reason, people were eager to die in battle: at least it was a good story. At least someone might mention it in the future. There are no heroic ballads about so and so shitting himself to death (pardon me) somewhere in central Asia.

Pick up a damned book (I just gave you four) and see for yourself how absolutely awful life was for absolutely everybody, even royalty. Go read about how Babylonians forced their women to sit in a temple until a man used a token that made him entitled to sex. The pretty ones got the ordeal over with quickly. Other women had to wait there for days on end until unenthusiastic and undesirable men got around to them. The women literally had to sit there, once in their lives, until a man approached them for sex. They couldn’t leave until then. Really think about the kind of world we’re talking about here.

Oh and no antibiotics, no vaccines, no central heating, no Neosporin, no sliced bread, no Radiohead, and no road head. Nothing but dirt and poverty and occasionally the discovery of the Pythagorean theorem.

I’m drumming this in, mercilessly, because the study of history absolutely disabuses you of the lunatic notion that there is something holding you back. The idea becomes utterly untenable. This commandment I place over you today: thou shalt read history!

One additional benefit I received from my studies was the sense of continuity: I am the inheritor of a long tradition, reaching back eons. A desire arose in me to fulfill my role in this long line. In my own way, and on my own terms, but in view of, and with reverence to, the unalterable record of the past. I saw that my own life would eventually become an unalterable record as well, and that it was in my hands. The pages of history are not filled with the names and deeds of people who gave up in the face of discouragement. It seems clear enough that there are great people, that there always have been, and that it is up to us whether or not there always will be.

I’m speaking this way not to indulge myself but to impart something of the mentality. Some problems can be solved by following steps somewhat mechanically. Others have to be solved by thinking of the world and of one’s self in a different way. Nothing changes your perspective more broadly and consequentially then the study of the past. Reading is how you control augmentations to your perspective. Recognize that power and utilize it to your benefit. Greedily and ruthlessly.

A final review before we conclude for today.

When you are ruminating over your own performance, think in terms of “next time.” Identify what is missing in your arsenal, in your behaviors, your knowledge, and your experience, and seize upon opportunities to reiterate. Do this in writing. Do everything in writing. Live and breathe the written word.

When you have suffered a tragedy or a traumatic experience, use writing to unburden your mind and to declutter it. Organize the experience in your mind using casual language. What caused the events? What emotions did the events cause in you? What realizations about life have been caused by the events and your response to it? Causal language restores order to your world.

Once you have the self regulation part down (the journaling), move to co-regulation: be with people. Let them know what’s happening in your life, and let them be there for you.

When it comes to more generalized feelings of if only, solve this by expanding your basis of comparison. Read a book! Podcasts and audiobooks are okay, of course. But I will never stop insisting on literacy. You will thank me one day. Eat your greens and stay in school.

The past can be either an obedient servant or an abusive master. Reading and writing is what makes the difference. Bringing order to your mind makes the difference. In just the same way that a cluttered room rules you, an orderly room serves you.

Make order out of chaos and be free of the past.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

Jas