The Human Problem of Unactualized Possibilities
Here is one problem of human life: there are many possible courses of action, each of which would be worth actualizing, and yet only relatively few are feasible for a human being to actualize. These possibilities are actualizable per se. However, if one considers the various limitations on the human condition, one is likely to recognize that most of the possibilities cannot be realized by a given person in this premortem life.
It is often said that, for the young, the future is open. Roughly, what people mean by this claim is that young persons possess a spectrum of future opportunities. This might well be a metaphor; it’s not clear that future opportunities exist, and thus it’s not clear that they can be had.[1] Consequently, it’s an open question whether a young person (or anyone else) has a future. But the young do possess potential which can be realized in the years ahead.
One challenge the youth face is that they ought to select among the possibilities one or a few valuable ones to pursue. Otherwise, they risk falling into the life of the Peter Pan type — always young, never mature, never accomplishing anything of significance, and never meeting the business of human life with the seriousness it deserves. (Peter Pan lives in Neverland, which signifies the fact that he never takes on the responsibilities of adulthood.) This is the person who laments: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” (Richard II: Act 5, Scene 5, Line 50)
In any case, the challenge noted above can be generalized: as we age, we experience opportunities to actualize manifold possibilities concerning intellectual life, moral life, family, career, avocation, physical health, and the like. Herein lies the core of the problem of unactualized possibilities. With each passing day, one’s range of practically realizable possibilities decreases. One cannot achieve every possible career; one cannot realize every possible life project; one cannot meet every possible spouse and build every possible family; one cannot live in all of the desirable locations. Even the most eminent among us can succeed in only a few life endeavors - generally not more than one complex intellectual task at the same time.
For each of us, we must choose just one overall life to lead. This choice involves selecting some pursuits and rejecting others, despite the fact that some of the rejected pursuits are intrinsically worthwhile and might be achieved were we to choose them. “What might have been” is a common subject of conversation, either in the form of discussion with another or as an inner monologue. For instance, the successful lawyer might have chosen to pursue a political career instead, and had he done so, might have been an accomplished statesman. Those who have a wide range of interests are apt to sense this problem in their own lives: the athletically inclined physician might wonder how her life might have gone had she pursued a career in soccer rather than medical school; the biologist with a keen interest in engineering might frequently sense a desire to work on engineering problems while also recognizing the fact that he lacks sufficient time to address such problems effectively; the journalist might possess a long-held ambition to write a novel, yet struggles to find time to cultivate her creative writing ability.
So far, I have emphasized the diachronic aspect of the problem: the general course of one’s life over time unfolds with respect to just a few significant life projects. But there is also a synchronic element to the problem: at any given moment, a human being can do just one complicated activity at a time. You can’t read Tolstoy carefully and watch attentively a performance of Macbeth at the same time; you can’t play basketball and change your oil simultaneously, etc. This fact indicates that from moment to moment, we select possible activities and dismiss others — the dismissed joining the list of the unactualized. At the end of one’s life, one can count both the chosen and unchosen roads that were at some point accessible to him. These are the sheep and the goats of available opportunities, and the axiologically cognizant among us might dread the idea that we will be held accountable for our chosen and unchosen roads.
As I see it, there are at least three reasons for this problem. First, we are temporal beings. Our lives are bound by time. Second, specific weaknesses of the human condition prevent us from selecting more than a few worthwhile pursuits. Third, we are mortal. I will elaborate on these points below.
Human beings exist in time, and regardless of its nature, we cannot recover past moments.[2] The opportunities we chose yesterday will always be ones we chose on that day; the same holds for opportunities rejected yesterday, mutatis mutandis. Hence, with each day, the number of experiences available to us decreases, at least with respect to those that have disappeared in this moving image of eternity.[3] Such opportunities are, for us, forever unrecoverable.
Human beings are weak in sundry ways. Our intellects are not powerful enough for us to pursue every option of mental life; we cannot pay sufficient attention to everything. Our bodies are too frail to enable the enjoyment of certain physical experiences that might otherwise be available to us. Even the billionaire is such that her material resources are circumscribed: she can’t buy everything she might desire; she cannot focus on all of her possessions simultaneously. This point about weakness raises the problem of mortality.
We all die. Every day, we move closer to quietus. As such, our time in this life is limited. Given this restriction, we don’t have enough time to do everything that we might want to do. Instead, we must curtail our bucket lists to what is achievable given our abilities, interests, weaknesses, death-imposed temporal constraints, and other human limitations. The wise understand the significance of death and thus try to select pursuits that are both objectively valuable and consistent with their talents and interests. But even for the sage, death poses a problem of unactualized possibilities.
In short, for the three reasons addressed above, we have an existentially significant problem of unactualized possibilities. This is a characteristically human problem that likely deserves a more thorough investigation than I can give here. At least I’ve made a start.
[1] This question depends on whether eternalism is true. This is a philosophical theory about the nature of time that I can’t address here.
[2] Some hold that the moments of time pass in a dynamic fashion, and thus that temporal becoming is real. Others hold that the passage of time is an illusion and that time is static. In either case, it seems we are unable to move backward in time to re-live past experiences or undo past choices.