Making Peace with Big Life Choices

You made the decision years ago. Left the job, ended the relationship, moved to the city, chose the career path. It's done—irrevocably, completely done. And yet here you are, lying awake at 2am, running the simulation again. What if you'd stayed? What if you'd tried harder? What if the other choice—the one you'll never get to test—was actually the right one?

Big life decisions have a way of refusing to stay decided. The choice was made, the consequences have unfolded, and still the doubt remains. Not the productive doubt of learning from experience, but the circular, suffocating kind—the kind that goes nowhere except back to the same unanswerable question.

The strange thing is that you might be objectively fine. The decision may have led somewhere good, or at least somewhere reasonable. But the peace that should come with resolution never quite arrives. The decision made you, in some sense, and you're still not sure if you can live with what it made.

The Quiet Admission

Somewhere beneath the surface, you wonder if you're someone who makes good decisions at all. This particular choice becomes evidence in a larger case you're building against yourself—a case that says maybe you can't be trusted to choose well, maybe you lack the wisdom or the courage or the clarity that real decisions require.

You look at other people and they seem settled in their choices. They don't appear to be waking up at night, relitigating the past. Part of you suspects they know something you don't—some secret to being at peace with life's irreversible forks. Or maybe they just don't think as deeply as you do. Or maybe they're suffering too and hiding it better.

What you don't say out loud is that the questioning has become exhausting, and that you're not even sure anymore what resolution would look like. You've confused yourself. The doubt has been there so long it feels like part of who you are.

The Neuroscience of Decisions

Your brain has a remarkable capacity for imagining alternatives. It can construct entire parallel lives, complete with emotions and outcomes and meaning. This is useful when you're planning—when the alternatives are still possible. But turned backward, the same capacity becomes a torture device. You imagine the life you didn't live with a vividness that makes it seem almost real, while the life you did live fades into ordinariness.

The path you chose has revealed its compromises. Every life has friction, disappointment, ordinary struggle. The path not taken hasn't revealed anything. It remains frozen in potential, uncontaminated by reality. You're comparing your actual existence—with all its mundane difficulties—against a fantasy that doesn't have to be anything but perfect.

There's also the strange distortion of hindsight. Looking back, the warning signs seem obvious, the alternative seems clearly better, the mistake seems preventable. But you didn't have this clarity when you decided. You had incomplete information, emotional pressure, limited time. Judging your past self by present knowledge isn't fair, but your brain does it anyway, relentlessly.

Major decisions also become tangled with identity. The choice wasn't just something you did—it became part of who you are. Doubting the decision means doubting yourself. The stakes feel impossibly high because you're not just questioning a single choice; you're questioning the person who made it and everything that followed.

And underneath all of this runs the desire for certainty that can never be satisfied. You want to know you chose right. But "right" in the context of major life decisions is often unknowable. The counterfactual can't be tested. You'll never have the data that would prove your choice was the correct one.

Common Scenarios

It surfaces when you hit difficulty on the chosen path. The job gets hard, the relationship struggles, the city disappoints. In those moments, the alternative glows with imagined promise. If only you'd chosen differently, you wouldn't be facing this particular pain. The fact that you'd be facing different pain—unknown, perhaps worse—gets lost in the fantasy.

It appears when you encounter someone who chose the other path. A former colleague thriving at the company you left. An ex seemingly happy in the relationship you ended. Their success becomes evidence against your choice, even though their visible life tells you nothing about their invisible struggles.

It hits at transitions—birthdays, anniversaries, moments that invite reflection. The markers of time passing trigger the questions: where would you be if you'd chosen differently? How much further along, how much happier, how much more fulfilled? The questions have no answers but they arrive anyway.

It lives in quiet moments when the distractions fall away. Late at night, on long drives, in the shower. When the mind has space to wander, it wanders back to the fork in the road, trying once more to see down the path you didn't take.

Research shows that our fast, intuitive brain constructs narratives that make the past seem more predictable than it was. This hindsight bias makes us unfairly harsh judges of our past decisions. Meanwhile, decision-making research indicates that maximizers—people who always seek the best option—experience more regret than satisficers, who settle for "good enough." Studies on "bounded rationality" remind us that humans are not designed to optimize every decision; we're designed to make workable choices with limited information and move on.

What Actually Helps

• Practice "good enough" decision-making: Research shows that "satisficing"—choosing an option that meets your criteria rather than exhaustively seeking the best—leads to greater satisfaction and less regret than maximizing.
• Set a "decision review" moratorium: Studies on mental resource depletion suggest that rumination drains the same mental resources needed for self-control. Give yourself a specific period (30 days, 6 months) where the decision is simply off-limits for review.
• Write about the decision once, then close the file: Research shows that expressive writing can help process difficult experiences. Write down what you were thinking at the time, what information you had, and what you couldn't have known—then put it away.

Peace with major decisions may not mean the absence of doubt. It may mean learning to hold the doubt differently—not as evidence of a mistake, but as a permanent feature of choosing in an uncertain world. The doubt doesn't prove you chose wrong. It proves you're human, making irreversible choices with incomplete information, and living with the consequences as best you can. That's not failure. That's the only way a life can actually be lived.