That promotion you passed on, or the one you accepted—here’s how to stop living in the counterfactual and start living in your actual life
You’re lying awake at three in the morning, replaying the same scene for the thousandth time.
The job offer you turned down. The promotion you accepted that changed everything. The partnership you walked away from. The startup you joined that imploded. The safe corporate role you stayed in while your friend took the risky leap and succeeded.
“If only I had chosen differently.”
The fork in the road appeared years ago, but you’re still standing there, staring down both paths, imagining the life you might be living on the road not taken.
This is what psychologists call counterfactual thinking—the mental simulation of alternatives to reality. And when it comes to career decisions, this thought pattern doesn’t just cause discomfort. It intensifies pressure and can significantly affect well-being and life satisfaction.
You’re not stuck because the decision was wrong. You’re stuck because you haven’t finished making it.
What Are Emotional Forks in Life?
An emotional fork isn’t just any decision. It’s a choice that:
- Feels irreversible: Once you choose, you can’t easily undo it
- Involves multiple competing values: Money vs. passion, stability vs. growth, location vs. opportunity
- Impacts your identity: The choice changes who you see yourself as
- Contains high opportunity cost: Choosing one path means losing the other entirely
Career forks are particularly potent because research reveals that education and career decisions are among the top regrets people experience in life, ranking even higher than relationship regrets.
Common career forks include:
The Promotion Dilemma: You’re offered a leadership role that pays more but moves you away from the work you love doing. Accept and lose your craft? Decline and watch others advance?
The Geographic Fork: An incredible opportunity requires relocating your family. Stay and wonder what you missed? Move and risk resenting the upheaval?
The Entrepreneurial Leap: Leave your stable job to build something of your own. Jump and potentially crash? Stay and watch others build your dream?
The Values Misalignment: Your company asks you to work on projects that conflict with your principles. Compromise for career advancement? Hold firm and plateau?
The Safe vs. Growth Fork: Choose the secure path with predictable outcomes or the uncertain path with exponential potential.
I know someone—let’s call him David—who faced the promotion dilemma five years ago. He was a brilliant engineer offered a director role. More money, more status, but no more coding. He accepted, thinking he should want management.
Five years later, he’s financially successful and deeply unhappy. “I miss building things,” he told me. “I spend my days in meetings about meetings. I took the fork I thought I was supposed to take, not the one I actually wanted.”
That’s the pattern: we choose based on who we think we should be, then spend years regretting it because we’re living someone else’s definition of success.
Why People Get Stuck at the Fork
You’re not stuck because you made the wrong choice. You’re stuck because your brain won’t stop running simulations of the alternative.
The Counterfactual Loop
Counterfactual thinking activates the prefrontal cortex and involves mental simulation of alternative outcomes. Your brain essentially runs parallel universes where you took the other path, and compares your actual life against these imagined alternatives.
The problem? The imagined alternatives are always rosier than reality would have been. You imagine the promotion bringing fulfillment, not the politics it actually entailed. You imagine the startup succeeding, not the sleepless nights and financial stress.
Research shows that 76% of Americans focus their biggest regrets on things they didn’t do rather than things they did. The road not taken haunts us more than the road we chose because imagination has no friction, no disappointment, no mundane reality.
The Opportunity Trap
Research directly links regret intensity to perceived opportunity—the more opportunity we see in a situation, the more likely we are to regret our choices.
Modern life multiplies this effect. You don’t just choose between two paths anymore—you see dozens of potential futures on LinkedIn, Instagram, industry newsletters. Every scroll presents another version of success you didn’t choose.
The Maximizer’s Curse
Studies show that “maximizers”—people seeking optimal outcomes rather than good-enough ones—engage in more counterfactual thinking, experience more regret, and feel less happiness after decisions.
If you’re someone who needs to make the “right” choice, you’ll never escape the fork. There is no objectively right choice. There’s only the choice you make and what you do with it afterward.
The Revision Illusion
Research on reversible decisions reveals that when we believe we can change our minds, we experience reduced satisfaction because the recognition of opportunity for rectification interferes with our ability to commit.
Even when a decision seems reversible (you could quit, you could go back, you could pivot), that perceived reversibility keeps you psychologically stuck at the fork, never fully inhabiting the path you’re on.
David’s regret wasn’t just about the management role. It was about the twenty other career paths he could see from his LinkedIn feed. Former colleagues who stayed in engineering were now senior architects at innovative companies. Others who took different management paths seemed to love it.
“I kept comparing my worst days to everyone else’s highlight reel,” he said. “Every Sunday night, I’d scroll LinkedIn and think about all the versions of my career that looked better than mine.”
That’s the trap. You’re not living your life—you’re living in comparison to phantom alternatives.
Practical Steps to Dissolve the Fork
You can’t unknow the path not taken. But you can stop living there.
STEP 1: Name the Counterfactual (10 minutes)
Write down the exact alternative scenario you keep replaying. Be specific.
Not: “I should have taken the other job.”
Instead: “If I had taken the VP role at that startup, I imagine I would be wealthier, more fulfilled, and respected in my industry right now.”
Notice the word “imagine.” That’s all it is—imagination. The easier it is to imagine an alternative outcome, the more likely you are to experience regret, but ease of imagination doesn’t equal probability of that outcome actually occurring.
Your turn:
- What fork are you stuck at?
- What alternative path keeps haunting you?
- What do you imagine would be different if you’d chosen differently?
STEP 2: Reality-Test the Counterfactual (15 minutes)
Your brain has constructed a fantasy version of the alternative path. Time to bring reality back in.
For the path you took, list:
- Three unexpected benefits that emerged
- Two skills or strengths you developed
- One person who came into your life because of this choice
For the path you didn’t take, honestly list:
- Three likely challenges or downsides it would have involved
- Two ways it would have conflicted with your other values or commitments
- One thing you would have had to sacrifice to pursue it
David did this exercise. His current path gave him: financial security for his family, expertise in leadership that broadened his skill set, and connections with executives who later became close friends.
The path not taken would have meant: potentially working 80-hour weeks on technical problems he’d eventually age out of, missing his kids’ childhoods, and staying in a narrow technical specialization with limited long-term options.
Neither path was purely good or bad. Both involved trade-offs he couldn’t see from the fork.
STEP 3: The Completion Ritual (20 minutes)
This is the step that most people skip, and it’s why they stay stuck.
Write a letter to the version of yourself on the other path. Not the fantasy version—the real version who would have faced real challenges.
“Dear Engineer-David,
I see you’re still coding at 11 PM on a Friday. Your back hurts from sitting. Your relationships have suffered because you’re always solving technical problems in your head. You’re brilliant at what you do, but you’re lonely. You’re starting to wonder if there’s more to life than elegant code.
I’m Manager-David. Some days I miss the work you do. But I’m also watching my daughter’s soccer games. I’m learning how to develop people, not just products. I’m financially secure in ways you’re not.
Neither of us has the perfect career. Both of us are doing our best with the choices we made.
I release you. You don’t have to be my backup plan anymore.”
Then burn it, tear it up, or delete it. You’re not sending it. You’re completing the emotional transaction.
This ritual signals to your nervous system: the fork is in the past. I’m on this path now.
STEP 4: The Recommitment Practice (Daily, 60 seconds)
Every morning, for 30 days, answer this question in your journal:
“What’s one choice I can make today that honors the path I’m actually on?”
Not the path you wish you’d taken. The path you’re on.
For David, this looked like:
- “I can have a meaningful conversation with one team member today”
- “I can find one way to mentor someone through a technical challenge”
- “I can bring creativity to this leadership role instead of just administration”
Research shows that counterfactual thinking can actually facilitate behavioral intentions and lead to improvements when redirected toward concrete actions in your current reality.
You’re not erasing the regret. You’re redirecting the energy it generates toward making your actual life better.
Integrating This Into Daily Life
Career regret isn’t a one-time thing you resolve and move on from. It’s a pattern of thought you need to interrupt repeatedly until new patterns form.
Morning Reset
Before checking email, ask: “Am I living today, or am I living in ‘what if’?”
If the answer is “what if,” take three breaths and name one thing you’re doing today that’s only possible because of the path you chose.
LinkedIn Boundary
If social media triggers counterfactual spirals, set hard limits. Unfollow people whose success makes you question your choices. Use it as a tool, not a comparison engine.
David unfollowed everyone from his old engineering team. “It wasn’t about them,” he said. “It was about me. Every post was a reminder of who I wasn’t anymore. I needed to stop treating my feed like evidence of a wrong turn.”
The Decision Autopsy (Quarterly)
Every three months, do a structured review:
- What have I learned on this path that I wouldn’t have learned on the alternative?
- What opportunities has this path created that I couldn’t have predicted?
- What do I want to do with the next quarter of this path?
This keeps you oriented forward, not backward.
The Recommitment Ritual (Annually)
Once a year, write down: “I chose this path. Here’s why I’m choosing it again today.”
Or: “I chose this path. It’s served its purpose. Here’s how I’m intentionally evolving it.”
Both are valid. The key is conscious choice, not passive regret.
Common Mistakes That Keep You Frozen
Mistake 1: Treating Regret as Evidence
Just because you feel regret doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. Regret is a cognitive thought about a choice, not an objective assessment of it.
Your feelings are real. Your interpretation of them might not be accurate.
Mistake 2: Thinking You Can Still “Fix” It By Choosing the Other Path
Research shows that situations perceived as changeable actually keep counterfactual alternatives salient even after initial decisions are made, reducing satisfaction.
You can change careers. You can pivot. But you can’t go back to the original fork and choose differently. That moment is gone. The person you were then no longer exists.
Any new choice you make is from this moment forward, not from then backward.
Mistake 3: Confusing Regret With Learning
Some people think dwelling on regret will teach them to make better decisions. Research shows that while regret can be beneficial for learning, excessive regret can lead to chronic stress and negatively impact both mental and physical health.
There’s a difference between “What can I learn from this?” and “I should have known better.”
One moves you forward. The other keeps you stuck.
Mistake 4: Seeking Certainty About the “Right” Choice
There wasn’t a right choice. There were two viable options with different trade-offs. You chose one. It had consequences—both positive and negative.
The alternative would also have had consequences—both positive and negative.
Trying to determine which was “objectively better” is a thought trap. Neither was objectively better. They were just different.
Mistake 5: Using Others’ Outcomes as Evidence
Your colleague who took the startup risk and succeeded doesn’t prove you made the wrong choice. They were different people with different circumstances, timing, resources, and luck.
Research shows that when people see others who made decisions they considered making, they use those outcomes as evidence of their own bad choices, even though the situations aren’t comparable.
Stop using others’ success as evidence of your failure.
Conclusion: The Fork Is Not the Destination
David came back to see me a year after our first conversation. He looked different—lighter somehow.
“I still think about that engineering path sometimes,” he said. “But I stopped living there. I started finding ways to bring what I loved about engineering into leadership. I mentor junior engineers. I stay technical enough to understand their challenges. I’ve made this role mine instead of performing someone else’s version of management.”
“Do you still regret the choice?” I asked.
He paused. “No. I don’t think I regret the choice anymore. I regret the years I spent regretting it. That’s the real loss—not the path I didn’t take, but the time I spent not fully inhabiting the path I did take.”
That’s the shift. The fork isn’t the problem. The endless standing at the fork, simulating alternative paths, refusing to commit to the one you’re on—that’s what keeps you stuck.
Research shows that career decisions affect long-term well-being and satisfaction, but the key factor isn’t which decision you make—it’s how you adapt to and develop within the choice you’ve made.
You don’t need to erase regret. You don’t need to convince yourself you made the “right” choice. You need to finish making the choice by living it fully.
Every day you wake up and think “What if I had chosen differently?” is a day you’re still standing at the fork.
Every day you wake up and think “What can I do with the path I’m on?” is a day you’re actually moving forward.
The fork was years ago. You’re not there anymore. Time to notice where you actually are.
Start Tomorrow Morning
Before you open your laptop, before you check your phone, before you begin performing your day:
Ask yourself: “Am I going to live today, or am I going to live in ‘what if’?”
Then choose. Actively. Consciously.
And if you catch yourself sliding back into counterfactual thinking during the day, don’t judge it. Just notice: “I’m standing at the fork again.”
Then take one step forward on the path you’re actually on.
That’s the practice. Not perfection. Just presence.
The fork is behind you. Your life is ahead of you.
Time to walk.
Your Daily Dissolution Practice:
Morning (60 seconds):
“What’s one choice I can make today that honors the path I’m actually on?”
When counterfactual thinking arises:
“I notice I’m at the fork again. What’s happening right now in my actual life?”
Evening (2 minutes):
“What did I learn today that I could only learn on this path?”
Final Thought:
The fork in the road wasn’t a test with a right answer. It was a moment when you had to choose between two viable paths. You chose one. Now your work is to walk it fully, with presence and intention, rather than spending your life wondering what’s happening on the path you can only imagine.
The imagined path will always look better. That’s how imagination works—it has no traffic, no disappointment, no mundane Tuesdays.
Your actual path has all of that. And it also has you, learning, growing, adapting, becoming.
The fork is behind you. Your life is in front of you. Time to notice the difference.
Research References:
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