The Book of Your Life: What Three Novels Teach Us About Regret

By Adham Moustafa

The grass is always greener on the other side. It’s one of the oldest expressions we have for the belief that someone else’s life or situation is better than our own. Yet it’s not always so simple, especially when the list of regrets piles up.

One can’t help but wonder what their life might have been, how they strayed from their imagined path, and why they focus on an illusion that never existed. Psychologists call this the focusing illusion. When we picture another life, we fixate on the one thing that would be different and forget everything that would stay the same (Schkade & Kahneman, 1998). The imagined life wins every comparison because it has never had to survive an ordinary Wednesday. As much as humanity varies, our lives are very much shaped by decisions and factors that are not always in our hands.

I read three novels that had no business belonging together: one about a philosopher and the doctor who tried to save him, one about a library of every life a woman could have lived, and one about a library in hell. Writers capture the depth of these fantasies, the limitations that haunt us, the temptations we miss, and the warmth home provides once you wander far away. Each of these books sends someone into a life that isn’t theirs, and each brings them back changed. Deep introspection allows us to recognize the mundane yet vast oasis of little things that remind us of who we are, and remind us how we stray from the path that is ours.

Where Philosophy Met Medicine

Irvin D. Yalom’s novel When Nietzsche Wept imagines how psychology was born from philosophy and medicine. It dives into how a physician, Josef Breuer, came to treat Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth-century philosopher often described as ahead of his time. Although Yalom invents their meeting, much real history is woven in about how talk therapy came to be.

Philosophy seeks meaning in the unknown and the unprovable. Many great philosophers spent their lives in discussion and debate, trying to make sense of the suffering humanity endures, not just as a species but as individuals. Medicine built methods around what is measurable within a patient, yet spent little time defining the meaning behind an ailment. Talk therapy makes room for what’s within, for what’s been covered up by rationalization, for what the suffering means and signifies, not just a cure for physical symptoms.

Yalom uses notable slices of history to show how we reached this point. Josef Breuer was a mentor to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and the case of Breuer’s patient Anna O., mentioned in the novel, is much of what Freud built his early work on. Yalom uses a fictional setting to explore what could have been, and in doing so captures what was happening at the time in treating people not just medically or spiritually, but mentally.

The Library of Unlived Lives

Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library explores the magnitude of how different a life can be. Nora arrives at the library at the lowest point of her life, suspended between life and death, where every book on the shelves is a life she could have lived. She gets to open a book and live a life built from reversing the decisions the core Nora regretted. She quickly discovers how surface-level achieved success can be, and the cost of the sacrifices each one demanded: the experiences her core self valued but the successful versions never learned to care about. She sees how differently each version weighs things, and how some things actually worked out for the better in her original life. The novel does an amazing job of immersing the reader in different pedestals of success: an Olympic swimmer, a rock star, a glaciologist in Svalbard. Every one of those lives would be beautiful to encounter, but how unfortunate it would be not to stick around and witness how this one turns out. While chasing those achievements, Nora begins to yearn for and mourn the life she left behind, in retrospect regretting undoing her regrets. She becomes a witness to herself, and that wonder brings her joy upon her return.

The comparisons, the unchosen paths, the unopened doors all carry their own baggage. There’s an old saying: if all of humanity put their problems in a hat, would you draw a new one at random or keep your own? Becoming a witness, and valuing the people who witness you in return, brings Nora back to living her life after facing the deaths of her unlived lives. In a line Nora attributes to Thoreau, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Once Nora finally sees what she has been looking at all along, she realizes she “didn’t want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle.”

Even then, wanting isn’t enough. In the final pages, Nora tries to write herself back into her life: Nora wanted to live. Nothing happens. Mrs. Elm, the librarian, once told her, “Want is an interesting word. It means lack.” So she crosses it out. Nora decided to live. Nothing. Nora was ready to live. Still nothing. Finally, brave enough to face her own book, completely blank and the only one on the shelf not burning, still perfectly intact, she writes three words: I AM ALIVE.

A Library With No Exit, Yet

Soren, in Steven L. Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell, finds himself in an afterlife that isn’t quite fiery. He must find the book of his life in a version of Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, which holds every possible combination of characters, sensical or not, and the only way to salvation is the one book that describes his life precisely. The library isn’t endless, but the hope it holds can feel endless. He has eternity to find his book, so Heaven is inevitable, a matter of time, but as Soren puts it, “Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite.” That hope drives Soren to seek out a book that could take far longer than billions of years to find. On his search, he meets others seeking their own books, and together they build a university that maps the library and adds meaning to the random jumble of letters they find in each new book, even handing out titles and awards for the rare readable sentence.

Then he meets someone who sees him too. “Have you ever loved someone for a thousand years?” Soren asks. “I would have bet it impossible, but that’s how long we were together.” They spend fifty years discussing dogs, then live as dogs for a while, and run a game of tag that lasts twelve years. It was longer than any known human relationship, and also something familiar to stay content with, a way to escape the reality of facing what he had to do. But one can’t help but wonder whether it was an escape, or the only thing in the whole library worth finding. Two things can be true. In When Nietzsche Wept, Breuer passes along a lesson from his own mentor to a young Freud: “Dogs can have fleas and lice, too.” A patient can have two diseases at once, and a love can be both a hiding place and the most precious thing you ever had.

By the time Soren finds a book close to his own, he has been in the library for 23 to the 439th power days by his own count. Written out, that’s a number nearly six hundred digits long. A thousand years is about 365,000 days, six digits. In the grand scheme of this timeline, their thousand years was a blip of time, but also something to cherish. As he puts it, “a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.”

The couple is eventually torn apart, and she becomes a memory to hold on to, until even that fades. With all the time in the universe but nothing to give it meaning, it all begins to feel empty. By the end, Soren admits, “all meaning has faded long ago into an endless grey nothingness.” Later Soren realizes he needs to start at the foundation, the very bottom of the library so that he can cover all ground, and that only he could identify what his book would look like. No university could find it for him. On that six-hundred-digit day, he comes across a book close to his life, with slight variations he calls “trivial and of no consequence,” and places it in the exit slot to see if it changes his fate. Will he enter Heaven or remain in pursuit of it?

After more time than anyone could imagine, he stops demanding the perfect version of his life and offers up the imperfect one. Endlessly searching for meaning can take an eternity, so long that you miss a connection you could have grabbed onto and held a bit longer. But holding on can also stop you from growing, and sometimes letting go is part of it. So is handing in the imperfect book letting go, or giving up?

Would You Do It All Again?

Nietzsche suggests that if time is infinite, everything we live could infinitely recur, which he calls the eternal recurrence (Nietzsche, 1882/1974). He first posed it in The Gay Science, and in Yalom’s novel he puts it to Breuer in nearly the same words: “What if some demon were to say to you that this life... you will have to live once more, and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and everything unutterably small or great in your life will return to you” (Yalom, 1992). Are the decisions we make ones we are willing to make for eternity? Even though there is no way of knowing, making choices that may echo through time promotes more intention and autonomy to seize the day. The result of his thought experiment: all the small moments in between. The little things are exactly what we would live again.

The Doctor and the Philosopher

Breuer reaches a point of despair when he realizes there is no simple prescription to relieve his existential suffering, while Nietzsche is bold enough to face how life deviates and what it lacks. Nietzsche continues to use the thought experiment to treat Breuer, who is supposedly treating him. They challenge each other through talk therapy in a parallel process of growth that lets each man view his life in a more authentic light. A light that brings Breuer home.

Under hypnosis by a young Freud, Breuer lives the life he thought he wanted, comes back, and sees Mathilde, the wife he fantasized about leaving, in a new light, much like Nora. He tells Nietzsche he feels “present... rather than pretending to be here.” Breuer is finally able not just to label his containers but to look inside them, once he lives out the fantasy he felt so guilty about and sees what it would have cost him.

The kind of witnesses Nietzsche and Breuer become for each other grows complicated when both reveal they suffer from the same affliction. Once one finds resolution, the other is quick to ask for his blueprint. But both recognize that one man’s path would not resolve the other’s. As Breuer tells him, “You always said I must find my own way and not search for the way or your way.” Carl Jung would see this as a call to individuation: each person has their own roadmap, with their own unique shortcuts and setbacks.

Nietzsche, uncured of his despair, leaves changed too. He admits he had only half embraced his own idea of amor fati, loving one’s fate. Until then, he had resigned himself to his fate rather than truly loving it. Through the most powerful form of love, friendship, he discovers he is “capable of touching and being touched,” and that he has a choice in how he loves his fate.

The Lack in Wanting, the Gift of Choosing

The three books arrive at the same place. Wanting another life keeps you in lack. Mark Manson credits Alan Watts with calling this “the backwards law”: “pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place” (Manson, 2016). The more desperately we chase the greener grass, the browner our own looks. Nora’s want meant lack. Soren’s search for the flawless book kept him searching. Breuer’s fantasy kept him absent from his own dinner table.

The way out isn’t to stop caring about the other life. It’s to stop wanting a different life and start choosing this one. Whatever sparks excitement, even something small, can be a signal pointing toward your authentic self. Nietzsche’s own change shows the difference: resigning yourself to your fate is a kind of giving up, while choosing it is closer to letting go. Nora stops writing that she wants to live and writes that she is alive. Breuer doesn’t resign himself to Mathilde, he chooses her wholeheartedly. Soren hands in the imperfect book, coming to terms with it before seeing the result. And none of them gets there alone. Nora becomes a witness to herself in a way Nietzsche became one for Breuer. Even Soren had a love that lasted a thousand years. We must let go of the want, and mourn the unlived versions of ourselves that become ghosts in our lives.

This is where fiction meets the therapy room. You can’t argue your way out of the focusing illusion, because from inside your own head the imagined life will always look better. You have to go and look at it, the way Breuer did, and you usually need someone beside you who isn’t seeing through your eyes, someone to help you hold what you may never unsee. Therapy borrows the same move in gentler forms: imagery work, the empty chair, or simply saying the regret out loud to someone who can hear it. It’s no accident that Yalom imagines the birth of talk therapy as two people taking turns witnessing each other.

Greener Where You Water It

Breuer comes out of his trance and can’t stop staring at his wife. Later, in the kitchen, he tells her he has decided to marry her. “I thought you decided to marry me fourteen years ago,” Mathilde says. “What’s important,” he answers, “is that I choose to do it today, Mathilde. And every day.”

The grass is greener where you water it, and watering is never finished. It has to be chosen again today, and again tomorrow. So embrace the things that make you, you. Comparisons rank you against lives you never lived, but no one else can be the version of you that exists right now. When regret comes back, and it will, it might help to remember that the decisions you made were made with the knowledge and insight you had in that moment. You can’t go back and hand your past self what you know now. You can only choose, today, what to do with the life that’s actually yours. You never know what you might see while looking at it all.

If you find yourself caught comparing your life to the one you didn’t live, or carrying regrets that won’t loosen, consider reaching out to one of our clinicians. Therapy can be a place to look at those other lives honestly, and to choose this one again. If you are in crisis or having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

References

Haig, M. (2020). The midnight library. Canongate.

Manson, M. (2016). The subtle art of not giving a f*ck: A counterintuitive approach to living a good life. HarperOne.

Nietzsche, F. (1974). The gay science (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1882)

Peck, S. L. (2012). A short stay in hell. Strange Violin Editions.

Schkade, D. A., & Kahneman, D. (1998). Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 9(5), 340–346.

Yalom, I. D. (1992). When Nietzsche wept. Basic Books.