The "What If" Universe

The "What If" universe is one of the most explored universes and yet we still don't even remotely understand it or why it exists. When we settle in the “What If” world, pull out a foldy chair and take a sip of a piña colada, it doesn’t help the situation at all. It’s just like watching your life go by living in the what could have happeneds. A lot of times we think about how things should have gone or how they could have gone in afterthought of an event or series of events. The "What If" universe is really intriguing. Sometimes we use it to make ourselves feel better about a decision and sometimes we use it to make ourselves feel worse. It's a sort of subconscious universe that surfaces when we think about something. Especially when something bad happens, the "What If" universe comes out and you start pondering if you could have done something another way to avoid the outcome. It can lead to us blaming ourselves for what happened which isn’t something you would want to do, but it just happens. This also may show the innate desire of humans to be able to control every occurence when not everything can be controlled(at least I think this).

This is a good segway (I was gonna put a picture of a segway here but Blogger won't let me for some reason) into another discussion: why do we invite pain unto ourselves? Frequently, our mental pain is from something we construct and why would we create something that pains us? Too often I get paranoid about when people are vague about things they say to me because it makes me think that they're trying to hint that they're talking about me. Since these things are hardly ever about me, by over thinking everything I'm just hurting myself. It's not something I can control, it's just something I do and it causes me a lot of incessant worrying. When we think of these types of “What if”s, it could cause you to act differently towards people because by spending too much time in the foldy chair you haven’t realized the world moving on without you. Living in the “What If” universe is just like living in the past; you can’t change what has already happened, yet you spend your time wishing you could have changed something you did. By the time you’ve taken the last sip of the piña colada, you’ve constructed a whole other reality around these let’s call them “probabilities” (for lack of a better word).

While we can learn from our time spent in the “What If” universe it seems to usually end up hurting more than helping. Sure, we can learn what we should do if we ever face that situation again, but if you spend too much time thinking about a one-time situation, regret comes to the surface. Spending too much time in the “What If” universe is a lot like a NASCAR race: you just go in 8,000 circles (possible exaggeration here) trying to predict when you should go to the pit stop for a break while still wanting to win the race. When you keep thinking about what could have happened and go in circles back to points where you could have changed something you did, you go further to think about what the results of changing your actions could have been; which is a pointless thing to think about because you can never know the consequences of taking the other road (Frost reference; be proud, very proud). Yet when you tell yourself to make that pit stop and take a break from thinking about it, you don’t want to because you’re curious as to what you think the results may have been.

This quote doesn't make complete sense to the rest of the post but it's funny: "The future is like a Japanese game show: you never know what's going on"