“A man chooses his career at an age when he is not fit to choose,” Nietzsche wrote. “He doesn’t know the various professions; he doesn’t know himself; and then he wastes his most active years in this career, giving his whole mind to it, acquiring experience.”

Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a decision which has to be made before a certain day. He takes the place offered in the counting-house, and is committed. Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may

It’s not that no one had imagined other lives for themselves before the first cotton factory was built or Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, but such lives have been nursed by an economic system that isolates us and urges us to calculate opportunities and maximize their effects. The elevation of choice as an absolute good, the experience of

The Gay Science, where Nietzsche imagines us coming one night to a fork in our road, presided over by yet another divinity, this one not impotent but with a decisive power. What if, Nietzsche says, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live

Regret is a luxury given to those born to choice and chance.

when we think things have gone wrong, we imaginatively improve upon the past so that we might not make the same mistake in the future.