I’m happily married with a house and a career now. So why do I feel like such a failure?

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Dear Hera,

I am aware that this is going to smack of privilege, but I can’t help but feel like I haven’t achieved anything worthwhile in my life.

I was a “gifted” kid growing up, meaning I spent my time around talented people, which continued into high school. If I consider my peers, they are all high achieving, with good careers and what seem like idealistic lives (according to Instagram). I had, and still have, high expectations of achievement for myself.

I feel like I left high school and stagnated. I wanted to leave my hometown for uni and didn’t. I wanted to study abroad and didn’t. I’ve had a strong desire to be elsewhere all my life and I’ve never managed to make the leap. I’m stuck comparing myself to my peers, many of whom either live or have lived overseas, and feeling inferior.

My husband, bless him, is trying to help me by saying I have successes in my life, such as being married, having a house, and a good career. But these aren’t successes to me. I fully expected all of these things to happen in my life, and as such they aren’t achievements, more like meeting requirements. We are even moving overseas next year so I can have the experience, but it feels like too little too late.

How do I get myself to accept that what I have is enough and isn’t anything to be ashamed of?

Yours,

Underachieving

Dear Underachieving,

Your husband is right. By every conceivable metric it sounds like your life has been a success. But your husband being right doesn’t mean you’re wrong for feeling the way you do.

If it makes you feel any better, I think this is a near ubiquitous 20th century feeling. There’s something almost wicked about the way we ratchet up people’s expectations, and then send them off into the real world to work in some backwater printer cartridge manufacturer’s HR department. No wonder everyone feels vaguely disappointed.

Many people your age are in much more precarious circumstances. You have a loving spouse, a career and a house. So why doesn’t it feel like enough?

I think the reason it doesn’t feel good enough is because your letter is first and foremost about regret. You don’t want what you want now. You want it back then, when it would have changed the trajectory of your life. You’re mourning the person you might have been, if the circumstances of your life had been different.

I don’t think it’s scandalously privileged to feel this way. Changing the past is perhaps the most common human fantasy there is, right after foiling a terrorist attack on live television or developing heretofore unknown figure skating abilities. Unless you’re planning to die young, it’s a little early for you to be having a midlife crisis. But whatever this feeling is, yours has arrived right on schedule.

It is, however, a fantasy. There’s no such thing as the life you didn’t live. Obsessing over what your life might have looked like if you went to study ballet or robotics in Paris is just as pointless as wondering what your life would be like if you’d been apprenticed to Santa, or born with a luxurious monkey tail.

I believe that given the exact same set of initial conditions: biological, cultural, historical, it’s basically impossible that any of us could have lived different lives. Is this the same thing as not believing in free will? I’m no great shakes at philosophy, never having advanced beyond the ontological argument, but I believe both that our choices matter, and that given the exact same conditions, we would make the same choices again and again.

This doesn’t let you off the hook, exactly. But I think if you can learn to enjoy the fatalism inherent in this line of reasoning, it can offer a little relief from the endless cycle of regret. To have chosen a different life, you would first need to be a different person born into a different world – an impossible task. There’s no point beating yourself up over something which could never have gone any other way.

Perhaps claiming “we all have limited to no agency over our lives” is not a very helpful stance for an advice columnist to have. But whatever. Regret is only useful insofar as it can be applied constructively to the future.

Besides, the fantasy of an unlived life is always preposterously rosy. When you fantasise about the career you might have had, you never stop to consider the horrific chairlift injury that caused both of your legs to be amputated, or the car accident that killed your sister and mother who were on their way to pick you up from the airport. There is no such thing as a perfect speedrun of life. There’s always something to be regretted. I’m sure many of the peers you are comparing yourself to feel envious of aspects of your life. Even those who “have everything” never really have everything, and Instagram is the worst possible tool to use as an objective yardstick.

I don’t know if any of this is useful. It sounds as if moving overseas is the main thing you feel you’ve missed out on, and considering you’re about to tick that off the bucket list, there’s not much practical advice I can offer, beyond saying what you’re feeling is something almost everyone experiences at one point in their life, and you’ll eventually get through it. Don’t be too hard on yourself, but try not to languish in despair to the detriment of your actual life, which is still happening, right now, all around you. Try and think of what you’d most regret 30 years from now, and address it while you have a chance. Or as the Stoics said, think of yourself as dead.

The past is gone and we can never get it back. Salvage what you can from your regrets, try to constructively apply that information to the future, and instead of blaming yourself for something which could never have been any other way, try and muster up a little gratitude for your past self, who made many wise decisions, and brought you here to the future: housed, gainfully employed, and loved, without any debilitating chairlift injuries.

Good luck!