Are you happy with your life?

If someone offered you a chance to do one thing different, to go right where you went left, to catch a train instead of missing it, would you take it?

That's the question at the heart of "Dark Matter", a 2024 sci-fi TV show adapted after the eponymous 2016 novel by Blake Crouch. The story taps into the often-cited many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which suggests that all possible outcomes of a scenario are realized across different worlds. Parallel universes, for short. The show follows a physicist who is kidnapped from his universe and sent into another, where thanks largely to a choice he made 17 years prior, his life has unfolded quite differently.

I really won't spoil it for you, since it's a hell of a show if you're into sci-fi and parallel universes in particular. While personally I wasn't too thrilled with the ending, the show kept me hooked right up to the end and was, at times, extremely moving.

All possible outcomes are unfolding right now.

Yet you only get one foggy, blurry road.

There is a universe where you got the job. The girl. Where your kid lived. Died. Where your parents no longer speak to you. Where they do. The list goes on and on, and out of a myriad of worlds they could explore, the show certainly takes us through some very exciting ones.

"Are you happy with your life?"

... is a recurring question asked by the kidnapper. Or, is there one choice that's been gnawing at you? One thing you're beginning to fear (or perhaps are certain) you chose wrong.
Yet it seems to me (as the show itself seems to suggest) that happiness is made up of a thousand tiny choices. It's tempting, at times, to look back and say I would give all back to have chosen differently at X juncture of my life. Yet obviously, there's no telling how your life might've unfolded. Of course, the show invited me to meditate upon my own past choices. I recognized the fleeting temptation to say "Oh, what I wouldn't give". At night, watching the truly excellently realized series. But the next day, in the harsher, wonderful, infinitely more real light of day, I had to be honest with myself. Do I wish I'd done differently?

Not really.

Not outside of an ephemeral, poetic sense of fate. While there are (like for us all) little moments I wish I'd handled differently, with more kindness, compassion, understanding, perhaps, the big ones, the decisions that were truly resonant, I wouldn't do different. Once or twice, I blamed others in my life for influencing my decisions. I said, but how could you? Why did you let me, or why did you push me? And yet, I realize (and they did, also) that

I can be stubborn, and I get carried by emotion. The truth is, if I'd wanted to make the other choice, really properly thought that was right, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

"How could you tell me/let me/....those are just things we say when the guilt gets to be too much. Except, you don't get very far refusing to be held accountable for your own decisions.

Roads not taken, famously, are a very fertile soil for artists, as the show itself proves. It hits a nerve. We all have at least one. Except they're not any of them real. Many of us enjoy the parallel universes theory, but we obviate one crucial detail - once a decision is made, the self is split into two different yous, leading two different lives. To assume that road not taken is still yours is nothing but self-deception. It stopped being your road the moment you made the decision, and you wouldn't be happier going back, changing places with that you, or with any other little trick or subterfuge artists or physicists alike might invent.

You wanna know what I think, I don't think you're unhappy because you chose X instead of Y 10 years ago. I think what makes you unhappy in the present moment is asking yourself. Am I? To quote Jack,

Ask yourself if you are happy,
And then you cease to be.

Keep yourself stuck wandering down 'what if's, that's a sure-fire way to be miserable. As one character concludes, it was never about making the "right" choices, as even if you scored every answer right, life for that version of you would still be imperfect. So perhaps a better endeavor would be applying yourself to experiencing fully this reality that you've chosen. No regrets? Perhaps not, that's a tall order sometimes. But ultimately, all you get is this one go.

Did I make the wrong choice?

Maybe. Sometimes, we do. Yet as soon as the choice was made, the universe in which that would've been the wrong choice ceased being your universe. In this universe we appear to share, the choice you made was the only choice. So stop beating yourself up about it.

Also, if that's your cup of tea, do go check out the show. It's really quite good. Also, in this universe, check out some good music. Hey, it's the first #threetunetuesday of 2025, what the hell.

Give Miley a shot. In another universe, she still is Hannah Montana. But in this one, he adds a special sort of edginess to a classic.

I think it's strange you never knew.

except maybe in another universe, you did.

I love it when I find something that's just come out (in this universe, at least) and that makes me smile a bit.

Well? How you liking our universe so far?