The lives we never lived
By Cecilia Camacho, Founder of CC/magazine and Strategic Consultant at CC/studio
There is a feeling that has become surprisingly common. It is experienced by people with stable jobs, access to more information than any previous generation, the ability to travel, learn, change careers or communicate instantly with virtually anyone in the world. On paper, we have never had so many opportunities. Yet it is becoming increasingly common to hear people say they feel they are falling behind, that they never quite manage to keep up, or that they should be making better use of their time.
“It is the persistent impression that there is always a better experience, a wiser decision or a more interesting version of life.”
It is not necessarily unhappiness. Nor is it frustration in the traditional sense of the word. It is something more difficult to define: the persistent impression that there is always a better experience, a wiser decision or a more interesting version of life waiting somewhere else.
For years, we used a word to describe part of this phenomenon: FOMO, the acronym for Fear of Missing Out. Today, however, the concept has evolved far beyond the fear of missing a party, an event or a conversation. It now reflects a much deeper unease: the difficulty of feeling satisfied in a culture that constantly reminds us of everything we could be doing but are not.
While we work, we observe people who seem to have found the perfect career. While we try to switch off, we encounter those who turn every journey into a transformative experience. While we strive to build stability, we admire those who live in constant motion. Wherever we look, there always seems to be someone who has made a better decision than we have.
Social media has amplified that perception, but reducing the issue to Instagram or TikTok would be far too simplistic. The real question has more to do with the way we have learned to relate to possibility itself. We are exposed to an unprecedented amount of information about how other people live, and that has inevitably transformed our understanding of what a satisfying life looks like.
Only a few decades ago, it was perfectly normal not to know what most of our friends or acquaintances were doing over the weekend. Today, we can follow the everyday movements of hundreds of people. We know where they eat, what they read, what they listen to, which projects they launch, which destinations they visit and which causes they support. Other people’s lives have become a continuous stream of information that accompanies us over breakfast, during our commute and even in the final moments before we go to sleep.
Human beings have always compared themselves with others. The difference is that we now do so on an unprecedented scale. We no longer measure ourselves solely against those within our immediate environment. We compare ourselves with successful professionals, content creators, artists, athletes and entrepreneurs scattered across the globe. Each one embodies a different possibility. Each one represents a life we are not living.
The consequences of this constant exposure go beyond simple comparison. By continually observing the choices, trajectories and experiences of others, we also expand almost infinitely the catalogue of possible lives against which we measure our own. We no longer ask ourselves only whether we are doing things well. We begin to wonder whether we might have been happier had we chosen a different path.
The abundance of possibilities has created an unexpected paradox. The more alternatives we have before us, the easier it becomes to imagine that the best one is always the option we did not choose. As a result, many people live with the feeling that they are missing out on something important. Not because they have made poor decisions, but because constant exposure to other lives fuels the illusion that somewhere along the way there was a perfect path that they failed to take.
Experience, however, tends to reveal something far simpler: every decision involves trade-offs, even those that appear perfect from the outside. Other people’s lives are also built upon abandoned paths, unresolved doubts and opportunities that never materialised. What we see on social media is the outcome of a choice, not everything that was left behind in the process.
In a culture obsessed with what comes next, with novelty and with what has not yet arrived, paying attention to what is already part of our lives can be a far more transformative act than it first appears. Satisfaction rarely comes from finding the perfect option. More often, it emerges when we stop constantly evaluating alternatives and begin to commit ourselves to the choices we have already made.
“Satisfaction emerges when we stop constantly evaluating alternatives and begin to commit ourselves to the choices we have already made.”
(*) Photo: Prateek Katyal from Pexels.
