The What ifs

"We make the smallest decisions and don't think anything of them. But what if they change everything" - Black Crouch, Dark Matter

Choices are like the flicker of traffic lights at an empty intersection - green, yello, red - each one leading to a different destination, each hesitation birthing a new road unseen. Missed choices or alternatives are the unread messages we choose to ignore, the missed calls that could have been answered, the doors we pass without knocking. With everybreath, a decision is made, and in its wake, an alternte version of our lies quietly dissovles, slipping through our fingers like fine grains of sand.

Life is a ceaseless sequence of decisions, each one unfurling like a paper crance, delicate and irreversible, shaping destinies in ways we seldom comprehend.

In the quite moments, when the world pauses just long enough for introspection, we wonder: What if I turned right instead of left? What if I smiled at the stranger you huried past me this morning? What if I lingered an extra second in that conversation intead of walking away? What if that text wasn't send? What if I didn't call that night and asked him out? What if I never forgive him, will he be mine? What if you had stayed instead of left, or spoken instead of stayed silent?

In all these seemingly insignificant moments, entire lifetimes are forged and forsaken, the weight of their possiblityhanging in the air like an ech that never fades.

Imagine stepping into a pitch-dark room, where the walls hum with an energy you cannot see. The air is thick, not with heat, but with possibility. In front of you is a switch—but this is no ordinary switch. When you press it, you don’t just turn on a light; you split the very fabric of reality. In one universe, you flicked it on. In another, you left it off. And in yet another, you hesitated just a moment longer, creating yet another world where your indecision led to an entirely different path. This is the fundamental principle of quantum mechanics—the idea that every choice fractures into infinite possibilities, each just as real as the one you are living right now.

I came across this book and now a series on Apple TV, Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. It is based on the idea of quantum superposition. Think of it as a cosmic roulette wheel, spinning in the unseen dimensions of reality. It exploits a bizarre, counterintuitive phenomenon called quantum superposition—a state where something exists in multiple places or forms at once. Until an observer collapses the wave function (a fancy way of saying sees what’s happening), all outcomes exist simultaneously.

Inside this box, reality behaves like a deck of shuffled cards, each card representing a different version of your life. The moment you step out, the deck "collapses," and you are dealt one reality—but in the quantum abyss, all those other realities still exist, just beyond your reach. This is the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), a theory proposed by physicist Hugh Everett III, which suggests that every quantum event splits the universe into parallel branches.

The human mind is its own quantum box, a vessel of infinite what-ifs, flickering between possibilities like a glitch in time. We do it constantly—slipping into the gravity well of choices we did not make, lives we did not live. The mind, much like a subatomic particle, exists in multiple states at once—here, yet elsewhere; present, yet lost in another version of reality that exists only in thought.

You are sitting at your desk, pen hovering over paper, eyes glazed. A thought creeps in, soft at first but growing louder—What if I had taken that job? What if I had stayed? What if I had walked away sooner? It begins as a whisper but quickly spirals, like a match dropped into dry leaves, igniting an entire forest of untaken roads. In those moments, you are both here and not—trapped in a personal version of superposition, where reality bends and fractures under the weight of your wandering mind.

The what-if spiral is a uniquely human phenomenon, an everyday brush with the multiverse, where the physics of regret and possibility stretch across the infinite expanse of our thoughts. The body remains still—a silent observer in the experiment—while the mind flickers between parallel existences, conjuring lifelines that shimmer and disappear like mirages on hot asphalt.

It happens in the quiet spaces—waiting for the kettle to boil, standing in a long line, staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night. A moment of pause, and suddenly, the world inside your head fractures. In one version, you spoke up when you had the chance. In another, you turned back when your gut told you to. In yet another, you picked up that phone call, and everything unraveled differently. Each thought splits into another, then another, until you're tangled in an infinite loop of possibilities—versions of yourself blinking in and out of existence like fireflies in the dark.

And yet, much like Schrödinger’s cat, these imagined realities collapse the moment we return to the present. The coffee in our cup grows cold. The line moves forward. The kettle whistles. The body reclaims the mind, and just like that, the parallel selves dissolve into nothingness, leaving only a whisper of what could have been.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is this: in chasing the ghosts of our unlived lives, we often forget to fully live the one we are in.