Counterfactual Thinking: Fate, Regret, and the Choice to Act

One

The morning before last, I woke to the terrible news of a plane crash. In our group chat, my middle-school classmate Xiao said that a friend’s son had persuaded his girlfriend to postpone her return to Guangdong because she had not taken a nucleic acid test. She became the only person who had bought a ticket for that flight and survived.

Are life, death, and destiny somehow determined in advance? Or does fate drift like duckweed, changed by the faintest breeze from an unseen butterfly’s wings?

Years ago, a friend suddenly received a call from his son’s school saying that the boy had caused trouble. He hurried there and learned that his usually well-behaved child had injured another student in a fight. By the time the matter was settled, the family had missed the flight they had booked to visit the boy’s grandmother back home.

As you have probably guessed, that plane met with disaster.

Fate is unpredictable. It is hard to imagine the overwhelming grief of the victims’ families, and impossible not to feel that simply being safe together with family and friends is the greatest happiness of all.

Two

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman once devised an experiment:

A and B take separate taxis to the airport to catch flights scheduled for six o’clock. Traffic delays them both until 6:30. A’s flight departed on time long ago, but B’s was delayed until 6:25, allowing him to watch helplessly as it left. (Please disregard the relationship between checking in and the plane’s departure.) Which of the two would be angrier?

Most people think B would be angrier because he came so close to catching his flight.

But both men missed their flights, so objectively, what difference is there?

From this, Daniel Kahneman proposed a concept:

Counterfactual thinking.

What makes B angrier is not the fact that he arrived late at the airport, but the counterfactual:

• B almost made the flight and lost the second chance created by its delay, so he is furious;

• A missed his flight by a wider margin and was never given such an opportunity by a delay, so he is less angry.

It may seem strange that people let “counterfacts,” rather than facts, determine how they feel. Researchers have found, for example, that Olympic silver medalists are more upset than bronze medalists. This is because:

• The silver medalist’s counterfactual is, “I almost won gold”;

• The bronze medalist’s counterfactual is, “I almost won nothing at all.”

The first is an “upward counterfactual”; the second is a “downward counterfactual.”

Counterfactual thinking is a sophisticated human capacity. It profoundly affects our judgments, decisions, and emotions, making it crucial to human decision-making. Future-oriented counterfactuals usually ask: What would happen if…? This kind of constructive thinking helps us reason about causes and thereby change the future.

Past-oriented counterfactuals usually take the form: If only… This kind of negative thinking often traps us in regret, causing us to overlook the optimism and opportunities that come from looking ahead.

Three Often, the counterfactual sense of having “missed by only a little” may be an illusion. Suppose the winning number in a hundred-million-yuan lottery is 314159 and yours is 314158. It looks as though you were only one digit away, but your near-miss number is no more special than any other losing number; mathematically, they are equal. Yet our minds and emotions are not mathematical machines. The counterfactual of “almost” is a source of joy and sorrow in both real life and works of art.

In 2010, Ren Zhengfei was traveling abroad when he suddenly thought of calling his mother. Worried that the call might make her anxious, he decided to wait until he returned. He then received word that she had been struck by a car while out shopping for groceries and seriously injured; she died soon afterward. Ren said this was the greatest regret of his life. From then on, he would be tormented by an inescapable supposition:

“If I really had called my mother on the morning of the eighth and delayed her departure by a minute or two, perhaps she would have escaped the disaster…”

It is a heartbreaking story.

Perhaps every family struck by such a sudden calamity has a similar counterfactual. It resembles young Wayne’s nightmare in Batman: if his fear of bats had not driven him out of the theater, his parents would not have been shot by a robber. In some sense, does that make him one of their killers too?

Or imagine someone rushing to catch a connecting international flight who arrives less than a minute late and must cancel and repurchase the entire itinerary. Could every preceding minute then be called a cause of that single minute of lateness? If the traveler had risen a minute earlier, driven a minute faster on the airport expressway, or taken a few quicker steps inside the terminal, would the flight have been made? Or might that delay instead have spared the traveler from a worse fate?

Is the final straw that breaks the camel’s back the real culprit, or should every earlier straw also be held responsible? “Of all the cities in all the world, and all the bars in those cities, you walked into mine.” Without that particular coincidence, how would the story have unfolded? How would everything have passed away?

Four Now try an experiment. If, as described above, one trivial counterfactual can change a person’s fate, can you do something now—some future-oriented counterfactual—to intervene in what happens next? You may find it difficult. What could you do? Send a message to a friend you have not contacted in a long time, start learning an instrument you have always wanted to play, give up a bad habit, or raise a banyan tree that can live for many years…

It all feels like tossing a pebble into a raging river. You are swept along by the tide of the age, while “the you who is trying to change something now” is carried along by the countless other versions of you that make up your destiny, surging eastward without shifting it in the slightest.

Even if you did create some astonishing counterfactual, leaving your friends utterly amazed, the change you made to fate would still be part of fate: the counterfactual would become fact. Whether you succeeded or failed, whether things went your way or not, others would say, “See? That was this person’s fate all along.” If he had left home a minute later, or if she had spent a little less time talking to her neighbor, might they have avoided the fatal accident that happened in a single second?

For an individual, a traffic accident is a random event, yet the annual number of accidents in a city produces a relatively stable result. In 2017, 37,133 people died in traffic accidents in the United States; in 2016, the figure was 37,461. Why are the two numbers so close? Does the Grim Reaper have performance targets too?

The law of large numbers follows the system with cold indifference, producing a stable figure as if by rolling dice. That figure does not change in response to a bereaved family’s sorrowful thought: “If only…”

The number of forest fires, the number of babies born in a country, the number of clear days in a region—counts of recurring events like these all fluctuate within a stable range. If one can tolerate its emotional fatalism, the dead within one set of probabilities died in place of the living within another, even though they never knew one another. In Feynman’s view, the contingencies that move us so deeply are merely coincidences produced by randomness. A license plate reading “12345678” is no more coincidental than one reading “15923769.” If you happened to see two cars on the street one day, one numbered 12345678 and the other 87654321, you would surely marvel at how such an unlikely event could occur. You would be surprised because the numbers look highly “ordered,” yet two other plates that did not strike you as coincidental might contain a different, less obvious kind of “order” and be even more remarkable coincidences. By extension, astonishing coincidences may be everywhere. Behind the idea of “coincidence” lies the assumption of “purpose,” as though someone had deliberately placed two ordered sequences together. Yet the second law of thermodynamics tells us that perhaps all change is, in essence, simply the result of spontaneous decay. Human beings excel at detecting patterns. We are obsessed with causality and possessed by a strong sense of individual purpose: the unrecognized purpose imposed by the “selfish gene,” which uses us as vehicles for reproduction, as well as the consciously perceived purposes distributed across the different levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We then extend this teleology across the boundless universe, trying to find a designer of all things and discover the purpose and meaning of human existence. But the question receives no answer. Everything remains silent and mysterious, because the magnificent universe needs no purpose simply to exist, nor does it depend on an explanation.

Five The emptiness we feel when looking up at the stars and the confinement we feel when looking down at survival repeatedly leave us perplexed. What determines a lifetime: chance or destiny? We always choose first and find reasons afterward; act first and explain later; do something and only then make it seem coherent. Sadly, we have almost never actively “existed.” Perhaps this is because we have defined the probability space of the counterfactual incorrectly. Irrational Man opens by quoting a story once told by Kierkegaard:

A man who had been absent-minded about his own life knew of his existence only when he woke one sunny morning and discovered that he was dead.

What Camus called the only “truly serious philosophical problem” may also be understood as a counterfactual thought experiment: if we woke tomorrow morning and discovered that we were dead, how would we reach the root of our own existence? The impact of news about a plane crash comes from counterfactual reflection produced by the interplay between another person’s misfortune and human empathy. Whoever we are, whatever our gender or social standing, the counterfactual to our lives is neither “she is richer than I am” nor “he has a seaside vacation home on Maui and I do not.” Everyone alive shares the same counterfactual: On some morning touched softly by dawn and dew, you are no longer here. Whenever people contemplate their place in the universe through a hopelessly teleological lens, they marvel that life ever arose on Earth at all, since the slightest error in that cosmic process would have brought everything to nothing. If even the Moon’s “guardianship” of the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis had varied slightly, the existence of any life would have been hopeless. For every living being, every rainbow along the way has risen for it, the sun has burned for it, gravity has labored tirelessly for it, and atoms have assembled every building block for it. Yet the realization that “everything in life except birth and death is trivial” often lasts less time than the news that inspired it. Desire, fear, and greed drive humanity deep into an exceedingly narrow desert. All-powerful technology either tries to draw us into an illusion of existence or plans a panicked escape from a planet that humanity itself will destroy sooner or later.

Six The film Eternals uses immortal aliens to ask: if we never die, and if every rebirth comes at the price of erasing our memories, do we still have free will? Do we still “exist”? Karl Jaspers offered this answer: The instant is the unity of temporality and eternity; it carries an actual moment deep into eternal reality. In this unfocused age, a world that once believed itself omnipotent has suddenly encountered a succession of once-in-a-century events. Perhaps we should give up prediction and stop longing to return to the past. Perhaps we should turn away from the revelry of grand narratives and toward the seemingly insignificant fates of individuals, experiencing forms of existence long ignored and witnessing each one as an extraordinary counterfactual within the universe. In his book, Barrett draws particular attention to Buber’s argument:

The meaning of life arises only in the space between one person and another, where they enter a relationship in which one can always say “I” to the other as “you.” This is an idea worth exploring over an entire lifetime.

The turn in the river of time that you and I dimly perceive may be real, or history may simply have always been this way. If we still believe that seeking eternity is worthwhile, and if the proportion between the life of the universe and our own lives has already created a relatively eternal scene, then even if time itself may be an illusion, the following claim by Karl Jaspers may still deserve a hearing:

As long as I am alive, I must do everything in my power. Although I do not know what I may attain, I must act. Only a full today can give rise to tomorrow; if we do what lies within our power today, we may have a tomorrow.

As a psychiatrist and philosopher, Karl Jaspers believed that human existence cannot avoid division: the division between reason and emotion, soul and body, responsibility and desire. To me, this resembles the structure of a pair of scissors, or a bow whose drawn tension gives life its existential force. Jaspers believed that people can overcome and transcend their own divisions. The purpose lies not in succeeding, but in striving and thereby revealing self-knowledge. He said: “Only a person possessed of this active, dynamic reason can transcend the self. Transcendence means the future; it means eternity.”