Actually, that's not entirely accurate.
I think about the people I could have been.
Not because I'm unhappy with the person I am now, or because I'm sitting around regretting every decision I've ever made.
It's more fascinating than that.
Throughout our lives, we make thousands upon thousands of decisions, and every once in a while, one of those decisions quietly eliminates an entire future that could have happened.
Sometimes we know we're making one of those decisions.
Other times, we probably don't realize it until years later.
And sometimes, we'll never know.
There's the version of you who took the other job.
The version who went to a different school.
The version who moved away.
The version who stayed.
The version who said yes to something you declined.
The version who said no to something you accepted.
The version who went somewhere that night.
The version who stayed home.
Every one of those decisions potentially creates another timeline.
And yes, I've watched enough Dragon Ball Z in my lifetime that naturally my brain eventually turned this into Future Trunks.
Because that's essentially what we're talking about here.
These aren't necessarily completely different universes where nothing resembles the life you're living now. They're timelines that were exactly the same as yours right up until they weren't.
That's the part I find fascinating.
If I could somehow get all these different versions of myself into the same room and sit us around one giant table, how many of them would I immediately recognize?
Not physically.
Presumably we'd figure that part out pretty quickly.
I mean their lives.
Would one of them tell me his story and leave me thinking, There is absolutely no way I would've ever done that?
Or would I hear about the one decision that sent him in a different direction, listen to everything that happened afterward, and eventually say:
"You know what? Yeah. I could see it happening that way."
Because every version would still have started as me.
We'd have the same childhood. The same family. The same experiences right up until whatever point our timelines separated.
What happens after that?
That's where it gets interesting.
One of the easiest alternate versions of myself to imagine branches off somewhere around high school.
I was never planning on going to college.
It wasn't something I agonized over and eventually decided against. In my mind, I already knew I wasn't going. And once I got toward the end of high school and knew I had the credits I needed to graduate, I absolutely took my foot off the gas.
Could I have applied myself more?
Absolutely.
Could I have pushed myself academically, tried to build a better transcript, applied to colleges and seen where that took me?
Sure.
There's a version of me somewhere in this imaginary collection of timelines who probably did exactly that.
But the version who actually existed looked at college and saw one enormous obstacle:
Money.
And yes, I know the obvious response.
"You could've taken out student loans."
I knew that then, too.
But anyone who knows me knows how much I hate having things unfinished.
I'm the kind of person who wants notifications cleared, loose ends tied up and obligations completed.
Give me a massive debt that I know I'm going to be paying a little bit at a time for years and years, and that thing is going to live in the back of my mind until the balance finally says $0.
I know people who were still paying off their college loans 15 years later.
That was never something I wanted hanging over me.
So the logic in my teenage brain was remarkably straightforward:
If I don't go to college, I don't need a student loan.
And that's exactly what happened.
I never went to college.
I never took out college loans.
I never had college debt.
And all these years later, I'm financially doing just fine for myself as a single man.
Do I regret that decision?
No.
But that's not really the point of this exercise.
I want to meet College Jerome.
What if somewhere toward the beginning of high school I had decided that I absolutely wanted to go?
Immediately, that version of me probably approaches high school differently.
Maybe he doesn't take his foot off the gas.
Maybe his grades are better.
Maybe he applies to several schools.
Maybe he gets accepted somewhere.
Then what?
What does he study?
What career does that eventually lead to?
Where does he work?
Where does he live?
And maybe most interestingly:
Who does he know?
How many people in my life right now are also in his?
That's what I'd want to ask him if we were sitting across from each other at that table.
And after he told me his entire story, would I eventually look at him and think:
"Yeah. I could've been you."
Then there's another version of me that is considerably easier to picture.
He's still working at Big Y.
Before I started working for TSA, I had a job that I liked.
It wasn't going to make me rich, but it checked several boxes that have always mattered a lot to me.
It was in the town where I lived.
It was pretty much a straight shot from my house.
I could get there in less than five minutes.
I liked the people I worked with.
I knew the environment.
I was comfortable.
And I've always valued comfort, convenience and functionality more than squeezing every possible dollar out of something.
I'm never going to be the person who voluntarily doubles his commute to 40-plus minutes every day just to make a little more money.
Eventually, that commute is going to wear me down enough that I'm dreading it every morning, and whatever extra money I'm making isn't going to magically give me those hours back.
So when another job opportunity started getting pitched to me, even though it came with a significant pay increase, I wasn't immediately interested.
My cousin was dating someone whose father worked in a higher-up position at TSA, and he spent roughly six months trying to convince me to apply.
And I kept thinking:
Why?
I like where I am.
I'm comfortable.
I'm five minutes from home.
I like who I work with.
Unless something drastically changes here, I'm staying.
And then something drastically changed.
There was one particular manager I really liked working for, and he left.
At the time, I couldn't even tell you definitively whether he quit, got fired or transferred.
The story was that he transferred to another store, and all these years later I'm still not entirely sure what happened.
What I did know was that he wasn't my manager anymore.
And the environment changed.
Suddenly, that comfortable job wasn't quite as comfortable.
Which completely changed the equation.
Before, I was comparing:
Less money + extremely comfortable environment
against
More money + completely unfamiliar environment.
Now I was comparing:
Less money + potentially uncomfortable environment
against
More money + potentially uncomfortable environment.
Well, if I'm going to be uncomfortable either way...
I might as well make more money.
So I finally took the offer.
And I've now been there for 18½ years.
But I can very easily see the timeline where that manager never leaves.
And if he doesn't leave, maybe I never do either.
One of my friends from that job has now been with the company for 24 years and is a department manager.
It's not difficult at all for me to imagine another version of myself working right alongside him all these years later, except I'm a department manager in some other part of the same store.
Put that Jerome across the table from me and have him explain his life:
"I never left. Eventually I became a department manager. I still work with him. Work is still close to home. I'm comfortable. I make enough money. Why would I leave?"
And Current Jerome would probably have to respond:
"Yeah. That sounds exactly like something I would do."
But there's an incredibly strange full-circle element to the timeline that actually happened.
Years after I left Big Y and started working at the airport, I began seeing someone walking around who looked incredibly familiar.
Eventually I realized why.
It was that manager's son.
We never interacted.
But he looked so much like his father that every time I saw him, I was essentially looking at a walking reminder of the reason I was standing in that airport in the first place.
His father stopped being my boss.
That helped make my old job uncomfortable enough for me to finally consider something else.
That something else brought me to TSA.
And now, years later, his son was walking through the place where that decision eventually took me.
It's almost like the alternate timeline briefly brushed against the real one.
That's where this thought experiment gets stranger.
Because some alternate versions of ourselves don't necessarily exist because they went to a different school or took another job.
Sometimes the same things could happen to two versions of you, and they simply learn different lessons from them.
There's probably a version of me who became completely obsessed with climbing the ladder.
Call him Career-at-All-Costs Jerome.
Maybe he starts out genuinely believing that if he works harder than everyone else, his hard work will inevitably be noticed and rewarded.
Then he learns something that most people eventually discover:
Hard work matters.
But hard work alone doesn't guarantee anything.
I've watched people get promoted whom I've worked alongside for years, and based purely on what I knew about their actual work ethic, I wouldn't have considered them anywhere near the most qualified person available.
But maybe they knew the right people.
Maybe they presented themselves particularly well to the people making the decision.
Maybe they had the right connection at exactly the right moment.
That's a harsh reality of life.
The hardest worker isn't guaranteed to get the job.
So what if another version of me learns that lesson and responds:
"Fine. Then I'll play the game."
He starts networking relentlessly.
Every person becomes a potential connection.
Every task becomes an opportunity to be noticed.
Every relationship starts getting evaluated according to what it can do for him.
He gets promoted.
Then promoted again.
And eventually maybe he develops a worldview that Current Me would find horrifying:
People are replaceable parts of a machine.
They're useful until they aren't.
Relationships become transactional.
If someone can do something for him, they're worth keeping around.
If they can't, why bother?
Basically the Owen Shaw philosophy minus the whole drug trade, arms dealing and human trafficking thing, they always spruce up the movie villains.
I would shudder at that version of myself.
But that's exactly why he belongs at the table.
Because if he were completely alien to me, he wouldn't be interesting.
What makes him unsettling is the possibility that he could walk me through every decision that created him and I could understand the logic.
Maybe I wouldn't like where he ended up.
But I might understand how he got there.
And eventually I'd have to admit:
"I can see how I could've become you. I'm just incredibly glad I didn't."
He's different.
Career-at-All-Costs Jerome at least has an objective.
He's working constantly because he's chasing money, status, influence or another promotion.
Work-Is-Life Jerome?
This guy apparently just wants to be at work.
I've known people who reach the end of the year with "use or lose" annual leave.
They earned paid time off.
They have too much of it.
Their employer is essentially telling them:
"You can stay home and we're still going to pay you."
And somehow they give it back.
They would rather work.
If there's a version of me sitting at that table trying to explain why he voluntarily surrendered paid time off so he could go to work instead, Current Jerome is going to look him directly in the eyes and say:
"Tell me exactly where our timelines diverged, because I need to make absolutely certain I never make whatever decision created you."
Then there's another version who might be just as horrifying for completely different reasons.
People-Pleaser Jerome.
This version wants everybody to like him.
Everybody.
He never wants to ruffle feathers.
He wants to find the bright side in absolutely everything, including situations where there genuinely isn't one.
Someone could ruthlessly kick a dog for absolutely no reason and People-Pleaser Jerome would somehow be standing there saying:
"Well, obviously I'm not defending what he did, but maybe we don't know what kind of day he was having..."
Current Jerome:
"HE KICKED A DOG."
That's the extreme I'm talking about.
Not optimism.
Not trying to see the best in people.
There's nothing wrong with either of those.
I'm talking about being so desperate to maintain harmony that you start manufacturing excuses for things you don't even agree with because disagreement creates the terrifying possibility that someone might not like you anymore.
And maybe that version of me has more "friends."
But how many of those friendships are real?
If you're constantly adjusting yourself according to the person standing in front of you, eventually everybody likes some version of you.
But does anybody actually know you?
And maybe People-Pleaser Jerome doesn't remain that way forever.
Maybe eventually reality gives him an experience he simply can't explain away.
He works hard and isn't rewarded.
He's kind to someone and they take advantage of it.
He gives someone every possible benefit of the doubt and they prove him wrong.
He discovers that some people aren't going to like him regardless of what he does.
And suddenly the person who was eager to change the world discovers:
The world was going to change him first.
But even that creates another branch.
Maybe he becomes more realistic while remaining kind.
Maybe he develops boundaries.
Maybe he becomes cynical.
Maybe he becomes Career-at-All-Costs Jerome.
Maybe he decides that if relationships aren't guaranteed to be reciprocal, he'll make sure he always gets more from them than the other person does.
The exact same thing could happen to two versions of me, and both could walk away having learned completely different lessons.
That's another timeline.
And this is where I have the perfect physical representation of everything I'm talking about.
My photo album.
I've taken pictures with countless people throughout my life, and if you pulled one of those pictures out and handed it to me, chances are I could tell you the story behind it.
Who the person is.
Roughly when it was taken.
Where we were.
How we met.
And probably how we got from meeting each other to eventually taking that picture.
Because most of those pictures didn't just happen.
Nobody came knocking on my door saying:
"Jerome, I'd like to be in your photo album."
There were certainly a few situations where somebody else initiated taking a picture, including people I probably never would've worked up the nerve to ask myself because I didn't think we were "on that level."
But a lot of those pictures exist because I asked.
And even the way I ask is probably another tiny timeline branch.
I'm much better at making an elaborate request in writing than I am face-to-face.
If I'm looking somebody in the eyes for too long, eventually I start feeling like they're staring directly into my soul.
And if I'm trying to build toward a request in person, I'm also watching every facial expression and every bit of body language.
If I convince myself they're already leaning toward saying no, there's a decent chance I'll abort the mission before I even finish asking.
Writing is different.
I can put the entire thought together.
I can explain exactly what I'm asking.
I can hit send.
And now the complete request exists before I have the opportunity to talk myself out of making it.
That's how quite a few of those pictures happened.
People whom, looking back, weren't necessarily major recurring characters in my life.
We knew each other.
I got enough of a confidence boost to ask.
They said yes.
Click.
Another picture enters the timeline.
I still don't believe I actually have said picture.
I then double check, and boom, it's actually there, because it actually happened.
Now imagine Back to the Future.
Except instead of Marty McFly watching his siblings disappear from a photograph, I'm sitting there flipping through my album while changing decisions from my past.
What happens if I go to college?
How many pictures disappear?
What happens if that manager never leaves Big Y?
Maybe I never work for TSA.
Now how many pictures disappear?
An entire page?
Several pages?
People I've known for 15 years suddenly start fading out of photographs because the event that caused me to meet them never happened.
And the weirdest part would be watching people disappear whom I never would've associated with that original decision.
Change one thing.
That changes another thing.
Which changes another.
Eventually:
There goes that picture.
But some pictures survive.
Maybe that friendship existed before the branch.
Big Y Manager Jerome still knows that person.
TSA Jerome knows that person.
College Jerome somehow still knows that person.
Several wildly different versions of me all have the same photograph.
Those people become almost like fixed points in the timeline.
And now let's take this one step further.
Every Jerome at the round table brings his own photo album.
College Jerome opens his.
I don't recognize half the people.
"Who's that?"
"My college roommate."
Never met him.
Big Y Manager Jerome opens his.
There are people he's worked alongside for 20 years whom Current Me has never seen before.
Then I open mine.
"You seriously don't know this person?"
Half the table:
"Nope."
And now we start tracing it backward.
"Okay, I met them through work."
"Which job?"
"TSA."
"Oh. I never worked there."
There it is.
That's where the timelines split.
Maybe Career-at-All-Costs Jerome recognizes someone in my album but says:
"I haven't spoken to him in fifteen years. There wasn't really anything either of us could do for each other anymore."
And every other Jerome at the table just stares at him.
"Dude."
Maybe People-Pleaser Jerome somehow knows everybody.
Of course he does.
And maybe Work-Is-Life Jerome is missing pictures that the rest of us have simply because while we were out living our lives, he voluntarily went to work.
But the strangest part isn't the pictures missing from their albums.
It's the pictures in their albums that aren't in mine.
People I've never met.
Vacations I never took.
Places I've never visited.
Friendships I never had.
Events I never attended.
Entire groups of people who could have been incredibly important to me and whose names I will never know because the sequence of events necessary for us to meet never happened.
Somewhere in all those futures that never happened are entire photo albums I'll never get to see.
Obviously, mine.
I'm the one writing this.
But every Jerome sitting around that imaginary table would say exactly the same thing.
College Jerome doesn't spend his life thinking he's Alternate Jerome.
Big Y Manager Jerome doesn't wake up every morning wondering what Main Timeline Jerome is doing at TSA.
Career-at-All-Costs Jerome probably thinks I'm the idiot.
Work-Is-Life Jerome probably can't understand why I take so much time off.
People-Pleaser Jerome is desperately trying to make sure everyone at the table likes him.
Each one lived a sequence of events that made his life feel completely normal.
And that's why I wouldn't want this imaginary meeting to become a competition over which one of us "won."
Maybe another version makes more money than I do.
Maybe another has something I wish I had.
Maybe another made a decision I occasionally wonder about.
But I don't know what else came with it.
Maybe I'm looking at College Jerome thinking:
"I wonder what my life would've been like if I'd done that."
And he's looking directly back at me thinking:
"You mean you never had student loans?"
Maybe Big Y Manager Jerome looks at 18½ years of my TSA career and wonders whether he should've taken the chance when it was available.
And I'm looking at his five-minute commute thinking:
"Man, that would've been nice."
Nobody gets everything.
And nobody gets to see all the other timelines before choosing one.
We just choose.
Sometimes deliberately.
Sometimes accidentally.
Sometimes without even realizing there was a choice.
And then we live with whatever comes next.
Somewhere behind me are countless futures that never happened.
Some I'm curious about.
Some I'm probably better off without.
Some might have been wonderful.
Some might have been disasters.
Some might have eventually circled around and looked surprisingly similar to the life I'm living now.
There are versions of me at that imaginary table whom I would probably envy.
There are versions I'd pity.
There are versions I'd find fascinating.
There are versions who would probably drive me absolutely insane.
And there might be one or two where I'd listen to their story, slowly realize exactly how I could've become them, and think:
"Thank God that timeline didn't happen."
But eventually the meeting ends.
Everybody takes his photo album.
Everybody goes back to his own timeline.
And I'm left with mine.
I can open it and see the people who actually entered my life.
The places I actually went.
The friendships that actually happened.
The moments where I worked up enough courage to ask someone for a picture.
Every photograph represents a chain of events that somehow survived every branching point necessary to create that exact moment.
I can wonder about the pictures College Jerome has.
I can wonder who's standing next to Big Y Manager Jerome.
I can wonder how depressingly small Work-Is-Life Jerome's vacation section is.
But I can't see those albums.
They don't exist.
This one does.
And every picture inside it is evidence of the future that actually happened.
The strangest part is that somewhere ahead of me are countless more futures that haven't been eliminated yet.
There are people I haven't met.
Pictures I haven't taken.
Decisions I haven't made.
Some of those decisions will feel enormous when I make them.
Others might feel completely meaningless.
And twenty years from now, I might be able to look at a photograph and trace everything backward to something I did tomorrow without giving it a second thought.
Eventually, all but one of those futures will disappear too.
I just don't know which one I'm creating yet.
I think I may have just scratched the surface on this one, one day I might revisit this topic.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read this!
Until next week!
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