You Can't Have Every Life | The Fear of REGRET & The Fig Tree

September is here, fall is creeping in, and what better way to welcome the season than with a spooky story… before getting existential about our entire lives?

In this episode of The Sensationalist, Britton Rae opens with a strange and unsettling story to kick off the month before diving into one of the most universal fears we have: regret. How do you know when you’ve made the right decision? What happens when choosing one life means permanently leaving another behind? And how do you stop wondering if the life you didn’t choose might have been better?

Britton talks about the uncomfortable truth that every choice comes with the loss of another. There will always be another path, another possibility, another version of your life you could have lived. The goal isn’t to find the choice that guarantees you’ll never wonder... it’s learning to choose the thing you can’t possibly imagine spending the rest of your life wondering about.

Britton also discusses Sylvia Plath’s “The Fig Tree” and the haunting metaphor of standing beneath a fig tree filled with every possible life, knowing that choosing one means watching the others wither away.

A little spooky, a little philosophical, and very much about the terrifying business of being a person who has to choose.

Welcome back to The Sensationalist, hosted by Britton Rae.