Sometime in the early 2010s, the neo-Tuscan aesthetic became the official filter of the upper-middle-class Southern Californian suburbanite. It was inevitable that, at some point, you would be dragged beneath the faux-marble columns of the Cheesecake Factory, which seemed to be embedded in every typical American shopping mall. The malls themselves had vultures circling above as they sat in proverbial economic hospice, right before online shopping put the entire nation into its cart.
You sit in the dimly lit Egyptian-revival dining area, in a booth so large you have to waddle across it on your knees just to sit down. Before even looking at the menu, you get your hands on the complimentary bread. You spare the white loaf only to completely kill off the enigmatic brown bread, which nobody ever knew the name of.
The menu arrives.
Weighing as much as a 10-pounder bass, with dimensions of the novel War and Peace. You began flipping through this caloric scripture, one continuous, non stopping, heart stopping, artery clogging page after another.
Warm crab dip?!?!... Pasta Da Vinci?!?!... WHAT THE HELL IS A SKINNYLICIOUS® MENU?!?!
The twenty-page, 250-plus-item menu sparks a momentary existential crisis. Look at all these options! What if I choose the wrong type of salad?... What if this is my only chance? …CAESAR OR COBB?... If I get the Caesar, I will get fat. If I get fat, nobody will ever love me. Then I will die alone. Death? What happens when I die?.... Clearly, God is also too busy deciding what he wants at the Cheesecake Factory, because if he were present, there would not be this much evil in the world. But if there is no God, there is nothing after all of this. If I die, will I even remember that I went to the Cheesecake Factory?.... OH MY GOD, I AM GOING TO DIE SOMEDAY.
While the miniature Tchaikovsky living inside your skull conducts an orchestra of panic, the highly underpaid teenage waiter stares at you, pen in hand; you just smile. Your own mother, embarrassed to have a son who just lost a battle over what choice of carbohydrate he wanted, interrupts the awkward bout of silence, “Oh, I still think we need a few minutes to decide.”
“The Cheesecake Factory Effect” is not really about cheesecake. I was just hungry when I started writing this… But it is an excellent minimodel…or perhaps a SkinnyLicious® model of the human condition.
Before you order, every entrée is still available, and therefore every entrée is still capable of being perfect. The moment you choose, one meal becomes real, and the other 249 become meals you will not eat. Call it Schrödinger’s Menu
This is actually pretty comical when the options are calories. It becomes utterly dreadful when the menu is your life.
Every career you choose excludes careers you might have lived. Unless you're polygamous, the one person you marry implies you will never walk down the aisle with anyone else… well, unless you’re my parents and file for divorce…
The idea that your only chance of finding a “soulmate,” “perfect person,” or “true love” on Tinder or in your hometown is statistically improbable; we can live in realities where you could have loved other people. For example, I guarantee you walked past your soulmate while waiting in line at the DMV, and you never met them.
One of the menus I have recently been forced to reopen contains two main dishes I have been salivating over for the long three years of my young adult life. Should I prolong my Army career or cut it short and become a journalist? The thought itself creates a whirlpool of anxiety about both futures. But as a deadline approaches, both realities become too colorful, and the anticipatory grief metastasizes. I imagine the newsroom I will not enter or the stories I will not report, or I imagine the soldiers I will never have the pleasure of meeting, the mission I will never get to participate in. Your eyes suddenly gain clarity at the moment of decision; it plagues, paralyzes, and eats at your very soul, which itself is in the early stages of necrosis.
Both realities contain things I love. Some things I love, I will also lose. In the moment of decision, we must come to terms with and maturely grieve what may be lost.
Now, obviously I didn’t invent the wheel by explaining this. The dizziness of anxiety has been described and studied by plenty of philosophers. Some dead Danish guy named Søren wrote a book titled Either/Or, where he describes the term “Angst,” which essentially means fear and panic rooted in anxiety. I believe he describes it perfectly in this segment of his work.
“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it… whether you hang yourself or do not, you will regret both.” -Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. Edited by Victor Eremita. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 1992.
Aside from Kierkegaard, other psychologists and philosophers also describe a similar problem. In his 1890 book, Principles of Psychology, William James gives the reader a laundry list of all he would like to be: handsome, wealthy, athletic, philosophical, philanthropic, adventurous, fashionable, and in the same fashion as me, Brody Sinutko, irresistible to women. However, James understood that all those characters could not “keep house in the same tenement of clay.” To make oneself actual, he wrote, the others must be suppressed. The poet Sylvia Plath explored the consequences of not choosing in her famous passage from her novel, The Bell Jar. She described her choices in life as figs growing from a tree; she could not pick one without losing the others, so she watched them all wrinkle, fall, and rot.
I am not claiming to have discovered that choices have consequences; people have known that since that one dame ate that apple offered up by that talking snake and just had to screw it up for everybody. What interests me is the feeling when directly confronted with the menu of life, and the anticipatory grief you are forced to address in that split-second decision. Anxiety is vague and inherently just a guess; grief is the acknowledgment of a loss.
Identity is normally described as something a person builds over time. We accumulate memories, lower-back pain, achievements, relationships, humiliations, opinions, and experience, and somewhere along the way we become a unique individual.
However, identity is primarily influenced by subtraction rather than accumulation. Age has an inverse relationship with potential: as we inch closer to death, the door of potential slowly closes. Every decision deletes millions of versions of ourselves that were once possible. We become somebody by sacrificing our ability to become everybody. Economists call this opportunity cost; philosophers have spent centuries making it more depressing. Everything we choose carries the cost of every alternative we reject.
This may explain why sacrifice is considered virtuous across many of the world’s major religions. To sacrifice is to consciously surrender potential. Martyrdom in some fashion is inevitable in life; one possible self must die so another may live.
In Christianity, Jesus Christ sacrificed his earthly life, along with every future that his life might have contained, to redeem man from sin. Self-sacrifice is revered amongst nearly all cultures because it requires a person to confront loss and bid farewell to their potential. It requires a person to gaze into the deep green eyes of mortality while still faced with the primordial fear of mother death’s embrace. Sacrifice is valued when someone accepts the death of every possible future in the hope that something greater than the self may survive.
Ultimately, this way of thinking has changed how I fear loss. Imagine the totality of your life as a block of marble containing thousands of possible sculptures. Each chip away of the chisel is a decision. Once the stone is removed, it cannot be glued back together. Yet, only by eliminating every other shape that block of marble could become, Michelangelo could create the Pietà. Our lives are sculpted through the accepted loss of possibility. The loss and sacrifice of marble gifts the statue its beauty.
My chronic ADHD causes me to daydream at least every 30 minutes. In high school, I would walk into class, hear the teacher begin talking. The yapping session would soon turn into what the teachers from Charlie Brown sound like, trumpets and all. My mind would immediately escape into endless grandiose narratives in which I was already a successful journalist. I could imagine the articles I would publish and the late-night talk shows I would be on after publishing them. I could live in the metropolises of New York City, San Francisco, London, and Vienna. I could escape into nature, living in a cabin somewhere in Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Brokeback Mountain…
Every editor would congratulate me, give me a gold star sticker and a cookie. Every editor would be so starstruck by how flawless my work was; they would point out how I did not lack brevity or sound incoherent in my writing like they normally would. This is the potency of potential; if unregulated, it will be the death of you. As we age, the soul gradually builds a tolerance to daydreaming; eventually, even it knows we are running out of time. This explains my theory about why I see so many bitter old people.
Unrealized potential is analogous to straight-up mental heroin. Its momentary pleasure never actually has to amount to anything material, because material things can fail. The business you never started became a Fortune 500, and now you are reliving every normie 20-year-old white guy’s favorite movie, The Wolf of Wall Street. The bombshell chick you never approached at that Acai bowl place is still your soulmate. Possibility is perfect because it is unrealized.
Hence why I’ve started to daydream about how I’m going to split child custody with my future ex-wife, who I haven't even met yet…
This does not mean potential is worthless. Potential is necessary to our development; it provides us with the ability to experience life in both the present and the future. We begin life with abundant potential, and it gradually decreases until we kick the bucket.
Within that life, we are given the freedom to choose our own adventure and ad-lib most of it. As we walk through life, the paths we take close others for good, but they also carve new paths. We mark our own route to the destination, even though all paths ultimately lead to death. That trail, created from birth to death, is our life’s potential actualized.
The truth about freedom and free will is that we are ultimately forced to make a decision, and, in my opinion, it is better to choose a life quickly rather than live one imagining all we could have become.
Once we recognize the choices we did not make as dead realities, we begin to feel the panic and dizziness that Søren Kierkegaard felt. Possibility at first creates anxiety; most, if not every person, has felt existential dread as they lie in bed at 1:00 a.m. and the melatonin isn’t working. Anxiety, however, is a vague confrontation with plausible futures. Rather, when we confront a decision head-on, that anxiety becomes grief as we anticipate the deaths of every other unrealized future. We then enter a state of anticipatory grief for each possible life now waiting for the electric chair, eating its last meal our decision has just delivered. By choosing, we become mourning executioners of our own possible selves. We allow one version of ourselves to live only by delivering the others to death.
I am using the term anticipatory grief in a philosophical context. Normally, anticipatory grief is felt before an expected loss, often before someone dies; usually this happens with cancer or dementia patients. What disappears is not the inevitable loss of a person but the loss of a possible self.
The grief feels real, so much so that even if you made the objectively wise choice, something worth loving will be gone. I can choose the right career and grieve all the others that interested me as a child. I can marry the right woman and mourn the nights I had where I wouldn’t always be too hot under the bed sheets. Even choosing the correct decision can induce grief, because choosing one valuable life does not make every rejected potential life worthless.
The existence of anticipatory grief is evidence that at least one or many possible futures contained some personal element of value to you. While loss is naturally scary, we must learn to accept it as our only means of progressing through life. Without loss, we can not continue forward; therefore, we truly have nothing to fear when leaping into the abyss.
The only person capable of creating my identity is also the person capable of killing every alternative identity; that person is you. The tragedy and beauty of life is that every day we bury our own graves.
At first I wrote that freedom was an entity holding a gun to our heads and forcing us to choose which version of ourselves should be shot next. I still like the image, but it identifies the wrong gunman. Time is the gun. A decision will be made no matter what, in part because not choosing anything is just as much a decision.
Freedom and free will are real, though often misunderstood. They do not give us the power to preserve every future. Rather, it lets us choose which losses become ours.
Most decisions are not as irreversible as they initially appear; most of the time, things are never as big or scary as they seem. Careers change. Relationships end. You get fat. But no man ever steps in the same river twice. I may become a journalist after the Army, but I cannot become the journalist who never joined. I don’t look back in anger. The Army may have given me a more empathetic outlook on the world than a college-educated version of me may never have. If I spend my time in the military and then become a journalist, I will have a unique outlook and knowledge custom-tailored to my life and experiences: Institutional knowledge, the diverse set of people I have gotten to meet, and places to look for stories where I otherwise wouldn’t have thought to search. Loss, being a fundamental law of life, is not all tragic. The death of realities gives way to opportunity.
All of us, every day and for every decision we make, must summon our black-masked executioner and mourn what once would become, now no more. I would like to add that I imagine my executioner to be a tiny Robespierre living inside my skull, committing a constant reign of terror on myself with a tiny guillotine.
Not every possible self is executed by that very person. We as humans are all victims of circumstance, some more than others, of course. Grace should be given not only when judging another person, but also yourself. Poverty, disability, race, prejudice, illness, war, family obligation, and good R&G are all factors that act as tragic chisels which sculpt our lives. In an effort not to come across as tone-deaf, as an upper-middle-class white kid from Southern California, I have no grounds to stand on here. Ultimately, the loss that many people experience from their exterior and surroundings also creates the same chisel effect on who you were as a person, chipping natural impressions to your sculpture.
Throughout my fun-sized educational career, I was embedded in nearly the entire spectrum of American education, from actual special-education classes to the supposedly renowned club of neurotic, egotistical yet self-loathing, mirror-kissing students known as Advanced Placement. This allowed me to become a Steve Irwin–like figure, observing almost every available species of student. From my field research, I have concluded that work ethic is a horseshoe.
On one end is the procrastinator. On the other is the perfectionist. They hate each other.
The perfectionist sees the procrastinator as a lazy, unambitious waste of oxygen. The procrastinator sees the perfectionist as a pompous lunatic who thinks a grade point average is a personality. Yet bend the horseshoe far enough, and they nearly touch tips. Both are terrified of converting a perfect possibility into an imperfect reality.
The procrastinator says, “I could write an incredible essay tomorrow.” As long as the Sun never sets or rises for the next day, the essay remains Pulitzer Prize-winning.
The perfectionist starts but never finishes. Every sentence is a placeholder, because declaring the work complete would kill all the unrealized superior versions that might have been written with one more revision. Submission is a long, drawn-out Viking funeral down a river. Once the essay is turned in, it stops being an infinitely improvable object.
Modern society has profited off of selling possibility. Dating apps keep your next one-night stand one swipe away, then hidden behind a paywall. Streaming services give us tens of thousands of stories at the tap of a button, and then we spend hours scrolling through the catalog and never find something to watch. Self-improvement culture assures us that we can always looks-maxx, as long as we remember to practice our daily routine of bone-smashing, smoking meth, oh… and most importantly, drinking coconut water; eventually, even you will achieve your dream physique! But don't forget…you can always look better; just buy the newest influencer $100 course. Hell, even the government says that Gen Z will “totally benefit”... from paying into… Social Security… that we “totally” will “receive” one day…That’s potential, folks!
The horseshoe explains the paralysis spurred by the fear of failure. Possibility is something that people seek comfort in. If the given project remains unfinished, the project is undefeated. The person who could have written a great philosophical essay is protected from the person who actually wrote a shitty, drawn-out soapbox about how actions have consequences and that decisions are hard to make. Although sounding bleak, it can also be recycled to interpret a beautiful metaphor for life. Because we only run out of potential when we die. Until death, failure is not final.
The question is obvious. If loss is an intrinsic part of life and identity, then how am I supposed to cope with all the things that I have lost?
To cope, we could pretend that anything unrealized never mattered; people do this all the time. They are the crowd of preachy people who declare everything happens for a reason, that the chosen life was obviously superior, and that every alternative would have ended in taxes, divorce, colonoscopies, and death.
Alternatively, some people live their whole lives as necrophiliacs for what could have been; digging up their own unrealized graves and fornicating with them. We could compare our actual spouse with an imaginary partner who never gets on your nerves. You could imagine your actual career compared to one containing only meaningful work. We compare our real body with the Chris Bumstead level physique we absolutely would have achieved if that one high school PE coach with a missing finger he has in a jar on his desk (Looking at you, Mr. Ferdette…) had recognized our great genetics. This comparison to realities that never actualized is the most dangerous outlook, and drives people to live bitter, regretful lives.
Regret isn’t always wrong; in fact, a psychologist should probably screen you if you’ve never felt remorse or regret. Sometimes we really did screw the pooch. Sometimes we hurt somebody; We commonly betray our principles. Understanding that implicit loss is a guaranteed experience in life is not a hall pass to treat others poorly. If a decision can and should be repaired, repair it. But ultimately we should learn as much as we can from loss, from our failures and mistakes. We must take time to admire the beauty of these scars that sculpt our statue.
But eventually, the teenage waiter returns with more of that mysterious complimentary brown bread and a bad case of puberty. Hurry up! It is a dictate of life that, eventually, you must close the menu and choose your dish.
Mourning is normally generated by the memory of something once cherished. In this case, it is generated by the potential of something that would have been cherished. It just so happens that our minds naturally perfect possibility. The moment we choose one meal, the other 249 menu items become Michelin-worthy dishes that you must reject; the solution? Pick one and accept that those other dishes may have been enough to resurrect Anthony Bourdain (RIP), back from the dead.
Slow down in life and take note of what matters to you in the things you miss out on, not only in food, but in every other aspect of life as well. We have limited time here on this Earth; we can’t try everything on the menu; we do get the option to savor the aroma and salivate over the taste; we get the ability to remember what we loved and what we lost, and we can learn what we want in the future. I am certainly not one to preach to the choir about being neurotic; I am probably just as neurotic as Grover from Sesame Street. But I can confidently say that I am far less annoying to take to a restaurant than I used to be.
Close the menu, choose your dish, and eat before the chefs go on their cigarette break and your food gets cold.
