The life I would not trade

I am watching Dark Matter, and one idea in the series has stayed with me after turning off the television. Two versions of the same man live with the consequences of different choices. One Jason Dessen pursued an extraordinary scientific career. The other built a family with Daniela and became a professor. When those lives collide, the professionally successful man wants the family life the other has built.

There is something unsettling about that reversal. What might look, from the outside, like a life spent falling short of one’s potential becomes precisely the life someone who fulfilled that potential wishes he had.

Taken literally, though, the series’ metaphysics does not hold up. It asks us to imagine the paths not taken as other realities in which different versions of us go on living. From the standpoint of classical philosophy, that is impossible: reality is one, and our choices take place within it. The lives we might have lived are possibilities we can imagine, not parallel worlds our decisions bring into existence. In that sense, Dark Matter may not make metaphysical sense. Still, it offers a valuable perspective on choice: when there is only one life in which to act, our decisions deserve all the seriousness and feeling we can give them.

It is easy to imagine the paths we did not take. In those lives, we usually give ourselves more money, greater recognition and better opportunities. We rarely imagine, with the same care, what we would have needed to lose along the way. The alternative life arrives fully formed, its achievements visible and its costs conveniently hidden. We compare it with our actual life, where we know every difficulty and everything still left unresolved.

Watching the series, I find myself thinking about the life I have today. Being able to wake up and make breakfast for my children. Being with them in the morning, seeing them again at lunchtime, working from home and taking part in the everyday life of our family. None of this would make a particularly impressive success story. Yet few things give me as much joy.

What I value is the chance to share a life as it happens. To hear whatever they feel like telling me at that moment. To know their days because I am part of them. To build a relationship during the hours when nobody has arranged anything special.

Those hours are not always idyllic. There is tiredness, repetitive work, unfinished tasks and moments when several people need us at once. Work still requires concentration. A home with children has needs that do not wait for a convenient moment. Some days, keeping things in balance takes effort, and patience runs out before the responsibilities do.

Even so, it would be strange to judge a life solely by how comfortable it makes us. Many of the things we value most ask something of us. Family asks a great deal, with a regularity that cannot depend on enthusiasm. We have to care again, listen again, make time again, even after a poor night’s sleep or a difficult day. Love becomes very concrete when there is something that needs doing for someone.

That is how a shared history takes shape. Meals happen again, familiar gestures repeat themselves, and children grow up with us there. One day, what seemed like routine has become their memory of the home they grew up in. We, too, are changed by having lived those days with them.

I think this is where Dark Matter touches on something that professional success cannot resolve. A relationship has a history. The intimacy between two people depends on what they have lived through together, what they have learned about each other and the difficulties they have faced. Even if someone could step into an already established life, they would still be missing the time that made it possible. Those bonds belong, in part, to the days in which they were formed.

Money is enormously useful. It provides security, solves problems and can free up time. Good work can be fulfilling and allows us to care for the people who depend on us. I know that being able to work from home and share these moments is a fortunate circumstance, and I am grateful for it. Precisely because I recognise its value, I find it difficult to accept a definition of success that cannot account for it.

When someone gives priority to family, we readily say they gave something up. Sometimes they did. An opportunity was declined, progression was slower, or their income could have been higher. But pursuing a career can also require sacrifices, and those do not always appear in the account of someone’s success. Time is limited in either life. We decide where to give it, and those decisions gradually shape who we become.

In family life, I find a kind of fulfilment that involves the whole of me. There is the body that grows tired through caring and also finds comfort in an embrace. There is the attention we learn to give, the pride that needs to yield, the patience we still need to learn. Spiritually, it does me good to have particular people to whom I owe time and care. My life becomes larger than my own plans.

Perhaps that is why a full life can sometimes be a tiring one. The joy of belonging to a family lives alongside the effort of caring for it. On some days, we feel one more strongly than the other. That does not diminish what we are building.

Watching Dark Matter, I think above all about how fortunate I am to recognise this wealth while I am living it. I do not need to know every career I might have had to understand the value of being here. The life I have takes work, brings worries and is far from perfect. But it contains the people with whom I want to spend my days.

Tomorrow, making breakfast for my children will be an ordinary task again. It is one of the parts of my life I would not trade for all the success in the world.