After Anna Karenina
Tolstoy had finished his masterpiece and hidden every rope in his house. The successful version of him wanted to die. He spent the next thirty years figuring out why.
Tolstoy hid the ropes from himself at fifty-one. He had finished Anna Karenina two years earlier and was the most famous novelist alive.
He could not understand why the achievement had not held. He had written what was already being called the greatest novel ever written. He had a wife, thirteen children, a country estate, a name that traveled further than any Russian’s. None of it explained what he was supposed to do on Tuesday morning. The question that arrived in his head and would not leave was the simplest one. What is it for?
He documented the year in a thin book called A Confession. He gave up hunting because he was afraid he would shoot himself by accident on purpose. He carried the rope from the room where he undressed each night so that he would not hang himself from the beam.
A Misallocated Scoreboard
In 1995 Cornell psychologists Tom Gilovich and Vicki Medvec published a paper in Psychological Review that has been replicated in different forms for thirty years. They asked subjects to list their largest regrets. In the short run, people regretted the things they had done. In the long run the proportions inverted.
The actions you took could be explained, justified, integrated into the story of your life. The actions you did not take stayed open. They kept the door cracked on a version of you that never showed up.
Tolstoy at fifty-one was looking at the actions he had completed. He was not looking at the cathedral of unbuilt selves that surrounded them. The crisis arrived because his ledger was incomplete. He had been keeping the wrong books for decades.
What the Dying Talk About
Bronnie Ware spent eight years as a palliative care nurse in Australia in the 2000s. She sat with people in the last weeks of their lives, often the last hours. The same five regrets surfaced over and over.
I wish I had had the courage to live a life true to myself. I wish I had not worked so hard. I wish I had had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish I had let myself be happier.
Notice the absences. Nobody on the list regrets a smaller company or a shorter resume. Every regret named is internal motion that was within reach the whole time and was never taken.
Tolstoy at fifty-one was reading the same list from inside himself, thirty years early.
The Five-Year Self
The temptation when you read research like this is to make the deathbed your judge. To imagine yourself ninety and assemble the life that would survive the audit. Death is a poor coach for the living. It compresses too much of the long arc into a single horizon.
The better coach is yourself in five years. The five-year version of you can still write you back. He can still tell you which sentences he wishes he had said out loud at this dinner, this morning, this argument. He is close enough to be honest and far enough to be free of the panic.
Mark Manson likes to say that values are what you have been willing to suffer for. The future self is built out of what you walked through, not what you imagined.
Three Things to Try
Audit the Tuesdays. The crisis arrives on a Tuesday morning when no emergency is filling the empty space. List the last three Tuesdays in your calendar. Were you alone with yourself for an hour? Did you do anything that the five-year version of you will remember? If no, the Tuesdays are the leak. The weekends never were.
Keep an inaction list. Once a quarter, write down the conversations you have been avoiding, the friendships you have let go cold, the line of work you keep flinching from. The list is the obstacle map. The smallest item on it is your weekend.
Make one internal motion non-negotiable. Pick one thing per quarter. The phone call with the friend you have been quiet with. The honest sentence you have been swallowing. The exit from the room that has been killing you slowly. Log the count. The accumulated number is the only ledger that will read true later.
Numbering the Days
Tolstoy lived through 1879. He spent the next thirty years giving away his copyrights, working a plow alongside the peasants of his estate, falling out with the Russian Orthodox Church, and writing books that almost no one finished. His wife thought he was unwell. His country thought he was a saint. He thought he was finally living.
The line he kept returning to in those years was from Psalm 90, Moses’s prayer about the brevity of a life. Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.
The days you do not number, you spend.