After writing my article Let’s Live, I remembered this book and returned to it, after a dear friend reminded me of it.

There is a question that visits most of us as we grow older, perhaps more often than we care to admit:

What if?

What if I had chosen a different field of study?

What if I had married someone else?

What if I had not left that job?

What if I had traveled when I had the chance?

What if I had said “yes” instead of “no,” or “no” when I said “yes”?

Two small words, yet they can open a door to an endless world of possibilities.

As I reread The Midnight Library by British writer Matt Haig, I realized that the entire novel is built, in one way or another, around those two words.

But to me, it is not really a novel about possibilities as much as it is a novel about regret—the strange human feeling that sometimes makes us suffer not because of what actually happened to us, but because of what we imagine might have happened had we chosen another path.

And that, I think, is where the brilliance of the idea lies.

Who Is Matt Haig?

Matt Haig is a contemporary British writer and novelist who has written fiction, essays, and books for children. Yet a significant part of his work has revolved around questions of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and the meaning of staying alive.

Perhaps his best-known book, alongside The Midnight Library, is Reasons to Stay Alive. Its title alone reveals much about the intellectual world that concerns him: Why do we continue living when life itself can sometimes seem meaningless?

For that reason, The Midnight Library, published in 2020, does not strike me as merely an ingenious fictional idea. Rather, it feels like an extension of a question that has pursued its author:

What makes life worth living?

The Story

The protagonist of the novel is Nora Seed, a woman who reaches a moment in her life when she feels that everything has failed.

Dreams have not been fulfilled. Relationships have ended. Opportunities have been lost. There are people she believes she has disappointed.

When she looks back, she does not see her life as we normally might—as a mixture of successes and failures—but as a long sequence of mistakes.

She reaches a point where she loses the desire to continue.

But in the mysterious space between life and death, she finds herself in an infinite library.

The Midnight Library.

Its shelves contain an infinite number of books, but these books do not tell the stories of other people.

They tell the stories of her lives.

Each book represents a life she could have lived had she made a different decision at some point.

If she had continued swimming.

If she had chosen another career.

If she had stayed with someone she left.

If she had moved to another country.

If she had pursued a dream she abandoned.

Nora is given something no human being is given in reality: the opportunity to enter these lives and discover what would have happened if she had chosen another path.

And that is where the real novel begins.

It is not so much a journey through parallel universes as it is a journey into the human psyche.

We Know Only the Road We Took

While reading, I stopped at an idea that I find deeper than the events of the novel themselves.

We judge the road we actually took with almost complete knowledge.

We know its failures, disappointments, pain, and costs.

But when we imagine the road we did not take, we usually imagine it through its most beautiful possibilities.

And this is where we can be profoundly unfair to ourselves.

We compare a complete reality with an incomplete fantasy.

We say:

If I had married that person, I would have been happier.

If I had accepted that job, I would have been more successful.

If I had traveled, I would have been wealthier.

But we do not know the other spouse in everyday life, the illness that might have come, the loneliness that might have accompanied success, or the loss hidden behind wealth.

We see the gains of the alternative life, but not its costs.

And this is why regret, although sometimes necessary for learning, can become a cruel mental deception:

We put our real life on trial against an imaginary life that was never tested.

The Tragedy—and the Privilege—of Being Human

Here I arrived at an idea that I believe lies at the heart of the novel for me:

The tragedy of being human is not that we live only one life, but that we can imagine thousands of lives we never lived.

An animal lives its life.

A human being lives a life while simultaneously imagining the lives he or she could have lived.

This is one of the sources of our brilliance, but also one of the sources of our suffering.

The imagination that creates art, science, and civilization is the same imagination capable of creating regret.

The consciousness that allows us to envision the future also allows us to reconstruct the past into something more beautiful than it ever could have been.

Kierkegaard and the Vertigo of Possibility

This led me to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who made anxiety a fundamental part of understanding human freedom.

For Kierkegaard, anxiety does not arise merely from fear of what will happen. It also arises from realizing that we could have chosen something else.

The more possibilities we have, the greater our freedom—but with it comes greater anxiety.

It is as if we stand before countless open doors, without knowing which one leads to the life we want.

The Midnight Library turns this philosophical idea into a physical place.

Endless shelves.

Endless books.

Endless lives.

At first, it seems like a wonderful dream.

But then the question becomes:

Is absolute freedom really a blessing?

Or does part of life’s value come precisely from the fact that we cannot live every possibility?

Sartre and the Burden of Choice

Then Jean-Paul Sartre places an even greater responsibility upon us.

In existentialist philosophy, a human being is not merely what has happened to them, but also what they choose to do with what has happened.

Freedom is not always a comfortable gift.

It is a burden.

Because choice means responsibility.

And whenever we say that circumstances alone created our lives, we may sometimes be trying to escape a more difficult truth: that, to varying degrees, we participated in creating them.

But I disagree with an extreme interpretation of this idea.

Human beings are not absolutely free.

We did not choose our birth, our families, our genes, our country, or our time. Economic, social, and political circumstances can impose very real limits upon us.

Yet within those limits, there remains a space for choice.

And perhaps human dignity exists precisely within that space.

Nietzsche and the Hardest Question

Nietzsche takes us to an even more demanding—and, at the same time, beautiful—test: the idea of eternal recurrence.

Imagine that someone tells you that you will live your exact life again, in every detail, with all its joys, mistakes, and suffering—and then live it again forever.

How would you respond?

Would you consider it a curse?

Or could you say yes to this life exactly as it was?

I do not read Nietzsche’s idea here as a physical theory about time, but as a philosophical test of our ability to affirm life.

And suddenly the question becomes entirely different from Nora’s question at the beginning of the novel.

Instead of:

Which other life should I have lived?

The question becomes:

Can I accept the life I have lived—and then continue creating what remains of it?

To me, that is the more mature question.

Is There Such a Thing as a Perfect Life?

With every life Nora experiences, we discover something simple and profound at the same time:

There is no path without loss.

The life in which you achieve success may be the life in which you lose something else.

The life in which you find love may contain a pain you never expected.

A choice that looks perfect from the outside may create an entire chain of consequences no one could have anticipated.

And here I believe the novel comes close to an important human truth:

Perhaps there is no perfect life.

Not because life is bad, but because life is complex.

Every choice is, at the same time, a surrender of another choice.

Every great “yes” in our lives contains within it a number of “no’s.”

And if we could live every possible life, we might lose the very meaning of choosing.

It is the limitation of life that gives it value.

The Limits of Life Are What Give It Meaning

Here I would take the novel one step further.

We usually regard the limitations of life as a tragedy.

We have one lifetime.

One body.

Limited time.

And we cannot go back.

But what if this very limitation is what gives life its value?

If we had an infinite number of lives ahead of us, we could postpone everything.

I will love you in the next life.

I will apologize in another life.

I will write the book later.

I will travel in another version of myself.

I will start the project in a parallel universe.

But because we have only one life, the present moment becomes valuable.

The words “I love you” matter because they may not be repeated.

An apology becomes necessary because time does not turn back.

A decision matters because we pay a price for it.

Mortality does not merely take meaning away from life; perhaps it is what gives life much of its meaning.

Acceptance Is Not Surrender

The book can easily be interpreted as an invitation to accept the life we have.

But I do not like that interpretation if acceptance means surrender.

I do not want a person to say: This is my life, and that is the end of it.

Coming to terms with the past is one thing. Giving up on shaping the future is another.

I can reconcile myself with my past choices while deciding to change my life tomorrow.

I can accept my mistakes without repeating them.

I can appreciate what I have achieved without losing the desire to achieve more.

So I believe the deeper message is not:

Be satisfied with what you have.

It is:

Do not allow what you failed to do yesterday to prevent you from doing what you still can do tomorrow.

And As We Grow Older…

Perhaps this is what touched me most personally in the novel.

When we are young, we ask:

Which life will I choose?

As we grow older, the question may become:

Did I choose the right life?

I believe both questions are incomplete.

No one knows at the beginning of the journey where it will end, and no one can return at the end to test the other roads.

Perhaps the wiser question is:

What will I do with the life that is still ahead of me?

A person is not merely their résumé.

Not the jobs they held, the positions they reached, the successes they achieved, or even the mistakes they made.

The self is not a museum of the past.

The self is an ongoing project for as long as life continues.

And this is where The Midnight Library connected, for me, with an idea that has occupied my thoughts a great deal lately:

To live is to strive.

To feel.

To love.

To learn.

To discover.

To change your mind.

To begin a new project.

To risk failing again if failure is the price of trying.

And to wake up in the morning with something in your mind that you have not finished yet.

The real danger is not that you chose the wrong path twenty or forty years ago.

The danger is convincing yourself today that there are no paths left.

The Library Within Each of Us

The Midnight Library in the novel is a fictional place between life and death.

But I believe each of us has our own Midnight Library.

It is called memory.

On its shelves are people we loved.

Opportunities we lost.

Doors we closed.

Words we said and wish we had never said.

Words we never said and wish we had.

Dreams that came true and others that remained on the shelf.

We can spend the rest of our lives wandering through this library, pulling out one book after another and asking:

What if?

But life is not inside the library.

Life is outside it.

Wisdom is not about erasing regret. Regret is part of consciousness, and it can be a great teacher.

But wisdom means not allowing regret to become a prison.

We should visit the past to learn from it, not to live there.

And I Closed the Book…

When I closed The Midnight Library, I felt that the novel had begun with death in order to speak about life.

It began with despair in order to arrive at possibility.

It began with the question:

Which life should I have lived?

But it left me facing another question, one I consider more important:

What will I do with the life that is still ahead of me?

Perhaps we did not choose everything that happened to us.

Perhaps we made mistakes in some of the things we chose.

Perhaps, if we could go back in time, we would choose differently.

But time does not go backward.

And perhaps the beauty of life is not in living every possibility, but in giving the possibility that became our life as much meaning as we possibly can.

We do not possess a magical library that allows us to experience the lives we never lived.

But as long as there is another morning, curiosity that has not gone out, a person we can still love, an idea we can still write down, work we have not yet completed, and a dream—small or great—that we have not yet abandoned…

there is still an open book.

And there is still a page that has not been written.

And as long as we can write the next page, the question is not:

Why didn’t I live another life?

It is:

How can I live this life… all the way to the final page?

The post Dr. Hossam Badrawi Writes for “Haarf”: The Midnight Library: Would We Have Been Happier If We Had Lived Another Life? appeared first on Dr. Hossam Badrawi.

Whenever I read a great novel, I do not ask only: What happened to its characters? I also ask: Why has it remained alive after the world in which it was written has changed?

Some novels survive because they tell an engaging story. Others survive because they document a bygone era. But the rare works endure because they touch something in the human being that does not change with the passage of time.

Among these works is Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

On the surface, it is an exceedingly simple story: an old fisherman goes out to sea alone, catches an enormous fish after a long struggle, and then, on his journey home, sharks devour it until he reaches the shore with nothing but its skeleton.

Yet great literature sometimes does what a drop of water can do when it reflects an entire sky. In this short story, we see an entire lifetime: dreaming, striving, loneliness, pain, dignity, triumph, loss—and then the hardest question of all:

Is a person’s worth measured by what he brings back to shore, or by what he becomes while struggling against the sea?

Hemingway… The Writer Who Simplified Language and Expanded Meaning

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 and lived a life that sometimes seemed like an extension of his own novels. He witnessed war, worked as a journalist, traveled, fished, sailed, and experienced adventure, danger, love, and loss. These experiences found their way into his writing, but what distinguished him was not simply the abundance of events. It was his way of writing.

He believed that a writer did not need to say everything. He compared his style to an iceberg: the small part visible above the water is only a fraction of the whole, while the greater mass remains hidden beneath the surface.

And so his language became economical and clear, almost free of ornament, while beneath its simple words lay deep layers of fear, pain, and meaning.

The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952, at a time when some critics felt that Hemingway’s literary brilliance had begun to fade. The novel became something of a major literary comeback. It won the Pulitzer Prize and helped reaffirm his stature before he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Perhaps the irony is that Hemingway wrote about an old man determined to prove that he was not finished, at a time when Hemingway himself needed to prove that his creative powers were not finished either.

For that reason, I find it difficult to completely separate Santiago, the old fisherman, from Hemingway, the writer. Both ventured into a sea of uncertainty, and both returned with a work declaring that age, or the setbacks of yesterday, do not mean that the capacity to create has died.

The Story

Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a single fish. In the village, some regard him as unlucky. Even Manolin, the boy who loves him and learns from him, is forced by his family to work with other fishermen who are more successful.

But the boy does not lose faith in the old man, and the old man does not lose faith in himself.

On the eighty-fifth day, Santiago decides to sail farther out than usual. He does not know what awaits him, but he knows that staying close to shore will change nothing.

There, in the depths of the sea, his line catches an enormous marlin, almost larger than his boat.

He cannot lift it, and it cannot break free from him. It pulls the boat far out to sea, and a long struggle begins—one that lasts for days. The old man’s hands become wounded, his body grows exhausted, and hunger and thirst intensify, but he refuses to let go of the line.

What is striking is that Santiago does not hate the fish. On the contrary, he admires its strength, beauty, and nobility. He speaks to it as though it were a brother or a worthy opponent. He loves it, yet he knows he must kill it.

Here, fishing becomes more than a struggle between man and animal. It becomes a confrontation between two forces bound together by a mysterious relationship of respect and pain.

At last, the old man succeeds in killing the fish. He ties it alongside the boat and begins the journey home.

It appears that he has won, that his days of bad luck are over, and that the village will finally see proof of his ability.

But the fish’s blood attracts sharks.

Santiago fights them with everything he has: first with his harpoon, then with his knife, then with an oar, and finally with whatever strength remains in him. He kills some and drives others away, but they keep coming. They devour the fish piece by piece until, by the time he reaches shore, nothing remains but its head, tail, and backbone.

The old man returns exhausted, carrying his boat’s mast on his shoulder. He climbs to his hut and falls asleep.

In the morning, the villagers see the enormous skeleton and realize the size of the fish he had caught. Manolin sits beside him and cries, then tells him that he will go fishing with him again.

As for Santiago, he sleeps and dreams of the lions he had seen on the beaches of Africa in his youth.

What I Took Away from The Old Man and the Sea

The first question the novel leaves in my mind is: Did Santiago return victorious or defeated?

If we judge by the logic of the marketplace, he lost. The fish that could have brought him money and status returned as a skeleton that could not be sold.

And if we judge by the outcome alone, everything he had endured at sea seems to have been wasted.

But I believe Hemingway wants to free the meaning of victory from the outcome itself.

A person does not always control what happens to the fruits of his labor. But he does control the way he confronts what happens.

He may succeed in catching his dream, only to have the sharks of life tear it apart before his eyes: illness, injustice, betrayal, an unforgiving era, or a twist of fate he cannot prevent.

And yet, there remains something the sharks cannot devour unless a person willingly surrenders it to them: his inner dignity.

That is why the novel’s central idea is that a person may be destroyed, but he cannot be defeated.

The difference between destruction and defeat is profound.

Destruction may come from the outside: a person may lose his money, his health, his status, or someone he loves.

True defeat, however, takes place within, when he becomes convinced that he is no longer worthy of trying, or when he allows loss to redefine who he is.

Santiago lost the fish, but he did not lose himself.

Old Age Is Not an Exit from Life

I also read the novel as a defense of the dignity of old age.

The villagers saw Santiago as a man whose time had passed. Eighty-four days without a catch seemed sufficient evidence that his experience was no longer valuable, that luck had abandoned him, and perhaps that he should accept his place on the margins of life.

But the old man did not go out to sea to deny his age. He went out to affirm that growing older does not erase a person’s capacity to strive.

He knew the limitations of his body and dealt with them consciously, but he did not allow weakness to become his identity.

This is a meaning that comes closer to me the older I become: the greatest danger in old age is not that the body loses strength, but that a person accepts the idea imposed upon him by others that nothing more is expected of him.

We often tell older people, with the best of intentions, “Rest. You have done enough.”

But life is not measured only by what we have accomplished. It is also measured by what still awakens in us the desire to get up in the morning.

Santiago was not alive merely because he was breathing. He was alive because he still had a sea to sail.

And the sea does not have to be water and ships for every person.

It may be a book he wants to write, knowledge he wants to acquire, a grandchild to whom he can pass on his experience, a cause he believes in, music he wants to play, or a love he wants to preserve.

What matters is that he still has a horizon that extends beyond the boundaries of his day.

The Sea Is Not the Enemy

I did not see the sea in the novel as a symbol of an evil world. I saw it as a symbol of life itself: beautiful and harsh, giving and taking, conspiring against no one and guaranteeing nothing to anyone.

Santiago loves the sea, even though he knows its dangers. He speaks of it as one speaks of a close companion. He sees birds and fish as fellow beings, not merely as tools for his survival.

Even the marlin he intends to kill is, in his eyes, a magnificent creature worthy of respect.

In this sense, the novel was ahead of its time in the way it portrayed the relationship between human beings and nature. Man is not the absolute master of the universe, but part of a larger web of life.

He kills in order to live, but he does not do so with arrogance or disregard. He understands that his victory over another creature carries within it an element of sadness and responsibility.

Perhaps Santiago’s tragedy began when he went beyond the boundaries of necessity into the desire to prove himself.

He himself wonders whether he has gone too far.

And here the novel opens an important moral question:

When does ambition become courage, and when does it become transgression?

Do we struggle for what we need, or do we struggle to prove to others that we are still capable?

The novel gives us no final answer.

And that is part of its greatness.

The Boy… The Continuation of Meaning

Manolin is not, in my view, a marginal character. He is an essential part of the old man’s victory.

Experience that is not passed on dies. And a person who finds someone who believes in him is never entirely alone, even when he sails by himself.

The boy saw in Santiago what the village did not.

He did not measure his worth by the number of fish he brought home, but by what he had learned from him.

And when the old man returned without the fish’s flesh, the boy returned to him.

It is as though the novel is telling us that the greatest thing Santiago left behind was not his catch, but the human being he helped shape.

Here, Manolin becomes a symbol of the continuity between generations.

The body grows old and strength declines, but experience, love, and courage can pass from one generation to the next.

Perhaps immortality does not mean that we remain, but that something of us remains alive in another person.

The Sharks of Life

The sharks in the novel are real, but they also work as a symbol of everything that devours the fruits of our efforts after they have finally come to fruition.

Every person has his own sharks.

And sometimes the cruelest ones are not the great catastrophes, but the small, successive losses that eat away at a dream piece by piece, while its owner watches it diminish and cannot save it whole.

Yet Santiago continues to fight even when he knows he will not be able to preserve the entire fish.

That may seem irrational according to the logic of profit and loss, but it makes perfect sense according to the logic of dignity.

He does not fight because he is certain he will win. He fights because he wants to remain faithful to what he believes in until the very end.

This, in my view, is one of the novel’s deepest meanings:

Not every battle we fight is one in which victory is guaranteed. Some battles are worth fighting because not fighting them would make us less respectful of ourselves.

And yet, we should not glorify pain for its own sake.

The old man is not great because he suffered. He is great because he was able to give his suffering meaning.

Suffering alone does not elevate a person. It may crush him.

What elevates him is what he makes of it, and what he discovers about himself through it.

Why Was The Old Man and the Sea Ahead of Its Time?

Because it understood early that modern man would live in a world obsessed with measuring worth by outcomes:

How much did you earn?

How much do you own?

How many people applauded you?

What did you bring back to shore?

Hemingway, however, asks a different question:

How did you make the journey?

In an age when success has become a quick image displayed before others, the novel reminds us that some of our greatest victories are witnessed by no one.

A person may reach the shore carrying nothing but the skeleton of his dream, yet discover at sea his courage and his limits, and prove to himself that he did not abandon himself at the first sign of pain.

The novel was also ahead of its time because it did not present a superhuman hero.

Santiago is poor, old, and alone. He becomes tired, makes mistakes, and talks to himself.

His heroism does not lie in possessing extraordinary strength, but in resisting despair with whatever little strength remains to him.

That is a more human form of heroism than all the myths, because it is accessible, in different degrees, to every one of us.

What Remains in the End

At the end of the novel, the fish is gone. The struggle is over. Even the admiration of the villagers fades.

What remains is the old man asleep, the boy beside him, and an old dream of lions.

The lions are a memory of his youth. But in my view, they are not simply a longing for strength that has been lost.

They are a sign that part of the human spirit remains young, no matter how heavily time weighs upon the body.

A person does not live by biological age alone, but by whatever remains inside him of wonder, desire, and imagination.

Santiago went out to sea to catch a fish, but he returned with a greater truth:

We cannot always prevent life from taking many things away from us. But we can decide whether it will take our self-respect along with them.

The sharks devoured the flesh of the fish, but they could not erase its size.

Its skeleton remained on the shore as testimony that the old man had not imagined his adventure, and that what he had accomplished was real, even if nothing remained of it that could be sold.

This is how I see The Old Man and the Sea:

It is not a novel about catching a fish.

It is about the human being standing alone before something more powerful than himself, knowing that he may lose—and pulling on the line anyway.

We do not always choose the sea.

We do not choose the size of the fish.

Nor do we choose how many sharks will come our way.

But until the very last moment, we can choose how we hold the oar.

And perhaps that is the only victory no one can ever take away from us.

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