We’ve all been there. It’s 3:00 AM, and you’re staring at the ceiling, replaying that one specific moment from seven years ago where everything went sideways. Maybe it was a breakup that gutted you, a job offer you turned down because you were scared, or a literal left turn that led to a car accident. You start playing the "what if" game. You imagine a version of yourself living in a different city, married to a different person, or holding a much heavier paycheck.
Honestly, the idea of if you had the chance to change your fate is the ultimate human siren song. It’s why movies like Back to the Future or Everything Everywhere All at Once hit so hard. We are a species defined by regret and the itchy curiosity of the unlived life. But when you strip away the sci-fi tropes, the psychology of wanting to rewrite your history is actually pretty messy. It’s rarely about the event itself and almost always about our inability to sit with who we are right now.
The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking
Psychologists call this "counterfactual thinking." It’s the mental habit of creating alternative realities to the ones we actually experienced. Dr. Neal Roese, a leading expert on the psychology of regret from the Kellogg School of Management, has spent years studying this. He suggests that regret is actually an evolutionary tool. It’s meant to be a teacher. If you feel bad about a past choice, your brain is trying to "program" you to do better next time.
But there’s a glitch.
Sometimes we get stuck in "upward counterfactuals." This is where we imagine a better outcome than what actually happened. "If I had just stayed in that relationship, I'd be happy now." This is often a lie we tell ourselves to avoid dealing with current loneliness. We assume that changing one variable would keep everything else the same, just better. Life doesn't work in a vacuum.
If you changed one thread, the whole tapestry unspools.
If You Had the Chance to Change Your Fate, Would the Outcome Actually Be Different?
There is a concept in behavioral economics known as "hedonic adaptation." Basically, humans have a base level of happiness. Whether you win the lottery or suffer a major tragedy, research (like the famous 1978 Brickman study) shows that after a period of adjustment, people generally return to their previous level of happiness.
Think about that.
If you went back and took that high-paying job in London instead of staying in your hometown, you’d probably be just as stressed, just as tired, and just as prone to existential dread within six months. The scenery changes. The "fate" feels different. But you are the constant.
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We often mistake "fate" for "circumstance." If you had the chance to change your fate by picking a different career, you might find that your inherent habits—procrastination, anxiety, or perfectionism—simply follow you into the new office. Change is rarely external. It’s a hard pill to swallow because it’s much easier to blame a missed opportunity than it is to look at our own character.
The Cultural Obsession with the "Second Chance"
Our culture is obsessed with the "Redo." Look at the gaming industry. The entire "roguelike" genre—games like Hades or Returnal—is built on the foundation of dying, learning, and trying again. You change your fate by iterating.
In real life, we don't get a respawn point.
This creates a specific kind of modern anxiety. Because we have so much "choice" today compared to our ancestors, we feel more responsible for our "fate." If you lived in a medieval village, your fate was basically decided by who your dad was. Today, if you’re unhappy, you feel like it’s because you made a "wrong" choice somewhere in the 2,000 forks in the road you've encountered since age 18. This is the "Paradox of Choice," a term coined by psychologist Barry Schwartz. More options don't make us freer; they make us more paralyzed by the fear of choosing the wrong fate.
The "Butterfly Effect" and the Risk of the Unknown
Let’s get a bit more granular. If you actually could go back and change one thing, you’d be engaging in a high-stakes gamble with your current existence.
Consider the people you love.
If you changed that "bad" breakup in your twenties, you never would have met your current partner. Your kids wouldn't exist. That specific friend you met because you were both miserable at a terrible job? Gone. When people say they want to change their fate, they usually want to "cherry-pick" the good parts of their current life while deleting the bad parts.
Nature doesn't allow for that kind of editing.
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There’s a real-world phenomenon called the "Stability-Plasticity Dilemma" in neuroscience. Our brains need to be stable enough to remember who we are but plastic enough to learn. If we were constantly changing our "fate" or our past, we would lose the narrative thread of our own identity. Our suffering, as much as we hate it, is the mortar between the bricks of our personality.
Why We Should Stop Resisting the Past
What if the desire to change your fate is actually a distraction from your "agency" in the present?
When you spend hours ruminating on if you had the chance to change your fate, you are effectively opting out of the only time where you actually have power: right now.
I’ve talked to people who have lost everything—businesses, marriages, health. The ones who thrive aren't the ones who wish for a time machine. They’re the ones who practice "Amor Fati," a Stoic concept championed by Friedrich Nietzsche. It means "love of fate." It’s not just about tolerating what happens to you, but embracing it. Every failure, every "wrong" turn, is seen as necessary fuel for your growth.
It sounds cheesy until you try it.
Instead of seeing a failed business as a "wrong fate," you see it as a brutal, expensive MBA that taught you things a classroom never could. That perspective shift is the only real way to "change" your fate. You change the meaning of the past, which changes the trajectory of your future.
How to Actually "Change Your Fate" Starting Today
Since we don't have DeLorean time machines, we have to use the tools available in 2026. If you are feeling trapped by your current "fate," you don't need to go backward. You need to pivot forward.
Fate isn't a destination; it's a momentum.
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- Audit your "Ghost Lives." Writer Cheryl Strayed once spoke about the "sister ship"—the life you didn't lead. Acknowledge it. Wave to it from the shore. Then, stop trying to board it. You can't live two lives at once.
- Identify the "Repeaters." Look at your regrets. Are they all about the same thing? If you regret three different breakups for the same reason, the problem isn't your "fate"—it's your pattern. You can't change the past, but you can break the pattern today.
- Practice Radical Acceptance. This is a pillar of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). It’s the practice of accepting reality as it is, without judgment or attempts to change it. Acceptance isn't approval. It’s just acknowledging that the "fate" you have is the only one that is real.
- Small-Scale Re-dos. If you regret not being braver in the past, find a way to be inconveniently brave this week. Ask for the raise. Send the awkward text. Start the hobby.
The Nuance of Regret
We have to be careful not to fall into the "everything happens for a reason" trap. That’s a platitude that often invalidates real trauma. Some things that happen to us are just objectively bad. There’s no "lesson" in some tragedies.
However, even in those cases, the obsession with changing the past can become a secondary trauma. It keeps the wound open. The only way to "change your fate" in the wake of tragedy is to integrate that event into a new version of yourself—one that is perhaps more fragile, but also more empathetic or resilient.
We are not victims of a pre-written script.
If you feel like your life is on the wrong track, remember that the "track" is something you’re laying down one tie at a time, every single morning. The "fate" you’ll be worrying about ten years from now is being created by the choices you make this afternoon.
Turning the "What If" into "What Now"
Instead of looking for a way out of your history, look for a way into your future. The energy it takes to maintain a "counterfactual" life is exhausting. It’s like running a program in the background of your laptop that eats up all the RAM.
Close the tab.
The most powerful thing you can do when thinking about if you had the chance to change your fate is to realize that you are currently standing at the beginning of a new one. Every second is a chance to deviate from the "expected" path. You don't need a cosmic reset button to change who you are becoming.
Actionable Steps to Shift Your Trajectory
- Write the "Alternative Bio": Write out the life you wish you had. Be specific. Then, look for the emotions in that bio. If that "other you" is "adventurous," find a way to bring adventure into your current life without needing the time machine.
- The 5-Year Rule: Ask yourself if the thing you’re regretting will matter in five years. If it will, what is one action you can take today to mitigate the long-term damage?
- Forgiveness Ritual: If your desire to change your fate stems from a specific mistake, write a letter to your younger self. Acknowledge that you were making the best decision you could with the information and emotional maturity you had at the time. Then, burn it.
Your fate isn't a cage. It’s a starting line. Stop looking back at the track you’ve already run and start looking at the open field in front of you. That is where the real change happens.