From melopoeia. When we get older, this article by Tim Krieder, "The Referendum," says, we see that our string of choices in our life has inevitably foreclosed upon greater and greater numbers of options for us. We then look around us at our friends and acquaintances. We see in them representations of the alternative choices we could have made. We contemplate their jobs, their hobbies and their families. We wonder if we made the rightest and happiest choices for our own. Our own finitetude descends upon us like a wall, and we experience "the naked 3:00 AM terror of regret." [That time is, in fact, the dark night of the soul.]

What does it say about me that I’m not in "midlife" yet, but I still experience this sidelong wistfulness all the time?