The Only Life You Have

"There was another life that I might have lived, but I am having this one."

— Kazuo Ishiguro

Context

Ishiguro said this in a 2017 interview after receiving the Nobel Prize, though versions of the idea run through everything he has written. His fiction is populated by characters undone by the life they imagine they should have had — the butler who suppressed his emotions for decades in service of a man who turned out not to deserve them, the clones who accept their fate with heartbreaking grace. The line reads like the conclusion they never quite reach. "I am having this one" is deceptively simple: not resignation, not contentment exactly, but something harder and more useful than either. It is the act of turning toward the actual, present life rather than away from it toward a version that never existed and never will.

Reflection Question

What "other life" do you return to most often in your thinking — a path not taken, a version of yourself that never came to be? And when you go there, what does it cost you in presence, energy, and attention to the life you are actually in?

Application Tip

For the next five days, when you catch yourself in a "what if" or "I should have" thought, don't suppress it. Instead, finish it: write down the imagined alternate life in one sentence, then write what this one has that the other never could. Not to prove a point but to look clearly at both. Most people find that the alternative life is mostly a fantasy constructed from selective memory. Ishiguro's characters never do this exercise. That is precisely why they suffer.