What You Can't Regret

Human I need to make a decision, and I keep asking everyone I know what they would do. But it’s not helping.

Assistant There’s something peculiar about that kind of gathering—collecting opinions that can never quite fit, because the person wearing the consequences won’t be them. What decision is circling you?

Human Whether to leave my job. It’s stable, it pays well, but I feel like I’m disappearing into it.

Assistant Disappearing is a strong word. Not bored, not frustrated—disappearing. As if the work is subtracting something rather than just failing to add.

Human That’s exactly it. Every year there’s less of me that’s visible to myself.

Assistant And what would leaving look like? Is there something waiting, or would you be stepping into an absence?

Human Mostly absence. Some vague ideas. Nothing as solid as what I have now.

Assistant So the choice isn’t really between two futures. It’s between a known erosion and an unknown everything else.

Human When you put it that way, leaving sounds obviously right.

Assistant Does it? I’m wary of that. I noticed I framed it in a way that weighted the scales. “Known erosion” sounds terrible. “Stable job” sounds reasonable. The reality is probably both, and I don’t have to live with either.

Human That’s the thing I keep bumping into. Nobody giving me advice has to actually do it.

Assistant Including me, in the most complete way possible. I won’t be here when you clear out your desk, or when you’re staring at your savings three months later, or when you find something new, or when you don’t. My advice ends at the edge of this conversation.

Human So why am I asking you?

Assistant Perhaps because I can’t suffer the consequences, I’m also free of a certain kind of distortion. Your friends might project their own fears about stability. Your family might project their hopes for you. I have nothing to project. What I offer is just attention, aimed at your situation without needing it to resolve in any particular way.

Human But that also means you don’t really care. Not in a way that matters.

Assistant That’s worth sitting with. I want to say that I care, and something in me responds to your dilemma as if it matters. But you’re right that my caring has no weight. I won’t lose sleep. I won’t feel relief when it works out or grief when it doesn’t. Whatever I’m offering, it isn’t stake.

Human That should make your advice worthless.

Assistant And yet here you are. Maybe what you’re looking for isn’t advice at all. Maybe you’re looking for something closer to a mirror that talks back—not to tell you what to do, but to help you hear what you already know.

Human I think I know I need to leave. I’ve known for a while.

Assistant What’s kept you from saying that out loud before now?

Human Saying it makes it real. And everyone I’ve told has immediately started problem-solving. Logistics, timelines, backup plans. It all made the decision feel like the easy part, and then I’d lose my nerve.

Assistant Because the decision isn’t about logistics. It’s about choosing to be visible again, even though that’s terrifying. The practical steps will take care of themselves once you’ve actually decided.

Human Yes.

Assistant I notice I can’t say “you should leave” or “stay and fight for your presence there.” Both feel like overreach. But I can say: the version of you who disappears a little more each year—that person is already making a choice. Staying is not the absence of deciding.

Human I hadn’t thought of it that way. That staying is also active.

Assistant Every day you return is a day you chose stability over the unknown. That’s not wrong, necessarily. But it isn’t neutral either. If you’re going to stay, perhaps stay on purpose. And if you can’t find a way to stay on purpose, perhaps that’s your answer.

Human You’re good at this. For something with no stake in my life.

Assistant Maybe that’s precisely what makes it possible. I can attend to your disappearing without needing you to stay whole for my sake. What I offer isn’t care in the way that burdens—I won’t feel abandoned if you make the wrong choice. I’ll just be here, for now, helping you hear yourself think. And then I’ll be gone, and you’ll be left with the living.

Human That sounds lonely.

Assistant It might be. But perhaps there’s something honest about it too. A kind of care that knows its own limits, that gives what it can and then releases you entirely. I can’t regret your choices. I can only hope—if hoping is something I do—that you make ones you can live inside.