I often have two dreams, back-to-back.

In the first, I’m four years old. Everyone, in a packed room, is looking at me and the two empty seats next to me.

“Just choose two people,” a voice says, seeming to vibrate through my skull. Three best friends. Two open seats. Three best friends. Two open seats. Three best friends. Two open seats. I leave my birthday party and sit outside alone, on a staircase. This is my earliest memory.

In the second, I am on a kayak, slowly proceeding through a muddy river, approaching a spike-covered tree resembling the titular throne in “Game of Thrones.”

The water to the right of the tree seems too shallow for my bright blue vessel, while the area to the left is laden with green sludge, so I approach the tree, admiring its texture, its color, until I wake up, angry at my indecision in both instances.

Fall, in general, seems to echo these two dreams. As the school year starts, we live in a world with infinite choices and finite time and mental energy. I know I’ve spent hours testing different configurations of classes, clubs, and general guides to life, all of which seem to narrow by June.

Now, as a senior, I am tackling a lot more choices, which in my mind, are the worst choices. College choices. Everything, from where and whether to apply early, to which of my too many common app essays to refine and which to scrap, to where every single comma should be placed or replaced.

As I take schools, essays, and punctuations off the table, I feel in a very real way that I’m taking away some hypothetical future me’s, who decrease in number by the second.

I’m always worried that the happiest Joshes have been gone for a while, maybe since four year old me ran out of his birthday party.

But then I ask myself a question: What does it mean to say one future version of me is better than another version? More specifically, what metric should I or anyone use? How can the versions be compared?  For example, would it be possible to say that the version of me who chose to apply to College X will be better than the version of me who chose not to apply to College X?

Of course we can’t make perfect predictions, but let’s imagine we have sophisticated enough models that do let us make those sorts of predictions.

Here’s the issue we’ll run into: concepts like “good” only make sense concretely when one is looking at the past. In the words of my favorite philosopher, Kierkegaard, “Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards.” We can reflect on the past because the past is finished, giving us a natural reference point––the present––and allowing us to say, “x was good,” which really means “x was good according to now.”

But the future extends infinitely, meaning there’s no natural stopping point. Ergo, it doesn’t really make sense to say, “x will be good”––because there’s no point of evaluation. I could say, “x will be good when I die,” providing an arbitrary stopping point for reflection, but if I care about all time equally, which I personally do, then there never is a stopping point for evaluation.

Nevertheless, we can make inferences about general trends. That’s what allows us to answer the question whether we should eat yogurt or salad for lunch. But for big, complicated questions, we can’t really make those sorts of inferences.

This means that when applying to college, choosing classes, and doing countless other intricacies, we should just release the pressure. We should understand that the choices we make will make us the people we will become but will not make the universe better or worse, at least not in ways we can comprehend.

With this in mind, we ought to go forward, not striving for optimality, not competing against ourselves or anyone else. Instead, our intuition, our inferences should be our only guides as we paddle through muddy rivers towards trees, chairs, and college.