There’s a case to be made, from things like Google search figures, that Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken – you know, the one about two paths diverging in a wood – is the most popular in modern history. (It recently turned 100; that wood is probably a Starbucks now.) Yet people still can’t agree what it means. On the surface, it’s a fridge-magnet cliche on the importance of taking risks and choosing the road less travelled. But many argue it slyly mocks that American belief in the individual’s power to determine his or her future. After all, the narrator admits that both paths look roughly similarly well-travelled. And how could he be sure he took the right one? He’ll never know where the other led. Looking back at our life histories, we tell ourselves we faced important dilemmas and chose wisely. But maybe only because it’s too awful to admit we’re stumbling mapless among the trees, or that our choices don’t make much difference.
Two psychologists, Karalyn Enz and Jennifer Talarico, throw light on these matters in a new study with a title that nods to Frost: Forks In The Road. They sought to clarify how people think about “turning points” versus “transitions” in life. A turning point, by their definition, is a moment that alters your future – deciding to leave a job or marriage, say – but often isn’t visible from the outside, at least at first. “Transitions” involve big external changes: going to university, marrying, emigrating. Sometimes the two go together, as when you move to a new place and realise it’s where you belong. (“New Yorkers are born all over the country,” Delia Ephron said, “and then they come to New York and it hits them: oh, that’s who I am.”) But it’s turning points we remember as most significant, Enz and Talarico conclude, whether or not they also involve transitions.
The distinction is useful: it underlines how the most outwardly obvious life changes aren’t always those with the biggest impact. Hence the famous “focusing illusion”, which describes how we exaggerate the importance of single factors on happiness: you switch jobs, or spouses, only to discover you brought the same troublesome old you to the new situation. Before it became a joke, “midlife crisis” referred to a turning point that happens because your circumstances don’t change, when your old life stops feeling meaningful. Turning points can be triggered by mundane things – the offhand remark that makes you realise you’re in the wrong life – or by nothing at all.
If, that is, our decisions really matter to begin with. In an entertaining recent book on The Road Not Taken (“the poem everyone loves and almost everyone gets wrong”), David Orr argues that Frost is intentionally ambiguous on that. The poem isn’t a trite homily about seizing your destiny. But nor is it a warning that it’s pointless to try. Rather, it’s both: a reminder that we must grapple with seemingly crucial decisions, and that they might not matter, and we’ll never know if we chose well. Oh, and not to be a downer, but nobody gets out of those woods alive anyway.
• oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
