I think the shrug response is ultimately the right one. In my 20s I lived in a hipster neighborhood and had perfected the 18-month-long torrid relationship. As I rounded 30 I probably could have continued that lifestyle indefinitely but I chose to marry, follow my fiancée to a small town, and start a family. Do I miss being able to walk two blocks to good Ethiopian food? Yeah, sometimes. But that doesn't mean my choice was a mistake. We make decisions that confine us but the art of good living is thriving where we've chosen to plant ourselves. Not to choose would be its own kind of big mistake.

I’ve been meaning to become a member for a little while, but this article triggered me so much I signed up just so I could comment on it. I just think this line of thinking is absurd. We live at the best time to be alive in human history. Maybe it’s because I’m American, but I think there are always opportunities in life. Each decision that we make will close doors and open others. Some decisions are very important and have incredible downside potential if we get them wrong. But, the idea that the average person in highly-developed countries routinely makes “unrecoverable” decisions is a massive overstatement.

The FT is only rated highly because it pays people adequate amounts to produce adequate journalism, thus achieving a higher standard than you can generally expect in the UK. I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t deserve its reputation for quality, but I would say that it mainly enjoys that reputation because the general standard of UK media is so low.
As for the topic at hand, who says you get to have a choice as to what you do with your life? The idea that you get to decide the direction of your life in a market capitalist economy is a cosy capitalist myth promoted largely by Americans (and your allies, eg the Brits) who, funnily enough, do more than any other group of people to restrict what everyone else can do with our lives.
If you now feel like the choice you were sold was an illusion all along, well, that’s only fair, seeing as how you’ve benefited from the illusion of choice and from trampling all over the freedoms of others. I don’t want to live on a planet where the vast majority of people live restricted lives to benefit a minority of wealthy people (including the relatively wealthy kottke.org-reading segment, ie me). So if you have to now suffer what you’ve long been comfortable imposing on others – isn’t that just? Accept it.

I guess I can see a lot of sides here. On the one hand, there is an awful lot of choice that is closed off to us, and yes, even in North America, by the circumstances of our birth, and that's worth acknowledging. We work within a certain set of constraints that we were lucky or unlucky enough to be born into. And even in North America those exist -- they're mostly but not exclusively class and race based. (But then, I suppose they are elsewhere, as well.) I had a friend in university who came from an extremely wealthy Indonesian family and who lived in a totally different universe than I did as a lower-middle class North American. But even she would be the first to tell you that her choices were also constrained by discrimination in her home country. (As someone ethnically Chinese, she was much less likely to go into, say, the arts or politics, than into business.) We are all born into a particular consideration set, and it's hard to tweak it. In the '90s and '00s in the U.S., if you were a "gifted" but not wealthy kid, you could still get into top universities, but even so your choices coming out the other end were very different than the kids born into different circumstances.

At the same time, even within the preexisting set consideration set I was born into, I've had the opportunities to make some very bad choices (which fortunately I dodged), and I've made some seemingly logical choices that turned out badly and are irreversible. I have made two decisions that decisively set my career back over the years, because I wanted to be in the same city as my spouse although there were no real career opportunities there for me. These decisions closed some doors emphatically, at least in my career, and no other doors magically opened. Are they "mistakes"? Not necessarily. Can they be learned from? Not necessarily. Are they irreversible choices that have diminished one major part of my life? Yes. But these are the choices that make up a life, for anyone anywhere, no matter what the circumstances you are born into.

Hey so, I've closed the comments on this — I think maybe the discussion got a little off track here.

While I feel it is important for everyone to keep in mind that their particular, often-unearned circumstances affect their decisions and the course of their lives, it's not that helpful to turn every conversation into a discussion about that. Moveover, it shouldn't be anyone's job here to police others about their privilege. If you have any concerns or complaints about specific posts or comments, my inbox is always open.

And as always, try to keep the community guidelines in mind while reading and choosing to respond.