The old woman sits by her window in the fading afternoon light, hands folded neatly in her lap. Shadows from the lace curtain play upon her face as she gazes at a photograph on the wall – a captured moment from decades ago. In her eyes lies a distant, haunted tenderness: the look of someone communing with ghosts of the past. She has been dutiful all her life, obedient to expectations, generous to a fault. Family, faith, country – she served them all without question, spending decades checking every box of responsibility. Now, in the stillness of old age, regret seeps in. The silence of her tidy living room is heavy with all that she sacrificed and all that she did not do. She thinks of the art career she set aside because a “good woman” put family first; the quiet wish to see the ocean just once, surrendered to the demands of work and frugality. In the window’s reflection, she sees not only the wrinkles and white hair, but the outline of a young dreamer she once was. A lifetime of obedience and delayed dreams has brought her to this moment – a reverie of what-ifs tinged with the sorrow of opportunities that will never return. She wonders, was it worth it? The question lingers unanswered in the hush of the room.

The Best Minds in the Wasted Marketplace

I returned to the United States in my late twenties, fresh from two years teaching in rural China. I carried with me a sense of purpose and wide-eyed optimism – after all, I had done everything “right.” I had earned my degrees, traveled to broaden my perspective, and honed my skills abroad. But the home I returned to did not open its arms with opportunity. Instead, I found myself grading SAT essays for barely above minimum wage, packed into a temporary scoring center with dozens of other over-educated and underemployed strivers. It was humbling, even surreal. Here I was, red pen in hand, evaluating high schoolers’ formulaic five-paragraph essays on The Scarlet Letter, while seated around me were people of extraordinary ability whose talents were being squandered in this rote assembly-line job.

In my row sat a former U.S. Fulbright scholar, fluent in Arabic, who mentioned she had an interview with the CIA next week. Across from me, a quiet older man – who I later learned was an aerospace engineer who had worked on systems for NASA – meticulously clicked through essay after essay. Next to him was a PhD chemist designing polymer experiments in her head while mechanically scoring student writing to pay the bills. All of them – brilliant, overqualified, with resumes that in a just world should have opened every door – were pressed into this Kafkaesque exercise of standardized testing drudgery. We had done what society asked: pursued higher education, collected credentials, stayed “efficient” and compliant. Yet here we were, casualties of an economy that didn’t know how to use us, in a culture that seemed content to watch its best minds waste away in the name of optimization and credentialism.

During breaks, I would chat with these colleagues, marveling at their expertise and wondering how on earth they ended up here. The truth was painfully simple: our society increasingly treats human capital as cheap and interchangeable, worshipping at the altar of efficiency while mismanaging human potential. The Arabic speaker told me she took this gig to make rent while waiting on security clearance – “Just following the process,” she sighed. The engineer had been laid off in a corporate merger; “I was too expensive,” he said wryly, referring to his decades of experience. The chemist had left academia when funding dried up and was stuck in endless postdoc limbo. Each story was a variation on a theme: talent thwarted by a system fixated on immediate returns and formal qualifications, blind to actual ability and passion.

I began to sense that something was deeply broken. It was as if an entire generation of highly trained people had been sold a promise – work hard, get educated, follow the rules, and you will find security and success – only to find that promise hollow. The assembly line of essay scoring suddenly felt like a grim metaphor: creative minds constrained to assign prefabricated scores, as life’s richness was reduced to a number in a box.

I carried this uneasy realization out of the scoring center and into the broader world. The pattern was everywhere. Friends with master’s degrees working as baristas because every entry-level job “required 5 years experience.” An adjunct professor with a Ph.D. driving Uber on weekends because her teaching barely paid a living wage. A brilliant poet I knew retraining in coding because the only path to stability was thought to be in tech. It struck me that we live in a society perversely comfortable with wasting its human treasure. We hail “meritocracy”, yet so often reward compliance over creativity, networking over knowledge. We preach that education is the key to a better life, yet treat educated workers as disposable.

The realization hit me hardest one gray evening as I left work: I saw the future that awaited many of us if we continued to play by the rules of this game. It was a future of quiet desperation, the very thing Thoreau warned of long ago – “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” – a future in which extraordinary potential is muted in service of systems that value only what can be measured and controlled.

The Cost of Obedience and the Myth of Safety

How did we get here? To understand, I had to look back at the economic story that shaped our lives. My parents came of age in the 1970s, an era when a summer job could cover a year’s college tuition. That sounds like a fairy tale now. In the early 1970s, the average price of public college tuition was about $1,400 per year; today, that price tag has exploded to over $22,000 for in-state students. Even adjusting for inflation, the cost of a degree has skyrocketed far beyond what previous generations faced – in real terms, the annual tuition and fees in the 1960s were under $5,000 (today’s dollars), whereas now it’s well over $14,000. The result? Millions of young people forced to take on debt for the “privilege” of an education that was once attainable with modest means.

I was one of those young people. Like most of my peers, I signed the dotted line on student loan documents at 18, not fully grasping that I was shackling my future self to a financial anvil. We had been raised to believe that taking on debt for college was a prudent investment in oneself – a necessary obedience to the system’s rules for success. We also assumed, naively, that if life went awry, one could always start fresh. After all, American law has long provided a safety valve for those crushed by debt: bankruptcy exists to offer a second chance. But here lay a cruel twist – unlike almost every other kind of debt, student loans were slowly and deliberately crafted to be undischargeable. Until 1976, education loans were treated like any other unsecured debt and could be wiped away in bankruptcy court. But that year, Congress – spooked by unfounded tales of students abusing the system – enacted the first restrictions, barring young graduates from clearing their school debt for at least five years after repayment began. Over the ensuing decades, the noose tightened: the waiting period was extended to seven years, then in 1998 it was removed entirely, meaning student loans could no longer be discharged at all absent extreme hardship. Finally, in 2005, even private student loans (once dischargeable like credit cards) were placed beyond the reach of bankruptcy relief.

The upshot is stark: a student who dutifully borrows to gain an education now carries that debt for life, in sickness or in health. No matter what misfortune befalls them, there is almost no escape. In the eyes of the law, college debt is a sin for which there is no forgiveness – a lifelong penance for the crime of trying to learn.

Contrast this unforgiving stance with how our society treats its most powerful financial actors. In 2008, when the financial industry’s reckless gambles brought the economy to its knees, it wasn’t individual bankers who paid the price. Instead, the U.S. government rushed in with a $700 billion bailout – the Troubled Asset Relief Program – to rescue the very institutions that had caused the disaster. The Federal Reserve opened the spigots of emergency funding, extending trillions in low-interest loans to banks and corporations deemed “too big to fail.” By one estimate, the Fed’s total commitments during the crisis reached as high as $7.7 trillion to prop up the financial system.

Think about that: while a 25-year-old cannot discharge a $50,000 student loan even through bankruptcy, a titan of Wall Street whose bad bets cost the world billions can watch the Federal Reserve conjure $7 trillion to save their firm’s balance sheet. We live in a world where corporations are granted mercy and second chances as a matter of course – they restructure debt, lobby for government relief, receive taxpayer-funded lifelines – but individuals who followed the prescribed path of self-improvement are denied the same grace. The moral calculus we’ve institutionalized is perverse: the larger and more abstract the actor, the more readily we forgive their failures; the smaller and more human, the more we demand their suffering.

This double standard carries a profound psychological cost. For those of us raised on the ethos of obedience – do well in school, get into a good college, trust the system – the realization that the “system” will not protect you is a bitter awakening. We were, in a sense, sold an illusion of safety. We believed that institutions cared – that universities priced tuition fairly, that banks offered loans in good faith, that employers would reward dedication with stability. Instead, we found that obedience often led us into traps. The obedient student accumulated debt they could not later shed; the obedient employee gave their youth to a corporation that would downsize them in a heartbeat to bump the stock price by a quarter of a percent. Meanwhile, those who took wild risks – the speculators, the executives who played fast and loose – often walked away unscathed, or even richer (golden parachutes intact).

The cost of obedience in our era is counted in lost years and damaged mental health: anxiety over debt, deferred family plans, the quiet panic of approaching middle age without a stable home or retirement. It is also counted in lost creativity and innovation, as brilliant people spend their energy coping with precarity instead of contributing their gifts to the world.

There is an old provision in the Bible that every seven years, debts shall be forgiven: “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a release… every creditor shall release what he has lent to his neighbor.” This was a recognition of a fundamental truth – that a society cannot remain whole if mercy is not extended to the indebted and downtrodden. Yet here we are, in a modern world that has largely forgotten mercy for the individual, even as it extends endless compassion to corporate entities.

We have made a false idol of institutional security and efficiency, at the expense of basic humanity. In pursuing the myth of safety – the idea that if we just play by the rules, the big systems will take care of us – we have surrendered both liberty and opportunity. We’ve complied our way into cages, and the irony is that the cages are often self-constructed.

The elderly woman by the window remembers how she was taught to always save for a rainy day, to never question authority, to be grateful for whatever job she had. She followed that advice to the letter, betting her life on the promise that deference and diligence would deliver contentment. But the rain, when it came, lasted years; the authorities she trusted made decisions that betrayed her sacrifices; the company she gave 30 loyal years to cast her aside before her pension fully vested. Now the institutions are distant and unaccountable, and she is alone with her second thoughts. The myth of institutional loyalty she lived by has crumbled, and all that’s left is the truth she avoided all those years: her life is her responsibility after all, and time is running out to live it.

The Charity of Distance: Outsourcing Our Conscience

There is another quiet revolution that took place as we placed more faith in systems: we started outsourcing our morality. We did it almost without noticing. At the grocery store, the card reader asks if we’d like to “Donate $1 to help hungry children.” We dutifully press YES – it’s just a dollar, and it feels like doing the right thing. At church on Sunday, we drop our check in the offering plate, comforted by the notion that the institution will distribute charity on our behalf. Online, we click a petition and share a hashtag, believing we’ve stood up for justice, though we risked and changed nothing in our own lives. Piece by piece, we have shifted the burden of doing good onto faceless organizations and point-of-sale transactions, while keeping our personal involvement minimal. It’s charity by proxy, compassion at arm’s length – a moral convenience that soothes our conscience just enough to carry on with our busy lives.

I began to notice this phenomenon in myself and those around me. When a colleague at the scoring center fell ill and struggled with medical bills, we started a small fundraiser – but many of us rationalized that we “gave at the office” via United Way payroll deductions. When confronted by a homeless mother asking for help on the street, it was easier to mumble about how we “already donate to the shelter” than to engage with her directly. These were small moments, easily justified, but together they painted a picture of how distant our empathy had become. We had, in effect, subscribed to moral ease. Rather than get our hands dirty, we let institutions – nonprofits, churches, the government – handle the messy work of caring for the vulnerable. Our role was simply to fund it intermittently and trust that the system would take care of the rest.

To be clear, there is great value in organized charity and in supporting institutions that serve the public good. Churches, for instance, often run food banks, shelters, and counseling services that do immense good, and they rely on tithes to fund that work. The issue is not the organizations themselves, but what we delegate to them. “Christian charity as Christ describes it is not the kind where we simply write a check and forget about it,” one theologian noted pointedly; “rather, we are to get viscerally involved on every level of our being.” In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan does enlist the innkeeper’s help to care for the beaten man – but crucially, he first tends to the man’s wounds himself and promises to return. He doesn’t just toss a coin and continue on his way. Yet how often do we effectively do just that in modern life? We contribute money at checkout counters – a practice that raised an astonishing $348 million in a single year through spare change donations – and feel we’ve done our part. The retailer gains goodwill (and a tax write-off for funneling our donations), the charity gets funds, and we get to walk away without investing any personal time or energy. Everyone wins, except perhaps the development of our own compassion.

The danger of this moral outsourcing is subtle but profound. When we outsource our kindness, we also outsource our awareness. Rounding up a bill or automating a monthly donation allows us to help without feeling. We no longer see the faces of those in need; we don’t hear their stories or share in their struggles. Our charity becomes an abstraction – a line item, a tax deduction, a news headline about how much was raised. We begin to forget the very people it’s meant for. It’s a hop and a skip from here to a quiet hypocrisy: we consider ourselves “good people” because we support good causes, but we might cross the street to avoid a flesh-and-blood beggar. We might feel anger at the idea of poverty in the abstract, but impatience or fear when directly encountering it. In outsourcing morality, we risk losing a piece of our own soul – the piece that grows through direct acts of empathy and witnessing another’s pain.

I confess I have been guilty of this. It is uncomfortable to confront how easily I have written a check in place of offering my time. I remember volunteering one weekend at a soup kitchen, and how emotionally taxing it was to actually ladle soup and meet the eyes of those I was serving. It was far easier to simply donate canned goods via a bin at the supermarket. But that easy path never challenged me or changed me. It’s the difference between reading about suffering and touching it with your own hands. One leaves you with your worldview intact; the other leaves you shaken, perhaps transformed. And maybe we avoid that transformation because it demands something more of us than we are used to giving. It’s safer to trust agencies and charities to be the good Samaritans on our behalf, while we maintain our routine.

Yet, something is lost in this transaction – something human and essential. We have delegated away the sacred parts of ourselves that ache to connect, to personally right wrongs, to sacrifice for another. In doing so, we inadvertently feed that hollow feeling that creeps in during quiet moments. The old woman by the window recalls all the times she wanted to speak up or step forward – to foster a child, to stand in protest against an injustice, to reach out to a neighbor in crisis – but held back, telling herself it wasn’t her place or that others would handle it. Her life was busy and full of duties; it was easy to put off the call of conscience. Now those moments of inaction stand out sharply in memory, each one a pinprick of regret. All the loving words left unsaid, all the good deeds left undone – they gather around her like a silent congregation of ghosts.

In the Shadow of Regret: Time as a Sacred Currency

It is often said that youth is wasted on the young, but the greater tragedy is how we waste our time at any age, under the illusion that we have plenty of it. In truth, time is our most sacred currency – irreversible, irreplaceable, and yet so easy to take for granted until it’s almost gone. What do people regret most at the end of life? Not what you might think.

A palliative nurse named Bronnie Ware spent years listening to the dying, recording their confessions and epiphanies. She found, overwhelmingly, that the regrets of the dying were not about things they’d done, but things they failed to do. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me,” was the number one regret, she reported. So many dreams left unfulfilled, sacrificed to conformity. The men she cared for almost all said “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard,” realizing too late they had missed the joy of watching their children grow up, of being truly present for their families. Others wished they’d expressed their feelings honestly instead of bottling them up to keep peace, or that they had stayed in touch with friends instead of letting meaningful relationships fade. In the final tally, our biggest regrets are for the words left unspoken and the lives not lived.

Research in psychology reinforces these insights. In the long run, the regrets of omission – the risks not taken, the dreams never pursued – far outnumber the regrets of direct actions. One large survey found that about 76% of people’s lifelong regrets stem from things they didn’t do, versus only 24% from mistakes or wrong actions they did commit. The inactions haunt us more, perhaps because we can’t learn or grow from the paths never ventured. They remain forever a question mark: What if I had dared? What if I had spoken? What might have been?

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
—John Greenleaf Whittier

Those untraveled roads and unlived possibilities become a source of enduring sorrow, a kind of permanent incompletion that lingers in the heart.

I think again of the old woman, the one we began with. In my mind’s eye, I see her not as a stranger but as a possible version of myself – or any of us – if we remain blind to life’s precious urgency. She is the seer we ignore at our peril: the voice of our future self trying to warn us. How many times have we received this warning in quieter forms? Perhaps in the envy that prickles when we see someone boldly change careers or end a toxic relationship – envy because deep down we yearn to do the same. Or in the still, small voice that speaks in the early hours of dawn, asking if we are truly happy, truly living, or merely existing. Too often, we push those feelings aside, like the citizens of ancient Troy dismissing Cassandra’s prophecies, only to realize later that truth was whispering to us all along.

If obedience is a tragic arc, then regret is its final act – the moment the hero realizes the cost of their follies. The great myths often center on this realization: King Midas with his golden touch, realizing too late that his greed has cost him what truly matters; or the character of Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power, only to lament the bargain when the bill comes due. Our modern tragedies might lack Mephistopheles or angry gods, but they have plenty of false idols – money, security, social approval – for which we too readily trade away pieces of our lives. We sacrifice authenticity for acceptance, passion for stability, kindness for convenience. And in the end, the specter of regret looms, asking: Was the sacrifice worth it?

Yet, this essay is not a counsel of despair. Quite the opposite. In confronting the uncomfortable truths – the waste of human potential, the betrayal by institutions, the distancing of our morality, the reality of our finite time – we are not wallowing in defeat, we are awakening. The emotional weight you may feel right now is the weight of awareness, and awareness can be a catalyst for change. To feel the fear of future regret is a gift if it drives us to course-correct now, while we still can.

The old woman’s story, the underemployed geniuses, the dying patients’ regrets – they are not meant to paralyze us with sadness, but to stir us, to galvanize our spirits. If you feel a knot in your stomach, an ache in your chest, reading this, hold on to that feeling – it is telling you something. It is telling you not to waste what time you have left. It is telling you that compliance is not the same as fulfillment, that comfort is not the same as joy, and that every day we wake up is a day that can be different.

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.”
—Joseph Campbell

In other words, we have to let go of the illusions and the scripts that no longer serve us – the notion that we must stay in the job that’s killing our spirit because it’s “secure,” or that we must keep adhering to roles that stifle us because we fear disappointing others. We have to shed that old skin of obedient complacency. Only then can we step into the life that was meant for us – a life defined not by what might have been, but by what still can be.

As I finish writing this, I find myself thinking of that old woman one last time. I imagine gently taking her hand and asking her what she would do if she were young again, if she had just a little more time. Her cloudy eyes brighten for a moment, and in that glimmer I see it: hope. She whispers of small things – walking by the ocean at sunrise, painting with the colors she loves, telling her sister who died last year that she always admired her courage. In her dreams, it’s never too late to say thank you, I’m sorry, or I love you. It’s never too late to choose a different path. And then I realize: for us, it isn’t too late. Not yet.

We leave our future selves an inheritance with every choice we make each day. One day, each of us will sit by our own window, with only memories and reflections for company. When that day comes, may we have the wisdom to welcome those memories without regret. May we be able to say that we lived, that we didn’t betray ourselves or squander our compassion or let our dreams die of neglect.

This is not a call to arms or a manifesto for grand upheaval. It is, in the end, a quiet invitation: a call to presence, to be deeply and courageously present in our own lives. To speak the truth to those we love. To stand up for what we know is right, directly and personally. To reclaim our time from those who would steal it, and spend it on what matters most to us. Because time is the one thing we can never earn back, and the life waiting for us is right here, right now, ready to be lived.

Let us not waste it. Let us not arrive at the end, holding the weight of unlived years, whispering “it might have been.” Instead, let us heed the hard-won wisdom of those who came before us and the yearning in our own souls. Let us shed the old skin and step into the new day with eyes open. The only moment we truly have is this one – and in this moment, we are free.