Hypothetically speaking, what if the events of the world played out differently to such a degree that the reality we live in would be replaced by another, completely different one? What if you’d just studied slightly more in chemistry? What if you could choose to travel to the past to fix any mistakes made in your lifetime? So many different possibilities!
What if? What if? What if? This phrase embodies the essence of hypotheticals: questions that test the waters of another reality. They probe us to imagine scenarios and how we choose to go about them. Hypotheticals are a great thinking piece for analysis, however they easily spiral out of control if used in a reactive manner.
Hypotheticals might pop up most often in your daily life. These hypotheticals ask you to question the validity of an action, past or future. Maybe you find yourself in a less-than-ideal situation with a friend or your academics, and you wonder what you could’ve done to avoid ending up in that situation. Regardless, something has happened, and in hindsight, you’d have done something different.
The impact of this line of thinking falls within the purpose of the hypothetical. What is being done with that thought experiment? Simply fretting over what could have been, very easily becomes a slippery slope. The idea of that ideal scenario is allowed to be more prominent, and details about the actual outcome get overblown or underplayed. The taxing nature of this pseudo-retcon has the capacity to exponentially grow, as this self-manifested perception becomes the dominant thought.
“If only I’d taken this more seriously” might be a sentiment you feel after finishing high school, or finishing a really important test that you believe didn’t go so well. The thought on its own isn’t explicitly bad, but the follow-up can easily sway it that way. It could end up as a source of regret, where that downplay can escalate and create a habit of idealizing by making the things you do well feel trivial, and make the missteps appear ever so prominent. There’s a factor of desired control in said hypothetical that gets obsessive and arguably ruins the point of mistakes in life by trying to deny them and not drilling into why they might’ve happened—it’s leaving the problem be and letting it get worse.
Likewise, there are plenty of hypotheticals that can provide enriching and compelling thought experiments. Counterfactual hypotheticals change aspects of a particular event, such as the overall outcome being reconstructed and imagining the potential domino effect, like “What if the Allied Powers lost WWII” or “what if the Confederacy won the American Civil War?”
Hypotheticals based on the future take past and present pieces and attempt to construct a potential reality. These hypotheticals take preexisting content to deconstruct an idea and often build a plan of action, rather than merely drowning in it. Take AI as an example; it has brought all sorts of discourse related to how it’ll affect the world, and in that discourse, you’ll find plenty of hypotheticals, particularly, the future of AI. It gets brought up all the time, not just in classes, with all sorts of informatics compiled into various arguments for what it could look like as early as only a few years from now. Hypotheticals range from whether self-driving cars would move to save people detected on the streets if that meant the passengers were compromised to whether AI will grow to be a majorly useful tool or something that’ll excessively and unnecessarily siphon resources.
There are also hypotheticals built specifically on absurd scenarios detached from reality to dissect the character of responders. A classic example is the Trolley Problem. Would you be willing to save five people from being hit by a trolley if you were directly responsible for the death of someone else, or pretend like you never knew the situation was in proximity? What about a third option entirely? Other questions might include “If you could have dinner and a conversation with any famous dead person in history, who would you choose and why?” or “a life without books or a life without music?” These questions can magnify a person’s interests and motivations, as their response and the following logic can paint a picture of the person.
There are aspects to this idea of hypotheticals that this article might’ve glossed over that only foresight can answer. There are details only another pair of eyes could spot. I can’t create the perfect set of particulars, and chronically overthinking the perfect write-up wouldn’t get me anywhere.
Hypotheticals, at their best, are vastly interesting and engaging pieces of conversation. At their worst, they’re self-destructive tools whose only real use case is to pile up fears for no discernible reason. There is a very practical use for hypotheticals with the inherently engaging nature of its format. “What if” serves as an easy and strong starting point to experiment and tinker with an assortment of ideas. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s practical or even an additional perk to have. Hypotheticals aren’t the end-all be-all for every situation. Maybe a “why” or a “how” is better suited if you’re trying to learn a skill to use in a practical context. Again, what is being done with that thought experiment?
At the start of, end of or somewhere in between something, anything really, there’s bound to be a multitude of emotions surrounding it, formed by the combination of past actions, current hopes and future wants. A good hypothetical can take any mix of those and push you out of compliance and towards something meaningful, as simple or as grand as you want it to be. Rather than just saying something like “if only I’d worked on this assignment sooner, then I wouldn’t be cramming this last minute,” find a way to frame it such that it sparks proactive curiosity. “What if I wrote it down on a daily list” could be a potential solution, but that isn’t certain until you go out of your way to incorporate it and find a new onslaught of “what ifs.” In which case you have this new knowledge of insights you wouldn’t have had otherwise if you’d just thought about it, or dreaded about it.
Hypothetically speaking, what if there was something you wanted to change? Something that you want to explore? Something you’ve found interesting and want to entertain? Explore that question, engage with that question, but don’t use it to just sweep problems under the rug, because then what really is the value of a good hypothetical?
