The dream that costs nothing

Listen at any café table long enough and someone will say it. If I had kept training, I could have played professionally. If I had stayed with the drawing, I would have been a real artist by now. If I had gone abroad at twenty, I would have built something huge.

The bigger the claim, the easier it is to make.

That sounds backwards, but it is not. A claim that can never be tested costs nothing. Nobody will ask us to prove we could have played for the national side. The odds were so long that the dream is safely out of reach, which means we are safely off the hook. Saying it is pleasant and risks nothing.

The modest version is much harder to say, because it can be checked.

What could the same person do with the next four years, given honest effort a few evenings a week? They could learn a second language well enough to read a novel in it. They could become a decent oud player. They could coach the children's football team in their neighbourhood and know every family by name. They could run a long race at the end of it, or plant a garden that feeds the house through the winter.

None of that is a lottery. Each of those is a plan, and a plan comes with the uncomfortable possibility of not doing it.

That is why the far dream is more popular. It asks for nothing. The near one asks for Tuesday evening, and the one after that, and it is the only one of the two that is likely to happen.