Milan Kundera: 'We can never know what to want'

Emet North gives us this insight:

"...who among us has never dreamt of an alternate world? A choice made differently? Who hasn’t stayed up at night, contemplating some difficult decision, wishing it were possible to see both scenarios played out, to know definitively which option to choose. “We can never know what to want,” the Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote, “because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” The unbearable lightness: “if we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.” The many worlds interpretation saves us from this lightness, gives our lives the weight of infinite repetition and variation. True, the rescue is more theoretical than practical, given that nothing about the interpretation suggests access to the alternate universes."
— Many Worlds and the Queer Imaginary: Imagine three possible futures for yourself. Let your future selves be bold..., Emet North, Reactor, May 8, 2024

I file this idea as a possible response to people who "ask" — that is, ask aggressively: How do trans people know what gender they are or want to be?

I wrote Why transphobia teaches us to be terrified of regret. It's an 8-min read on Medium.

To this, I add:

"As early as 1985, plant ecologists Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White wrote in 'The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics,' that an 'essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.'"
— We Need To Rewild The Internet: The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, Noema, April 16, 2024