I was at the gallery today, just sitting in the back office with the ledgers and the flickering fluorescent light that's been giving me a migraine since Tuesday. I was supposed to be cross-referencing the acquisition costs for this new series of oil paintings—huge, visceral things that take up the whole wall—and I realized I knew the exact technique the artist used for the glazing. Not just in a "I read about this" way, but I could sort of feel it in my fingers. I had that scholarship at RISD once. I mean, I actually had it in my hand, and I just... I kind of threw it away because the CPA track felt more stable for starting a family. Now I’m thirty-four and I spend my nights scraping dried oatmeal off the high chair and my days checking if someone else’s creative expression is tax-deductible. I think as a species we’re fundamentally prone to this kind of collective cognitive dissonance where we believe our choices are additive. We think we're building a life brick by brick, but lately, it feels more like an erasure. Every time we choose one path, we’re essentially murdering a dozen other versions of ourselves. It’s a literal subtraction of potential. I was looking at those canvases and I was trying to calculate the opportunity cost of my own existence, which is a ridiculous thing to do, obviously.