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Impossibilitude

Human existence is basically a constant negotiation between the choices we make and the constraints that shape our lives, and I'm not sure I've ever fully made peace with that. This awareness of our limitations, both the ones we're born into and the ones we create for ourselves, carries a melancholy with it. A longing for paths not taken, experiences forever out of reach. I've always felt there should be a word for that specific feeling. I've struggled with it for much of my conscious life, which is why I eventually arrived at the term impossibilitude to describe this emotional/existential response to my unreachable realities.

Impossibilitude is more than just acknowledging that something is impossible. It's the felt experience of those closed doors, as in the existential melancholy that comes from really sitting with the absolute nature of what cannot ever be. 

Some of this goes back to what Sartre calls facticity. It's a concept that has always felt like home to me. Facticity says we are thrown into circumstances (a specific year, a place, an upbringing) and those circumstances permanently place certain possibilities out of bounds before we ever make a conscious choice. But impossibilitude doesn't stop there, as it also feels the weight of every choice we make that inevitably eliminates a dozen other potential futures. Heidegger's emphasis on authenticity, on living in accordance with one's true potential, or what he calls our potentiality-for-being, makes impossibilitude even heavier to carry.

What I'm trying to describe, maybe clumsily, is the emotional weight carried by anyone who has really sat with the realization that there are infinite versions of themselves they will never become. It's a mourning - not only for something lost, but also for something that was never quite accessible to begin with.

Existentialism is pretty good at describing the paralyzing anxiety we feel right before a choice. But I think it's missing a name for what comes after, this lingering grief for the paths we didn't or couldn't have taken.

So, unlike Kierkegaard's dizziness of freedom, which addresses the overwhelming anxiety of having too many options before a choice is made, impossibilitude focuses on what comes after. It's the longing for the lives we were never granted and for the ones we left behind.


Disclaimer: all of the writing and concepts (and feelings!) are my own, but the text was edited with the help of AI.

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