MOURNING THE LIFE WE NEVER HAD
Nov. 2026
Can we mourn a life that never existed while still living our own?
Digital platforms circulate desirable homes, bodies, relationships, and radiant futures. No one explicitly promises us these lives. The promise is carried by the images themselves: look, identify, desire. This could be you.
Research establishes parts of the process. Heavier Facebook use has been associated with believing that others lead happier lives (Chou and Edge 2012). In an experiment with 479 people, images centered on people increased upward social comparison and online social anxiety compared with images centered on objects (Jia 2025). Imagined futures also draw on memory and emotion (Schacter et al. 2025).
But comparison is only the beginning. Images can seize perception, settle into memory, attach themselves to emotion, and return unbidden. In the automatic, defensive hallucinatory process I propose, their source may no longer be recognized. What entered from outside can be lived from within: not simply as something desirable, but as the felt possibility of another existence.
And so we begin to lead two lives. One takes place in the body, among bills, fatigue, missed chances, imperfect relationships. The other unfolds in recurring scenes of what our life was supposed to be. The imagined life does not disappear when the screen goes dark. It accompanies the real one, interrupts it, and constantly measures it against a promise it cannot fulfill.
The suffering is not a single disappointment. It is a continuing grief, renewed each time ordinary life fails to coincide with the other life carried inside us. We mourn a home we never inhabited, a love we never knew, a self we never became. No death marks these losses, no farewell ends them; the images remain available to revive what is missing. The more intensely the second life is inhabited, the more the first may feel like a diminished substitute.
This is a clinical hypothesis, not evidence that platform images produce psychotic hallucinations. Research must investigate involuntary imagery, the loss of awareness of its source, recurring grief, and the erosion of imaginable alternatives.
The danger is that we may spend our actual lives grieving another life — until living and mourning become almost indistinguishable.
References
Chou, Hui-Tzu Grace, and Nicholas Edge. 2012. “They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 15 (2): 117–21. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2011.0324.
Jia, Zhaohao. 2025. “An Experimental Study on the Impact of Social Media Images on Users’ Online Social Anxiety in China.” Discover Psychology 5: 14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-025-00337-4.
Schacter, Daniel L., Sarah E. Kalinowski, and Jenna M. Wilson. 2025. “Emotional Future Simulations: Neural and Cognitive Perspectives.” Cerebral Cortex 35 (1): 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae388.
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