A friend told me last month, on a rooftop in Bangkok with the traffic grinding away eight floors below, that she sometimes imagines getting on a plane and simply not coming back. Then she apologised. Actually apologised, to me, for the crime of having an inner life.

That reflex interests me more than the daydream does.

The daydream is everywhere. I have heard some version of it from a lawyer in London, a nurse in Manila, and a man in a Sydney pub who had done everything right for thirty years and still felt short-changed. What they shared was the flinch afterwards: the insistence that they were being silly, that they were lucky, that other people have real problems.

You got very good at being useful

Psychologists tend to split the self into three parts. There is the actual self, meaning the person you currently believe yourself to be. There is the ideal self, your hopes and aspirations and everything you would love to become. And there is the ought self, the person you feel you should have been, assembled out of duties, obligations, and everyone else’s reasonable expectations.

Most of us are outstanding at the ought self. It comes with instructions. Be reliable. Cover the rent. Ring your mother on Sundays. Do not detonate a marriage over a mood.

The ideal self arrives with no instructions at all. Be brave. Be interesting. Be the one who took the other job. There is no checklist, no deadline, and nobody chasing you for it, so it waits in the corridor while you handle everything urgent. Which is to say, forever.

The regrets that refuse to leave

Here is the finding that unsettled me. Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich ran six studies on what people regret most, and our longest-lasting regrets turned out to come from failing the ideal self.

The reason is oddly practical. Ought failures can be resolved. You apologise, you repay the money, you show up late but you show up, and the thing recedes. Ideal failures have nothing to resolve: no wronged party, no repair job. Gilovich has a nice image for it: the ought regrets are potholes on the road, already behind you. The ideal ones just sit in the windscreen for the rest of the drive.

So when you find yourself awake at two in the morning running the other life, that is not weakness seeping out of a crack. It is the only alarm your ideal self knows how to set.

Why a good life can still feel hollow

Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot spent years studying why people chase the goals they chase. Some goals we actually want. Others we take on out of pressure, guilt, or the low hum of shame that arrives when we imagine not bothering. They found that people chasing goals which genuinely fit their own values put in more effort, and got a bigger lift in wellbeing when they succeeded.

The flip side is the bit nobody warns you about. You can hit a target that was never yours and feel almost nothing. The promotion lands. Everyone is delighted. You stand in the kitchen at eleven at night wondering what is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. You cashed a cheque made out to somebody else.

The problem with beautiful daydreams

Now for the awkward part: I am not about to tell you that fantasising is the answer.

Gabriele Oettingen has built a career on a deeply annoying result: vividly imagining a wonderful future tends to drain the energy you need to get there. Her theory is that the fantasy hands you a portion of the reward in advance, so your system relaxes when it should be mobilising.

Which means the rooftop daydream can quietly replace the plane ticket. You get the warm feeling on a Tuesday night, the pressure drops, and another year goes by.

Her fix is simple. Picture the outcome properly, then name the obstacle in your way, and make it an internal one you can do something about. Not “the economy”. Something honest, like: I am terrified of what my brother will say.

What the evidence says about jumping

The economist Steven Levitt once persuaded people who were genuinely stuck on a big decision to settle it with a coin toss. Over twenty thousand people flipped. Six months later, those whose coin told them to make the change were more likely to have done it, and reported being happier than the ones told to sit tight.

Treat that with care. It was a single study. The participants were already agonising over their decisions, and happiness was self-reported. I am not suggesting you hand your life to a coin. But it points the same way the regret research does, and Levitt’s own reading was that we are probably too cautious when the stakes are high.

Start ridiculously small

Starting over rarely looks like the airport scene. In my experience it looks like a Saturday morning and an hour you told nobody about.

Write the wish down in one sentence, in your own handwriting, with no audience. Name one internal obstacle. Then build the smallest test you can run inside your current life, something you can do for a fortnight without resigning, moving, or announcing anything. A class. Two hundred words before work.

You are after information here. Does the thing hold up outside your head? Some ideas die the moment you touch them, which is a mercy. Others get louder.

My friend never got on the plane. She signed up for a course she had been circling for four years, and now I cannot get her to shut up about it. Most people who start over do it just as quietly.