Jonny Thomson’s Mini Philosophy turned up in my feed recently with a reflection on Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Train. In the story a man named Wilbur dies and boards a train that carries him back through the stations of his own life, stopping at each crossroad: a choice, a door he closed, a person he left standing on the other side of it. Thomson’s reading was thoughtful and reassuring. There is no painless life, he wrote. Every choice closes off other possibilities, every path carries its own losses, and the task is to learn to love the life you have without fearing that you chose wrongly.
I read it twice. The second time I understood why it had unsettled me. The genre assumes you are Wilbur. It assumes you are the one on the train.
I was one of the people seen briefly through the window.
For twenty-five years I was married to someone whose defining qualities were care, compassion, ethics and a strong sense of responsibility. Near the end she told me we had an “okay” marriage. She had also come to believe that something better was waiting beyond it, and she left to find it. I am not writing to relitigate that. I am writing because the train only runs in one direction, and I have spent years standing where it does not stop.
The Comfort of the Train
Stories like The Midnight Train are popular because they do something genuinely useful. They comfort people who are afraid they chose wrongly. The structure barely changes from telling to telling. A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Midnight Library and now The Midnight Train all hand their central character a guide, walk them back through old crossroads, and let them discover that every road they might have taken would have carried its own disappointments. Eventually the traveller arrives at self-acceptance. The lesson is never that life is perfect. The lesson is that no life is, and that recognising as much is the beginning of peace.
That is real wisdom, and I do not want to be glib about it. Regret is unavoidable. Every commitment forecloses alternatives, and every yes contains a thousand quiet noes. The machine works.
It just only works from one seat.
The People Outside the Window
In these stories the people affected by the chooser’s decisions are rarely allowed to be fully real. They are scenery, or lessons, or entries in the protagonist’s emotional ledger. The narrative acknowledges them, but only to the extent that they move the traveller along. They are the people he left behind, and they exist as the texture of his looking back.
Once you notice this you cannot stop noticing it. The people on the platform never get a carriage of their own. They get no guide, no narrator, no journey back through the stations of someone else’s decisions. The form cannot give them one, because the moment it does, the consolation begins to come apart.
What the Platform Feels Like
The person who leaves gets a story. The person left behind gets weather.
For the better part of a year I lived inside a signal I could not read. She would be present, sometimes warm, and for the length of an evening the marriage would feel as though it were still standing. Then she would leave, and by the next time I saw her the warmth had cooled again, as though something reset itself on the far side of the front door. One week it was over. The next, perhaps it was not. There were declarations of love sitting beside actions that quietly undid them. I kept trying to assemble a coherent picture from fragments that would not hold still, and the harder I worked at it the less of me there was left to do the work.
I would carry that confusion into a psychologist’s office and spend the hour explaining her to him, building the case for why it all still made sense, making her excuses as though she were the one in need of defending. I did not yet have a name for what I was inside.
The train genre has no language for any of this. There is no chapter where the abandoned spouse sits in that office trying to make the pieces fit. No chapter where the depression arrives. No chapter where agoraphobia develops and leaving the house becomes its own ordeal. No chapter where a person spends years rebuilding their grip on reality because the story they had been living simply stopped explaining itself.
There is no narrator on the platform. There is just weather.
Why the Train Only Runs One Way
I do not think the one-sidedness is an oversight. I think it is a requirement. The genre runs on a single promise, that regret can be turned into wisdom, and that promise only holds if the regret belongs to the person doing the reflecting. The chooser can reinterpret. The chooser can learn. The chooser can make peace. But the person who did not choose carries a different kind of regret altogether. Theirs was not selected from a menu of possible futures. It was handed to them.
It was assigned.
This is the asymmetry the form exists to hide. The carriage holds agency without proportionate consequence. The platform holds consequence without any agency at all. The one who acted is given the whole machinery of meaning-making. The one who was acted upon is given the outcome and none of the tools.
A novel is allowed this. A single consciousness looking back over its own life is the honest shape of a first-person story, and it would be an odd complaint to fault a portrait for not being a landscape. But Thomson did not offer The Midnight Train as a story. He offered its lesson as wisdom, as a way to live. That is a different kind of claim, and it cannot remain one-sided, because a philosophy of life is not read in a vacuum. It is applied by real people to real others. The counsel to love your life without fear of having chosen wrongly is addressed to the traveller. It is applied to everyone standing on the platform, and no one thinks to ask them whether the trade was a fair one.
The Self-Development Version of the Train
What unsettled me most, rereading Thomson, was how precisely this structure matches the logic of so much coaching and self-development culture. Both begin from the same premise. The individual is the primary unit of analysis, personal growth is the highest objective, and everything else is secondary to it. Seen through that lens, the things that bind a person to others quietly change category. A marriage becomes a limitation. An obligation becomes a block. A family becomes something that suited an earlier version of you and may no longer fit the person you are becoming.
I once heard two sentences I have not been able to put down since.
“Whether I made the right decision or the wrong decision, the universe will have my back.”
“My marriage is just a stepping stone to something better.”
Neither was meant to be cruel. That is exactly what makes them worth examining. The first is not really a statement of confidence. It is an indemnity clause, and the telling thing about it is that nothing can falsify it. If the new life goes well, the universe provided. If it goes badly, the universe was redirecting her toward something else. There is no outcome, and no quantity of damage left behind, that the sentence will allow to register as a wrong turn. It converts every possible consequence into proof of cosmic approval, decided in advance. That is not a way of coping with a hard decision. It is the engine of magical thinking doing the one thing it is built to do, which is to remove the brake before the choice is made.
The second sentence does the other half of the work. It reclassifies the marriage as a stage, something you stand on to reach the next elevation, and it reclassifies the people inside the marriage along with it. Stepping stone is almost too literal. In that picture the people on the platform are not hated and they are not worthless. They are simply no longer where the camera is pointing.
What Survives Growth?
The point was never that people are forbidden to change, or to leave, or to want a different life. They are allowed all of it. I had made the same binding choices she had: a marriage meant to last, a home, children, years spent at home raising them. People make those choices every day in the full knowledge that life moves and that people move with it, and sometimes the honest thing is to go. The leaving is not the wrong.
So when I talk about obligation, I do not mean the obligation to stay. I have written about this before and the distinction matters. The obligation is not to remain in a marriage past the point you believe in it. The obligation is to do the right thing on the way out. Those are two entirely different duties, and the whole nostalgia argument, the idea that the old vows should simply have held her in place, depends on confusing them. You can be released from the promise to stay. You are not released from the responsibility for how you end it.
That responsibility is the thing that should survive a choice like this. Not the commitment itself, but the accountability for ending it: the duty to weigh what it will cost the people on the other side, and to carry that weight rather than hand it to them to carry alone.
And the word doing the work in “the right thing” is not procedural. The right thing means the ethical thing, the moral thing, and in this case that is exactly what makes the machinery so precise in what it did. Ethics and morality were not a peripheral part of who she was. They were close to the centre of it, the ground we had shared most plainly across all those years, and they were the faculty that, left to its own work, would have produced the considered and accountable ending I keep describing. What I saw was not her ethics disappearing. They did not vanish, and nothing about her suggested they had turned out to be a performance. What appeared instead was a framework that seemed able to reconcile actions with values that, on everything I had known of her across twenty-five years, should have sat in plain conflict. The friction that ought to have been there was not. A way of ending a marriage that her own stated values would once have ruled out now proceeded as though those values raised no objection, because a vocabulary had arrived that dissolved the objection before it could be raised.
That is the function such frameworks serve. They are built for the conscientious, because the conscientious are the only ones with a conscience that needs quieting. A person without strong morals has no use for an indemnity clause from the universe. The need for one is itself the evidence that the morals were there.
That is precisely what so much of self-development culture is built to remove. Not the freedom to grow, but the friction that growth used to carry. An obligation that no longer fits is reframed as a constraint, ending it is reframed as courage, and the people it falls on are reframed as scenery you have outgrown. The marriage becomes a stage to step off. The accountability evaporates into the language of the journey.
The problem, then, is not that growth asks people to change. The problem is the machinery that lets them change without ever having to feel the cost, or to ask what remains owed to the people who helped build the life being left behind. A marriage, a friendship, a family: these are not scaffolding to be dismantled once the building of the self is complete. They are other people, with claims of their own, and those claims do not dissolve simply because someone has decided to move on.
No Train for the Left Behind
Thomson asks a genuinely beautiful question. How can we love our lives without fearing that we chose wrongly? For the passenger on the train it is a deep and worthwhile challenge. For the person on the platform it does not even arrive. They did not make the choice. The fear was never theirs to carry. Only the consequences were, and those came regardless.
Perhaps that is the blind spot folded inside so many stories of transformation. The chooser is handed a philosophy for making peace with the decision. The people left behind are handed the consequences of it. One receives meaning. The other receives reality.
And the fact that our culture turns out an endless supply of stories for the first, and almost none for the second, may be the clearest sign of whose comfort these stories were always for.