It's just logic

One of my best friends had depression. He was constantly torturing himself about the decisions he made and was going to make, no matter which ones were. For years we tried to dissuade him of thinking this way, but all our efforts were for naught.

After thinking too much about it, I concluded the reason we failed to dissuade him was because we didn't understand why he was depressed in the first place.

One day, when he and I were alone, I told him about my recent thoughts and asked him to explain me everything. He said:

"Well, I've been thinking a lot about it, and I concluded it's just logic. Life is so extremely complex there's an infinite amount of decisions we can take at every moment. Some of the will be horrible; some not as much, but, in all of them, only one will be the best one, and the chance of choosing it is practically zero. Thus, the chance of failing to choose the best choices in your entire life is practically one hundred. So, every decision we had ever made had been failures and they always will be. We can't do anything about it."

I told him to stop thinking about life that way, there's not only one right decision, different decisions just take us to different paths and give us different opportunities, but he didn't seem very convinced by it.

"I doesn't matter what I do or don't do: it'll always be a failure. I've always failed as a son, as a man, as a friend, as a person, and the worst of it it's I've also failed at dealing with my own failure and I've failed at dealing with the way I deal with my own failure."

His negativity infuriated me, and I was about to ask him: "So, your decision of becoming my friend was a failure too?" But I didn't; I was afraid it'll affect him.

Or maybe I just didn't want to hear his answer.

"Why are you so sure all your decisions had been failures?" I asked him instead.

"Cause that's how they feel."

Time passed, and I couldn't stop thinking about his words. I thought and I thought until I found a solution. I invited him to my place and told him:

"There's no way of knowing if the decisions we take are right or wrong, but we can assume they are. Yeah, if we assume all our decisions are right, we'll be extremely egocentric and we'll only fool ourselves. But we only need to assume one of our decisions is right. You see: if you have a goal in life and assume reaching it is the best possible decision, all your other decisions will focus on reach that goal, and because reaching that goal is the best possible decision, all of the decisions that help you reach it will be the best possible decisions."

"But if you assume one decision is right when it's not and you based your entire life on it, aren't you living a lie?"

"Yes and no, because, yes, it'll be a lie, but if you assume it's right it'll transform in your truth, and living based on your truth will make your life more authentic and significant."

"But, what's that objective? How can I know which one to choose and how can I know it's the right one?"

"You don't know. You just choose one and assume it's the right one. I could be whatever you want. So think: what do you want more than anything? How do you want to live the rest of your life?

He thought about it for a moment and smiled.

"Thanks", he said, and from that point on he became happier and kinder, he met a lot of new people, got in a relationship, got an ascension at work. So everything was hunky dory for him.

Until he died. A car hit him near a bar on the outskirts of the city. The driver was completely sober, and he said my friend appeared from nowhere, and he just couldn't dodge him.

No one believed him.

It's been a long time, and I can't stop thinking about his death. Was my advice really that effective? Did my friend really overcome his depression that easily, or did all his apparent recovery was really an strategy to make us, his friends, think he was better so we could stop worrying about him? What was he doing at the outskirts of the city? Why did he cross the road? Was he drunk? Was everything the driver said truth? Did my friend threw himself to the car? Did he killed himself because of my advice? Was it my fault? Did I failed him? Yes, it was, it has to; it's just logic