Cormac McCarthy

How Bad Luck Can Quietly Protect You

Psychology offers language for what McCarthy is pointing at: counterfactual thinking, the mental habit of comparing reality to imagined alternatives. We often default to “upward” counterfactuals—dreaming of how things could have gone better—because they sting and feel urgent. However, “downward” counterfactuals—how things might have gone worse—are less vivid, partly because there’s no evidence to hold onto. McCarthy’s sentence effectively supplies that missing direction, reminding us that the unseen alternative timeline may contain hazards we’re not equipped to picture. [...]