The museum of unlived lives

A tour of the versions of me I never became.

There’s a strange silence you only hear in coastal towns; the kind that forces you to sit with yourself. I’m writing this from Livorno, a small fishing city on Italy’s western coast. The waves are sharp, the food is sharper, and the whole town smells like olive oil, rusted boats, and old stories.

As I approach my 25th birthday and dive into this spiral of reflection; choices made, choices avoided, I’m stunned by how far I’ve come. People keep asking me, “So what’s next?”

Honestly, the only real way to answer that is to look at where I’ve been.

And when I look back, I see something strange:

the versions of me I never became.

So many choices I didn’t make pushed me into the man I am today. Lessons, losses, heartbreaks, and on the flip side, the beautiful experiences that make life worth living. My only rule has been to never carry regret. Never let regret take a seat at the table.

Now with a fully formed prefrontal cortex (allegedly), I walk through the museum of the lives I never lived.

And it feels like death. The death of every version of me that never saw the light of day.

The Attempts That Built Me

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve tasted almost everything under the sun. If something seems remotely interesting, I have to try it.

Welding robots in a machine shop.

Taking classes on being a florist.

Directing short films.

Representing people in court. (please don’t ask how I got there)

Not for aesthetics. Not for résumé points. But to be able to say I actually lived. I actually tried. Life is more about attempting than anything else.

And the attempts, even the stupid ones, built me.

I hopped onto a fishing boat this morning just to see what rough seas could teach me about control. I ended up talking to an older Italian fisherman whose wisdom weighed more than every foam-topped wave around us.

Talking to strangers in foreign countries is one of my favorite ways to understand the human condition. They’ll tell you truths you can’t pull out of yourself. He told me something simple:

When you die and look back, all you’ll have are your memories. Nothing else. Because you have nothing left to experience.

The laughs. The scars. The experiences. Then you die.

So you might as well create the memories you actually want. To have lived the life you claimed you wanted. The dream.

He said the most bitter people he’s met weren’t the people who tried and failed; they were the people who never tried at all.

Kinda makes sense why some of the grumpiest people in the world are old.

Every Choice Is a Death

The more I sat with his words, the more it clicked:

Every decision is a death.

When you choose business, you kill artist-you. When you choose this city, you kill that-city-you. When you marry or don’t marry someone, you kill that timeline.

And in every pivot of my unorthodox career, hardware engineering, law, venture capital, non-profit, computer science, I killed off a version of myself. Whether I realized it or not. Every pivot was a silent funeral for a version of Ayman that wasn’t meant to make it.

But here’s the thing most people don’t want to admit:

The weight of an unmade decision is the heaviest thing in the world.

People aren’t scared of failure. They’re scared of success. They’re scared to accept how achievable their goals actually are.

Because once you understand everything you want is reachable, you lose every excuse you had. You have to act. You have to hold yourself accountable. And there’s nothing left to hide behind.

So they freeze. And the unmade decision slowly crushes them. Making life unbearable.

Learning to Walk Through the Museum

So how do you reconcile all these deaths?

You visit the museum.

You walk the hallways of the unlived lives.

You acknowledge the versions of yourself that didn’t make it.

Not to fantasize about what could’ve been, but to be grateful for what actually was. To get closure. To accept qadr.

I hate the “what if” game. Truly. It’s fear dressed up in assumptions and pity. A way for people to feel better about never acting in the first place.

Because honestly?

The bar for trying is so low.

Most people won’t have the memories because they were scared.

I’d rather walk through a museum full of skeletons labeled attempts than live with regret.

Growth is choosing which version of you deserves to live.

A Meditation

Visit the museum of your unlived lives.

What would Ayman-who-became-a-doctor be doing right now?

Ayman-who-moved-to-Mecca?

Ayman-who-stayed-broke-but-happy?

Don’t dwell, just be grateful.

Look at that fisherman. He wakes up before sunrise, pushes his boat into the water, and plays the same game every day because he loves it. Not many people love the game.

What you’re not changing is what you’re choosing.

So make sure every failure happens because something was out of your control. Not because you didn’t attempt. Collect the bodies on the path to failure until you see what’s real.

Stay in the tension.

The only fear worth carrying is the fear of not reaching the outcome.

The further you entertain what’s not for you, the longer you delay what is. Success hits different when you sacrifice the life you thought you wanted for the one you actually need.

Sometimes I laugh at the old versions of my reasoning. Now it’s simpler:

Align the north star with the man I want to become.

The man my ancestors would be proud of.

The man my descendants will claim proudly.

And as I stand on the edge of whatever comes next, I walk through my museum in silence; the fishermen shouting in the distance, the Italian sun hitting the water, and the ghosts of the unlived versions of me lining the walls.

It gives me the clarity to pull the trigger on the versions of Ayman that need to die, kill the versions of Ayman that don’t serve the mission…

and resurrect the one that will.