Alright, it’s time to second the record straight as Mike D once said. We all know the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. But how many people have actually stopped to read the poem instead of mindlessly mouthing the final line like it was a clarion call to individualism? Because it’s not. It’s the musings of an honest coward and a liar (not Frost–the narrator of the poem I mean).

Check it out:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

Note what’s happened here. The narrator is standing at a fork in the road and is looking down both paths, wishing he could travel them both at the same time and still remain the same person. He looks down the one until in bends into the undergrowth (this is the road less traveled by) and decides to take the other because the grass seemed easier to walk on. He also admits that it would have been no more difficult to travel the undergrowth road.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Here he says that he made a pledge to himself to come back one day and take that other path but he doubted that he ever would. Here’s the key part:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

He admits to himself that one day in the future he’s going to tell a lie that he did take the road less traveled by and that doing so has made all the difference in his life. See, he’s a liar but he’s an honest liar. We’re not really sure why he’s lying to himself. It could be the myth of American individualism that gets eaten away by the way we are herded into stalls and coraled into sub-cultures which give us a false identity (but is it any more false than the individualistic ones we claim each day?)

No matter which road you take, there is movement and taking either one makes all the difference because you’re not the same entity you were before taking it. In the end, What If questions are an exercise in futility and the success of the past can only be measured by the happiness of the present moment. The happiness of the present moment cannot be measured by charts or polls but only on an individual level, much like freedom. And regardless of which road would have led to the better outcome, this narrator is a sad person and that is a failed measure of success. That road may have made all the difference but the question he should be asking is what’s the sum?

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