Ne Unresolvable

Skip the probe because no feasible evidence can separate the rival explanations; decide by values, robustness, or reversibility instead.

Ten years into your career, you keep circling the same question: would you have been happier taking the startup offer you turned down in 2016? You reread old emails, message former colleagues about how it went, and run the alternate life in your head at 1am. The evidence-gathering feels productive. It cannot work.

Some questions no feasible evidence can settle: the life you didn't live left no trace to inspect, and every rival story (you'd have thrived, you'd have burned out) fits the available facts equally well. The rule is to check honestly whether any obtainable observation could actually separate the rivals, and when the answer is no, stop probing and decide by different machinery: your values (what matters to you now), robustness (choices that work across many scenarios), and reversibility (what you can still change from here). Steps: name the rivals, ask what evidence would distinguish them, notice that none can, then consciously switch decision modes. What changes is where the energy goes, from unanswerable history to the next choice, which is answerable. Don't invoke this code just because the evidence would be uncomfortable to gather; it's for genuine dead ends, not convenient ones.