Have you ever wondered what your life would have been like if you’d made different choices? Maybe there was one particular “Sliding Doors” event that took you in a new direction. What if that hadn’t happened, and you’d gone down another path instead? But perhaps everything’s pre-ordained, and you’ve had no choice but to follow the route you did. Does it even matter?

These are ideas conveyed with real emotional bite, in the Pulp classic, Something Changed. In the first of what I’m hoping will be a regular “pop song philosophy” series, let’s take a look at the lyrics to this lovely, yearning question of a record, to see what philosophy might say about them.

Verse 1: what might have been

I wrote the song two hours before we met
I didn’t know your name or what you looked like yet
Oh, I could have stayed at home and gone to bed
I could have gone to see a film instead
You might have changed your mind and seen your friends
Life could have been very different but then
Something changed…

Ooh. It makes you feel funny just hearing that first line, doesn’t it? It plays with you, and challenges your understanding of how events play out. It makes it sound almost as if the meeting was inevitable, that it was decreed by fate.

Fatalism in philosophy is the idea that a certain event will necessarily happen and there’s nothing we can do about it. So for example, in the story of Oedipus Rex, it’s predicted that the protagonist will kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus goes to great lengths to avoid this prophecy coming true, but he can’t control his ultimate destiny, however hard he tries. It was always true that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother – and perhaps, if you’re a fatalist, it was always true that the couple in the song would meet.

Fatalism is related to, but a little bit different from, determinism, which also holds that future events are fixed. The difference with determinism is that our actions and choices do matter – in fact, they play a crucial part in determining everything that follows on from them. What we do does make a difference. (That doesn’t mean our choices are free, however!)

Looking at this verse, it seems as if we’re dealing with determinism here, rather than fatalism, because the writer brings in some counterfactual situations. These are things that could have happened differently, resulting in the couple not meeting. So, one counterfactual situation is that he might have stayed at home and gone to bed – and if that had come to pass, then a different set of events would have played out as a result, with each life carrying on down an alternative path.

If we were dealing with fatalism, the couple would still have met, whatever happened in the lead-up to that meeting. Perhaps if he stayed at home she would have visited his house to deliver a takeaway. If he’d gone to see a film, perhaps she would have done, too. If she’d changed her mind and seen a friend, it might have been a mutual acquaintance who later introduced them.

Verse 2: was it God’s will?

Do you believe that there’s someone up above?
And does he have a timetable directing acts of love?
Why did I write this song on that one day?
Why did you touch my hand and softly say
“Stop asking questions that don’t matter anyway
Just give us a kiss to celebrate here today”
Something changed

It can be comforting to think that “things happen for a reason”, to fit in with a higher plan concocted by God. In philosophy, this is known as divine providence. Proponents of divine providence hold that by nature, God is a perfect being who is all-good and all-knowing. As mere mortals, we can’t begin to comprehend the intricacies of His plan, but we can trust that all will come good.

Whether or not divine providence is true (and if it is, how we square that with the suffering that exists in the world) is up for debate. But if we do accept it, it would seem to rule out personal freedom, like the deterministic and fatalistic theories discussed above.

Maybe freedom is overrated, however. There’s something to be said for accepting that there are things we can’t control. The Stoics in Ancient Greece made this a cornerstone of their philosophy, promoting acceptance and resilience in the face of what fate has in store. Similarly, Buddhist philosophy highlights the inevitability of change and suffering, and encourages us to surrender ourselves to these truths, losing our attachment to what might have been and gaining peace through acceptance.

And if you have sympathy with these views, perhaps the loved one in this verse is wise not to question things so much. She advocates simply being grateful for the way things turned out. (After all, a Buddhist might add, they won’t stay that way forever.)

Verse 3: can we know the future?

When we woke up that morning we had no way of knowing
That in a matter of hours we’d change the way we were going
Where would I be now, where would I be now if we’d never met?
Would I be singing this song to someone else instead?
I don’t know but like you just said
Something changed

We don’t know what’s about to befall us. I think most of us prefer it that way. But is it theoretically possible that we could?

It might depend in part on how you conceptualise time. Some people think that all events in time already exist ‘out there’, and that our human, temporal perspective, experiencing things as past, present and future, is just one subjective way of perceiving them. This is called eternalism. If you’re an eternalist then you think that the future is “closed” to other possibilities because it already exists. On this view, if you could somehow get outside your restrictive human perspective, perhaps you could witness all the events that have ever happened and will ever happen, in their entirety.

What if things had been different? We thought about this a bit earlier, when we talked about counterfactuals. This is a fascinating question that can nag at us, both when we have regrets and when we can’t quite believe our luck.

Another way to express the idea of alternative paths is to talk in terms of possible worlds. So, for example, there’s a possible world in which bananas are blue, and one where Jarvis is singing his song to someone else. We can think of possible worlds as a handy analogy, a helpful way to talk about probability, chance and logical possibility. But interestingly, there is at least one philosopher who thinks that possible worlds are real. Really real! That’s a little bit mindblowing isn’t it?

Questions that don’t matter?

Most of the big questions in philosophy seem impossible to answer definitively. So is the whole endeavour of philosophy a waste of time, or is it fun to wonder? Let me know what you think in the comments.