The Folly of the Perfect Life: What Nora Seed Taught Me About Regret by Riya Parag

Riya Parag's entry into Varsity Tutor's October 2025 scholarship contest

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The Folly of the Perfect Life: What Nora Seed Taught Me About Regret by Riya Parag - October 2025 Scholarship Essay

In the modern world of literature, it is rare that one must endure the shared burden of "what if" as clearly as Nora Seed in Matt Haig's novel, The Midnight Library. Before the impossibility of despair, Nora stands in a place between life and death—a library with an endless number of books, each representing an alternate life she could have lived if only she had made a different choice. Though the book is a heartbreaking study of mental illness, the greatest thing learned from Nora's redemptive odyssey is this: believing in one irrefutable, flawless life is a toxic fallacy, and real happiness is found in accepting the entirety of one's current life, flaws and all.

Nora is paralyzed by remorse at the beginning of the novel, feeling as though every opportunity she did not take—marrying her fiancé, being a rock star, or working as a glaciologist—would have brought her happiness that she is lacking in her original life. Her sole sanctuary is the library, operated by enigmatic Mrs. Elm, where she can experiment with these lives. Nora goes into these other realities hoping to be rid of her misery, but in each of these new lives finds that while some outward success is attained, new and unexpected kinds of suffering and incompleteness are present. The one in which she was a popular lead singer is exhilarating but isolating; the one in which she stayed with her old fiancé is comfortably rich but stodgy. These are powerful tests of storytelling, reminding us that no group of choices can ever be possible to generate a human experience without pain or difficulty.

Nora's moment of great realization does not happen when she finds another existence which she wants to preserve, but when she makes the choice merely to be in the present in an imperfect existence on paper. She realizes that the defect had never been in her choices, but in her perception. She had been too preoccupied comparing life to the ideal of conception that she failed to notice the small, but profound, enchantment of her own world—the ordinary connecting with a neighbor, the elegance of one game of chess, or the peace of the swim. The life she had avoided was one of potential and connection, but she had locked it out of her in self-pity and overwhelming sense of wasted opportunity.

Ultimately, Nora Seed does not only teach the reader how to live a better life, but also how not to let life be spent within a prison of regret. The moment Nora ceases to search for an external solution—a life without pain—and instead adamantly commits to finding meaning in her original, flawed, and beautiful reality, is the moment she actually comes alive. This lesson rings loudly: happiness is not a destination that lies at the end of another path, but a state of being that is fostered through the bold embrace of the life that has been received and the intentional participation in its inherent possibilities.

The book is a timely reminder that the greatest obstacle to being happy is not disappointment or failure, but disabling assumption that things are designed to be otherwise. In declining the tyranny of the idealized other, we learn, with Nora, to love the great, imperfect, and singular value of the life we already have.

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