counterlife

plural counterlives

1. A counterfactual life; a life other than the one actually lived.

   More often, they simply struggle with their own counterlives.

   1991, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish year book, 1991 - Volume 91, →ISBN, page 68

   3 more examples

   Introducing difference into the flow of time, it suggested the possibility of counterlives in the present.

   2004, Stranded in the Present

   He is hailed by postmodernists for his fictive propositions and counterlives.

   2005, Jay L. Halio, Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth's Later Novels, →ISBN, page 125

   “Russell is an alter ego,” [Jay] McInerney says. “I decided early on that he was going to live what Philip Roth called the ‘counterlife’, the life that I could've lived if I had stayed married to the same woman and taken more of a conventional path career-wise.”

   2026 April 4, Jonathan Derbyshire, “Lunch with the FT: Jay McInerney”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 3