My situation is not exactly the same, but I am feeling much the same way lately.
Thank you to everyone on HN who gives sincere advice and words of support.
I think there is a lot of good advice here.
This is similar to what I call the "red sock in the wash theory".
When I was growing up (back in the 1970's) my Dad insisted that my Mom do his shirts for him (back then all men had to wear a white shirt and tie to work). My Mom suggested that he should take them to the cleaners like everyone else does. But my Dad insisted that it would save money if she did them for him. She dutifully complied but "accidentally" put a red sock in the wash with them so they came out pink. Of course, in those days, a man wearing a pink shirt would be considered a "sissy" or whatever.
After that, my Dad did his work shirts himself a few times then realized it was a hassle and used the cleaners ever after that.
Yes exactly what I was thinking, it is as if you mentally picture and weight each move, but what if you could actually represent that somehow and play out all the variations of a game like a multiverse. Sometimes when I play against a computer I will try different things by trying something then going back using undo, but then I wonder, wait maybe the other fork would have worked out, etc. This way you could have many versions going at once. I have look at source of various open chess engines and they do something similar, the idea is what if there were a way, maybe with shading of the pieces or some other way of representing the super positions of each possibility. The UI would be interesting challenge.
HA ! Of course there is, that always happens to me, I think I am the first to think of something but then of course, a bunch of other people beat me to it :)
I always thought a cool chess variant would be quantum chess where you can move a piece to more than one square and assign a probability to each position. Your opponent could do the same. But I never worked out how it could work from there.
Thank you for the post. Good luck my friend.