What looks inevitable in a history book once required people to guess.

Hindsight makes outcomes look like consequences. In the moment, the people involved had incomplete information, plausible alternatives, and no idea which way it would go, and they chose anyway. The inevitability is added later by the narrative, which knows the ending and arranges everything as a route toward it. Nobody who was there experienced it that way.

When you look back at your own decisions, judge them by what you knew at the time rather than by how they turned out. And when you are in the middle of something that will not resolve, remember that the clarity you are missing is not available to anyone yet. It arrives afterwards, and only for the people who were not there.