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April 15 - April 30, 2022
It is “the unpleasant feeling associated with some action or inaction a person has taken which has led to a state of affairs that he or she wishes were different,” say the psychotherapists.[1] “Regret is created by a comparison between the actual outcome and that outcome that would have occurred had the decision maker made a different choice,” say the management theorists.[2] It is “a feeling of unpleasure associated with a thought of the past, together with the identification of an object and the announcement of an inclination to behave in a certain way in the future,”
Human beings are both seasoned time travelers and skilled fabulists. These two capabilities twine together to form the cognitive double helix that gives life to regret.
This combination of time travel and fabulism is a human superpower. It’s hard to fathom any other species doing something so complex, just as it’s difficult to imagine a jellyfish composing a sonnet or a raccoon rewiring a floor lamp.
The emotion becomes regret only when she does the work of boarding the time machine, negating the past, and contrasting her grim actual present with what might have been. Comparison lives at regret’s core.
Every damn thing you do in life can pay off for you. Because, as we’re about to discover, regret doesn’t just make us human. It also makes us better.
The human superpower I described in Chapter 2—our ability to mentally travel through time and to conjure incidents and outcomes that never happened—enables what logicians call “counterfactual thinking.” Split the adjective in two and its meaning is evident. We can concoct events that run counter to the actual facts. “Counterfactuals are . . . a signature example of the imagination and creativity that stand at the intersection of thinking and feeling,”
Counterfactuals permit us to imagine what might have been.
Counterfactuals can point in either of two directions—down or up. With “downward counterfactuals,” we contemplate how an alternative could have been worse. They prompt us to say “At least . . .”—as in, “Sure, I got a C+ on that exam, but at least I passed the course and don’t have to take it again.” Let’s call these types of counterfactuals At Leasts. The other variety are known as “upward counterfactuals.” With upward counterfactuals, we imagine how things could have gone better. They make us say “If only . . .”—as in, “If only I’d attended class more often and done all the reading, I’d have
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One study found that 80 percent of the counterfactuals people generate are If Onlys.
Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual—the ultimate If Only. The source of its power, scientists are discovering, is that it muddles the conventional pain-pleasure calculus.[10] Its very purpose is to make us feel worse—because by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.
“There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen, 1992
The psychological concept is known as “escalation of commitment to a failing course of action.” It’s one of the many cognitive biases that can pollute our decisions.
A look at the research shows that regret, handled correctly, offers three broad benefits. It can sharpen our decision-making skills. It can elevate our performance on a range of tasks. And it can strengthen our sense of meaning and connectedness.
1. Regret can improve decisions.
2. Regret can boost performance.
This is one of the central findings on regret: it can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance.
Lingering on a regret for too long, or replaying the failure over and over in your head, can have the opposite effect. Selecting the wrong target for your regret—say, that you wore a red baseball cap at the blackjack table rather than that you took another card when you were holding a ten and a king—offers no improvement.
3. Regret can deepen meaning.
“My life is more flavorful because of my regrets,” she told me. “I remember the bitterness of the taste of regret. So when something is sweet, good god, it’s so much sweeter.” She knows she’ll never get the time back with her grandparents. “It’s a flavor that will always be missing,” she says. Collecting the stories of her father, which she wouldn’t have done without the prod of If Only, helps. “It is a beautiful substitute,” she says. “But it isn’t a replacement. Nothing will fill in that flavor. I will spend the rest of my life with a little bit of a gap. But that’s going to inform
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When we handle it properly, regret can make us better. Understanding its effects hones our decisions, boosts our performance, and bestows a deeper sense of meaning. The problem, though, is that we often don’t handle it properly.
In chapter 22 of his 1890 masterwork The Principles of Psychology, James contemplated the purpose of the human ability to think. He proposed that how we think, even what we think, depends on our situation.
“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.”[20] Modern psychologists have affirmed James’s observation, while shaving off ten words in the service of pith: Thinking is for doing.[21] We act in order to survive. We think in order to act.
When it comes to regret, a third view is healthier: Feeling is for thinking. Don’t dodge emotions. Don’t wallow in them either. Confront them. Use them as a catalyst for future behavior. If thinking is for doing, feeling can help us think.[27]
But occasional, acute stress is helpful, even essential.
When feeling is for thinking, and thinking is for doing, regret is for making us better.
Their work established a new—and now centuries-old—art form called kintsugi.
Kintsugi (which translates to “golden joinery”) considers the breaks and the subsequent repairs part of the vessel’s history, fundamental elements of its being. The bowls aren’t beautiful despite the imperfections. They’re beautiful because of the imperfections. The cracks make them better.
But “it somehow gave me this touchstone and perspective that makes other decisions and value judgments easier for me,”
“The opportunity and the feeling that I got out of that loss, and that fullness and that wholeness, is the greatest privilege I could have ever asked for.” Because of the pain, she sees the rest of her life with greater urgency and purpose.
What do people regret? Lots of stuff. Why do they have those regrets? Something about opportunity.
Beginning with a 1957 book called Syntactic Structures, Chomsky capsized these beliefs. He argued that every language was built atop a “deep structure”—a universal framework of rules lodged in the human brain.[1] When children learn to speak, they’re not simply parroting sounds. They’re activating grammatical wiring that already exists. Language wasn’t an acquired skill, Chomsky said. It was an innate capacity.
They divide into four categories of human regret. Foundation regrets. The first deep structure category cuts across nearly all the surface categories. Many of our education, finance, and health regrets are actually different outward expressions of the same core regret: our failure to be responsible, conscientious, or prudent. Our lives require some basic level of stability. Without a measure of physical well-being and material security, other goals become difficult to imagine and even harder to pursue. Yet sometimes our individual choices undermine this long-term need. We shirk in school and
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Foundation regrets arise from our failures of foresight and conscientiousness. Like all deep structure regrets, they start with a choice. At some early moment, we face a series of decisions. One set represents the path of the ant. These choices require short-term sacrifice, but in the service of a long-term payoff. The other choices represent the path of the grasshopper. This route demands little exertion or assiduousness in the short run, but risks exacting a cost in the long run.
Foundation regrets begin with an irresistible lure and end with an inexorable logic.
We typically read “The Ant and the Grasshopper” as a morality tale, but it’s also a story about cognition.
Temporal discounting
In chapter 13 of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, a few of protagonist Jake Barnes’s expatriate friends arrive in Pamplona, Spain, and meet for a drink. During the conversation, Mike Campbell, a Scotsman, discloses his recent bankruptcy. “How did you go bankrupt?” American Bill Gorton asks him. “Two ways,” Campbell replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.”[3]
Our brains therefore play a double trick on us. They entice us into valuing the now too much and the later too little. Then they prevent us from understanding the nonlinear, compounding effects of our choice. Overlay the two charts, and they form a trap that can be difficult to escape.
Remember that what distinguishes regret from disappointment is personal responsibility. Disappointments exist outside of your control.
When people, especially Westerners, try to explain someone’s behavior, we too often attribute the behavior to the person’s personality and disposition rather than to the person’s situation and context.[5]
With this category of regrets, something similar might be happening—a foundation attribution error. We attribute these failures, in ourselves and others, to personal choices when they’re often at least partly the result of circumstances we can’t control.[*]
au pair,
With boldness regrets, we choose to play it safe. That may relieve us at first. The change we’re contemplating may sound too big, too disruptive, too challenging—too hard. But eventually the choice distresses us with a counterfactual in which we were more daring and, consequently, more fulfilled. Boldness regrets sound like this: If only I’d taken that risk.
As a card-carrying ambivert who prefers the company of quiet people, I’ve cheered from the sidelines when others have decried the “extrovert ideal” in Western culture. Yet the evidence shows that modest efforts to move slightly in that direction can be helpful. For instance, Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, have found that asking people simply to act like an extrovert for one week appreciably increased their well-being.[2]
The pain of boldness regrets is the pain of “What if?” Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and other researchers have repeatedly found that people regret inactions more than actions—especially in the long term. “Regrettable failures to act . . . have a longer half-life than regrettable actions,”
A key reason for this discrepancy is that when we act, we know what happened next. We see the outcome and that can shrink regret’s half-life. But when we don’t act—when we don’t step off that metaphorical train—we can only speculate how events would have unfolded.
Boldness regrets, as with the Ohio man above, are often about exploration. And some of the most significant exploration, respondents said, is inward. Authenticity requires boldness. And when authenticity is thwarted, so is growth. The most telling demonstration of this point came from several dozen people from all over the world who described their regret—their failure to be bold—with the same five words: “Not being true to myself.” People who asserted their identities rarely regretted it, even when those identities ran counter to the dominant culture. People who suppressed their identities
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The lesson is plain: Speak up. Ask him out. Take that trip. Start that business. Step off the train.
they show that beliefs about morality stand on five pillars: Care/harm: Children are more vulnerable than the offspring of other animals, so humans devote considerable time and effort to protecting them. As a result, evolution has instilled in us the ethic of care. Those who nurture and defend the vulnerable are kind; those who hurt them are cruel. Fairness/cheating: Our success as a species has always hinged on cooperation, including exchanges that evolutionary scientists call “reciprocal altruism.” That means we value those whom we can trust and disdain those who breach our trust.
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All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With moral regrets, the need is goodness. The lesson, which we’ve heard in religious texts, philosophy tracts, and parental admonitions, is this: when in doubt, do the right thing.
