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March 23 - December 6, 2022
Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the steady path to happiness. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Regret is also valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.
negative emotions are essential, too. They help us survive.
Too much negative emotion, of course, is debilitating. But too little is also destructive.[10]
reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion—and to show you how to use its many strengths to make better decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to your life.
These seventy years of research distill to two simple yet urgent conclusions: Regret makes us human. Regret makes us better.
Nearly all regrets fall into four core categories—foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets.
regret “constitutes an essential component of the human experience.”[21]
“To live, it seems, is to accumulate at least some regrets.”[22]
regret doesn’t just make us human. It also makes us better.
At Least counterfactuals preserve our feelings in the moment, but they rarely enhance our decisions or performance in the future. If Only counterfactuals degrade our feelings now, but—and this is key—they can improve our lives later. 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.
Reducing cognitive biases like escalation of commitment to a failing course of action is just one way that regret, by making us feel worse, can help us do better. 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.
This is one of the central findings on regret: it can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance.
When feeling is for thinking, and thinking is for doing, regret is for making us better.
“If you have a broken heart, it means you have done something big enough and important enough and valuable enough to have broken your heart.”
All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With foundation regrets, the human need it lays bare is stability: we all require a basic infrastructure of educational, financial, and physical well-being that reduces psychological uncertainty and frees time and mental energy to pursue opportunity and meaning. The lesson reaches back two and a half millennia. Think ahead. Do the work. Start now. Help yourself and others to become the ant.
The consequences of actions are specific, concrete, and limited. The consequences of inaction are general, abstract, and unbounded. Inactions, by laying eggs under our skin, incubate endless speculation.
Boldness regrets endure because the counterfactual possibilities are so vast.
At the heart of all boldness regrets is the thwarted possibility of growth.
Authenticity requires boldness. And when authenticity is thwarted, so is growth.
People who asserted their identities rarely regretted it, even when those identities ran counter to the dominant culture. People who suppressed their identities talked about denying themselves the potential to live fully.
Sometimes the ultimate act of boldness involves the risk of using one’s voice in ways that might rattle others but that clear a new path for oneself.
All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With boldness regrets, the human need is growth—to expand as a person, to enjoy the richness of the world, to experience more than an ordinary life.
Moral regrets make up the smallest of the four categories in the deep structure of regret, representing only about 10 percent of the total regrets. But for many of us, these regrets ache the most and last the longest.
Moral regrets sound like this: If only I’d done the right thing.
when we consider what’s moral, we have an instantaneous, visceral, emotional response about right or wrong—and then we use reason to justify that intuition.[2]
one group has a narrower view of morality (don’t harm or cheat other people) and the other has a wider view (don’t harm or cheat other people—but also stay loyal to your group, heed authority, and uphold the sacred).
“moral foundations theory.” [4] Drawing on evolutionary biology, cultural psychology, and several other fields, 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
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Moral regrets are a peculiar category. They are the smallest in number, yet the greatest in variety. They are the most individually painful. But they may also be the most collectively uplifting.
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.
Connection regrets are the largest category in the deep structure of human regret.
Connection regrets sound like this: If only I’d reached out.
Closed door regrets distress us because we can’t do anything about them. Open door regrets bother us because we can, though it requires effort.
“Happiness is love. Full stop.”[11]
What give our lives significance and satisfaction are meaningful relationships.
when those relationships come apart, whether by intent or inattention, what stands in the way of bringing them back together are feelings of awkwardness. We fear that we’ll botch our efforts to reconnect, that we’ll make our intended recipients even more uncomfortable. Yet these concerns are almost always misplaced. Sure, we’ll get rebuffed sometimes. But more often—much more often, in fact—we overestimate how awkward we’ll feel and underestimate how much others will welcome our overtures.
simpler solution. Shove aside the...
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All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With connection regrets, the human need is love. Not love only in the romantic sense—but a broader version of love that includes attachment, devotion, and community and that encompasses parents, children, siblings, and friends. The lesson of closed doors is to do better next time. The lesson of open doors is to do something now. If a relationship you care about has come undone, place the call. Make that visit. Say what you feel. Push past the awkwardness and reach out.
Regret works much the same way. The four core regrets operate as a photographic negative of the good life. If we know what people regret the most, we can reverse that image to reveal what they value the most.
THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF REGRET
We seek a measure of stability—a reasonably sturdy foundation of material, physical, and mental well-being. We hope to use some of our limited time to explore and grow—by pursuing novelty and being bold. We aspire to do the right thing—to be, and to be seen as, good people who honor our moral commitments. We yearn to connect with others—to forge friendships and family relationships bonded by love. A solid foundation. A little boldness. Basic morality. Meaningful connections. The negative emotion of regret reveals the positive path for living.
Our actual self is the bundle of attributes that we currently possess. Our ideal self is the self we believe we could be—our hopes, wishes, and dreams. And our ought self is the self we believe we should be—our duties, commitments, and responsibilities.[1]
Regrets of “coulda” outnumbered regrets of “shoulda” by about three to one.
Discrepancies between our actual self and our ideal self leave us dejected. But discrepancies between our actual self and our ought self make us agitated—and therefore more likely to act.
Failures to become our ideal selves are failures to pursue opportunities. Failures to become our ought selves are failures to fulfill obligations.
opportunity and obligation sit at the center of regret, but opportunity has the more prominent seat. This also helps explain why we’re more likely to regret what we didn’t do than what we did.
Inaction regrets increase as people age.
among those ages thirty through sixty-five, regrets about career and finances were most prevalent—likely because, at that stage of life, opportunities were still alive in those realms. But as people aged, they tended to have fewer regrets about education, health, and career—and more regrets about family. One reason: at age seventy, the opportunities are relatively limited to get a PhD or launch a new career or compensate for decades of hard living. Those doors are closing. But the opportunity remains to reconcile with your estranged brother before both of you pass on. That door remains open.
We regret foregone opportunities more often than unfulfilled obligations.
A life of obligation and no opportunity is crimped. A life of opportunity and no obligation is hollow. A life that fuses opportunity and obligation is true.
For action regrets, your initial goal should be to change the immediate situation for the better.
