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May 2, 2022 - January 17, 2023
“Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal.”
What the anti-regret brigades are proposing is not a blueprint for a life well lived. What they are proposing is—forgive the terminology, but the next word is carefully chosen—bullshit.
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.
The purpose of this book is to 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.
Nearly all regrets fall into four core categories—foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets.
But by age eight, they develop the ability even to anticipate regret.[7] And by adolescence, the thinking skills necessary to experience regret have fully emerged.[8] Regret is a marker of a healthy, maturing mind.
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.
In all, a whopping 82 percent say that this activity is at least occasionally part of their lives, making Americans far more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth.[17]
A related study by Galinsky, University of California, Berkeley’s, Laura Kray, and Ohio University’s Keith Markman found that when people look back at previous negotiations and think about what they regretted not doing—for example, not extending a strong first offer—they made better decisions in later negotiations.
This is one of the central findings on regret: it can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance.
Excessive regret is linked to an array of mental health problems—most prominently depression and anxiety, but also post-traumatic stress disorder.
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]
Ample research shows that people who accept, rather than judge, their negative experiences end up faring better.[29]
They’re beautiful because of the imperfections. The cracks make them better. What’s true for ceramics can also be true for people.
“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.”
With the exterior world so fraught, interior contemplation might have felt indulgent. Navel-gazing was still a few years from becoming a national pastime.
“Education is the number one regret at least in part because in contemporary society, new and further education of one sort or another is available to nearly all individuals,” they concluded.
Regrets involving romance—lost loves and unfulfilling relationships—were the most common, comprising about 19 percent of the total regrets. Family finished next with 17 percent. Education and career each garnered 14 percent.[10]
of Babel cacophony ran a common human melody. It took me a while to figure out, but I’ve discovered that regret, too, has both a surface structure and a deep structure. What’s visible and easy to describe—the realms of life such as family, education, and work—is far less significant than a hidden architecture of human motivation and aspiration that lies beneath it.
we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn’t take than the chances we did.
But as the chorus of voices builds, if you listen carefully, you’ll also hear something else: the vivid harmony of what we need to lead a fulfilling life.
I regret not looking after my health through the years. I did lots to hurt my health and not much to help it. Also, I did not save for retirement, and now I’m sixty-two, unhealthy, and broke.
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.
Remember that what distinguishes regret from disappointment is personal responsibility. Disappointments exist outside of your control.
Introversion and extroversion are not binary personality types.
“Regrettable failures to act . . . have a longer half-life than regrettable actions,” Gilovich and Medvec wrote in one of their early studies.
It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin, That lays eggs under your skin.
For me, one of those books is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, written by Jonathan Haidt and published in 2012.[1]
There is something heartening about grown women and men waking up at night despairing over incidents decades earlier in their lives in which they hurt others, acted unfairly, or compromised the values of their community. It suggests that stamped somewhere in our DNA and
buried deep in our souls is the desire to be good.
The lesson, which we’ve heard in religious texts, philosophy tracts, and parental admonitions, is this: when in doubt, do the right thing.
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.
Rifts usually begin with a catalyzing incident—an insult, a disclosure, a betrayal. That incident leads to raised voices, ominous threats, crashed plates, and other mainstays of telenovelas and Edward Albee plays. Rifts leave the parties resentful and antagonistic, even though to outsiders the underlying grievance might sound trivial and easy to repair.
Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. . . . Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.
People with strong marriages suffered less physical pain and emotional distress over the course of their lives.
“Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”[8]
but fewer than twenty respondents out of more than sixteen thousand regretted having children.
“You’re almost always better off to err on the side of showing up. And if it’s awkward, then it’s awkward and you’ll live. It’ll be fine. But if you don’t show up, it’s lost forever.”
THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF REGRET
Higgins argued that we all have an “actual self,” an “ideal self,” and an “ought self.” 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]
“Couldas” bug us longer than “shouldas,” because we end up fixing many of the “shouldas.”[*]
“Regret is a thing,” Jeff said when we talked. “I do have regret. It fuels me. Regret sucks, but I like that better than people who say, ‘No regrets,’ or, ‘I don’t have regrets.’ ”
We’re more apt to repair what we did than what we didn’t do.
Apologies, wrote the great sociologist Erving Goffman, are “admissions of blameworthiness and regret for an undesirable event that allow actors to try to obtain a pardon from audiences.”[2] If that pardon is granted, the emotional and moral debt of the past is reduced, which at least partially rebalances the ledger.
At Leasts can turn regret into relief. On their own they don’t change our behavior, but they change how we feel about our behavior, which can be valuable.
So, with action regrets that are bringing you down, ask yourself: How could the decision I now regret have turned out worse? What is one silver lining in this regret? How would I complete the following sentence? “At least . . .”
If we look backward with the specific intent of moving forward, we can convert our regrets into fuel for progress. They can propel us toward smarter choices, higher performance, and greater meaning. And science shows us how.
But self-esteem brings downsides. Because it offers indiscriminate affirmation unconnected to genuine accomplishment, self-esteem can foster narcissism, diminish empathy, and stoke aggression.
Criminals, for instance, have higher self-esteem than the general population.
Self-compassion begins by replacing searing judgment with basic kindness.
