Invert Regret

On March 23rd, a New York Times piece reported on a survey of American adults. The survey asked respondents what their biggest regrets were. The answers largely centered on three regrets: relationships, education, and career. And what is regret? Longing, anger, self-criticism. Why didn’t I choose this path? Why wasn’t I more decisive when I had the chance to be? We hate regret, and we love stories of those with no regrets. In fact, it seems that perhaps the key to happiness is banishing the concept from our lives. If we have no regrets, then we are content, and therefore in a place where past regrets are resolved, present anxieties are clear from the doubt of the future regret of making the wrong decision, and therefore the future can be embraced without worrying about how to move forward. No regret is satisfaction. The regrets that the survey picks up on are directly related to perceived happiness: love, living standard, respect of one’s family and peers, etc.

So why do we worry about regrets, and why do we constantly regret the decisions that we “should have made?” Any answer to this is complex and invites sociological, psychological, anthropological, and philosophical explanation. Indeed, much research and many writings have endeavored to shed light on regret.

But what if we made a simple moral inversion? What if we embraced all of the moments of indecision and of mistake that form the crossroads of the regretted event, and affirmed all that has slipped through our fingers? Instead of wallowing in could-of-been formulations of our lives, we can happily accept the contingencies of it all. Indeed, we can find pleasure in not being decisive. I often return to moments of my life when I did say the correct thing, when I shied away from being the decisive being I ought to be. And I regret this. I regret the missed opportunities for friends, love, and experiences. At the moment I failed to make the proper decision, I was, if not consciously aware, sure that this was the safest thing to do. The hesitation and turn down the safest road assured my preservation. Other sorts of regrets are formed by glowingly accepted a route, safe or not, and later realizing that this road led oneself to miss a similar number of opportunities. In this case, decisiveness has damned the decider. So regret in the moment, and regret in hindsight both bring us to image of the crossroads, where one is about to take the unremarkable path, or takes the remarkable path, but realizes it was false. All paths lead to nowhere.

So the solution is to dissolve this entire life mapping, this concern about proper paths, challenging paths, and the image of the fateful departure, where one embarks on a path towards later regret in reflection. Embrace life’s basic indecision. Or more precisely, embrace the infinite and unavoidable potentialities of what we do, and reconcile with the inevitable fact that doing necessitates decisions and regrets. All decisions necessarily exclude others, and in the infinite combination of possible paths, no way can’t lead to some sense of loss. This entire metaphor of the “life course,” with its pathways and routes, is corrupted: it implicitly posits a correct route, and guarantees regret. If we inverted this emphasis on doing – and doing things correctly – then we can arrive at acceptance of not doing. Thus, at every moment when a decision is made, and others aren’t, we can accept the falling away of what didn’t happen. This demands a moral inversion of the connotations of slipping through one’s fingers, so that the slipping through is no longer experienced as loss, but instead is the process that we will affirm and relish. Because of the infinitesimal count of not-done things, it is more fulfilling to simply accept what can’t be done, and glory in imaginings of what could have been done as one would enjoy a fine drink or nice smelling flowers or paintings in a gallery. Instead of regretting not owning the paintings, we can simply enjoy the moment we spend watching them in the museum of imagination. What greater hope is their for happiness than accepting that we can’t consume or consummate all, and that affirming this, instead of regretting it, may bring us a more realistic and possible happiness.