A Life of Minimal Regrets
A Life of Minimal Regrets
A helpful way to think about regrets
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Dear Bolu,
Usually, you're up so high, shooting for stars on Saturday nights. But not tonight. It’s not because the sky has run out of stars, your highness has deserted you, or you’ve forgotten how to conjure lofty goals. No. You’re occupied with something—someone else. It’s a phone call with a friend, Toomeshay, who needs your help making a weighty decision. What’s the decision about? Well, it could be anything; Valentine’s presents, a job offer, a vacation spot, or movie tickets. The nature of the decision itself is irrelevant—whether it’s a choice of the lesser of two evils or, the better of two goods, they’re all the same. Toomeshay worries that she might make a decision she would regret, hence this conversation. She wants to know your thoughts, not because you’re a sage, of course. Ah, sorry. You seem to think otherwise, so maybe you are a sage. Anyway, you’ve lived long enough to know a few things about regrets. You have a few deep ones, in fact. So you talk to her.
You say regret is very often a personalised feeling, unlike many others. You can be happy or sad for someone or because of something, but regret is a state one enters on the sole account of one’s action or inaction. You say that regret comes bundled with the wonderful gift of hindsight, and so perhaps hindsight is not as wonderful as we think. Therefore, the personal nature of regrets and the inevitability of hindsight makes the potential for regrets ever-present. And you ask, is it possible for one to live a life of no regrets? That would be quite a feat. Perhaps it’s more realistic to aim for a life of minimal regrets. But how?
You say that our feelings of regret are a function of the impact of our decisions. One might regret making a decision today and not regret it tomorrow. That’s because the effects of the decision vary with time. Say Laycorn bought some stocks two years ago. If today, the price of those stocks drops drastically, he’d very likely regret buying them. However, if in a couple of weeks from today, the value rises way higher than what it initially cost him, he’d be glad he bought the stock. He’d feel no sense of regret—none at all. You say this is how regrets manifest in our lives—if the decision has aged well so far, we don’t regret it. If, however, the consequences of the decision become unpleasant, we regret it. As such, a decision can alternate between being regrettable and “non-regrettable” multiple times. It must mean then that a decision you made in the past can be seen as good, bad, good, bad, etc. It all depends on how well or poorly it has aged.
You say that that is not a useful way to think about regrets because it makes it impossible to define a good decision. If time will tell if a decision is good, then that decision is not inherently good. That’s not so helpful, is it? It becomes challenging to make confident choices because all options are potentially regrettable. Also, it leaves us with less responsibility for our actions and places us at the mercy of the universe. Ah, aren’t we already at the mercy of the universe? You say we aren’t—there are things within our circle of influence, including our decisions and reactions to things. You say we shouldn’t regret decisions simply because of how poorly they’ve aged. It’s not helpful at all.
Instead, you say that we should only regret decisions we made against our better judgment. Say Phranck is to choose between partying and going to bed early. Say he knows fully well that the latter is the better choice, but he instead decides to do the former, then he has made a regrettable decision. He can regret it because he knew better than to do that. If, however, he decided to sleep early, then it is not a regrettable decision. It doesn’t matter if he missed out on a lovely DJ performance, a pretty woman, a guest appearance by a popular musical act—it is not a regrettable decision. Why? At that moment, he made the decision he thought was best. He could not have made a better decision, and as such, he can’t regret it. It makes no sense to regret it.
You say that thinking of regret this way makes us hold ourselves more responsible for the choices we make. It places the onus on us to evaluate our options, recognise the best one—which, by the way, needn’t be the most convenient or pleasurable—and courageously go for it. So a bad, regrettable decision is not necessarily the decision that has so far aged terribly. No. If it is, then we have no control over what we can regret. We can potentially regret everything because everything ages terribly at some point, even obvious, wise choices. Instead, a regrettable decision is one we made against our better judgement. So making the choice we believe is the right one is the only way to live a life of minimal regrets.
You say to Toomeshay that she needn’t worry about making a regrettable decision. You say that all she needs to do is weigh her options and choose what she thinks is the best—whether it’s a pack of white singlets as Valentine’s gifts, the job offer from Deloitte, vacation in Comoros, or tickets to see Encanto. And regardless of whatever happens in the future—whether he loves the singlets, she gets laid off at work after two months, she gets ill on vacation, or she loved the movie—she can’t regret the decision because she made the best decision she could. You conclude by saying that it’s okaay to be sad when things don’t work out as well as we’d hoped—life happens—but we shouldn’t let in feelings of regret as long as we made the choice we thought was the right one.
Oh well.
A while ago, I was searching for answers to a question when I stumbled (I’m fine, I’m fine, I didn’t get bruised) on a quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was lifted from his book, Crime and Punishment;
“Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’d kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
It’s an interesting quote because it suggests that people kiss others for the nonsense they say. Maybe I—well, nothing. What I find even more interesting is that Dostoyevsky seemingly suggests that we prioritise travelling our own path more than being right. It’s a ridiculous ordering of priorities, one might argue. But it is sound, practical advice. When we travel other people’s paths, they might lead us to a treasure trove. However, they could just as easily lead us down a path of destruction. We might think then that it’s a matter of trust—we just need to trust the right people because they won’t lead us astray. Well, how do we know who to trust? We could say that people who love us won’t lead us astray. Also, people who haven’t deceived us before won’t fool us now. Well, those are fair filters, but they’re not good enough. Just because someone hasn’t lied to you before doesn’t mean they won’t lie now. And yes, it happens that even people who love us unintentionally give us bad advice.
If someone came up to you to say that the moon doesn’t exist, regardless of how much you trust, respect, and love them or how many times they’ve given you excellent stock advice, you’re very likely going to disagree with them. Why? You know the moon exists. You’ve seen it. So it’s not a matter of trust, no. Instead, it is a question of knowledge. How much do you know? So even when we listen to people’s advice, we choose to accept what they say based on what we already know. Oh, and they might be right—the moon may not exist.
Dostoyevsky is not saying that we shouldn’t seek people’s advice or ask for their thoughts when we want to make a decision. It’s okaay to do that, but we should make the decision ourselves. No, I suppose it’s not so much making the decision as owning it. It’s coming into the awareness we are responsible for our choices. These choices result from our knowledge—whether we seek the advice of others or not. It’s now up to us to update this knowledge as we go and grow to increase our capacity for making better choices. And that is walking our own path of choosing and learning. So it’s okaay if we make mistakes along the way because there is no other way!
If you make what you think is the best decision with the knowledge you have, you shouldn’t regret it regardless of what the future brings. You could not have made a better decision. So don’t regret following your own path even if you encounter a rough patch. It would not be a regrettable decision if you thought it was the right thing to do, dear friend.
Fin.
P.S.
Have you ever heard someone say something along the lines of “I regret being born”? It’s such a strange thing to say, I think. You had no say in being born, and as such, you can’t regret it. Being born is perhaps the most “non-regrettable” thing in this world.
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Write you soon, merci!
- Wolemercy