Regret

“Maybe I’ve forgotten the name and the address of everyone I’ve ever known, it’s nothing I regret”

The Story

I recently started listening to Daniel Pink’s “The Power of Regret.”  I was struck by two things from the introductory materials of the book:

1. No matter what anyone says, they experience regret.  And that’s OK.  If fact, if someone literally doesn’t experience regret, it’s a sign that something is medically wrong with their brain.

2. Humans are the only species that’s able to regret something from the past, and then reconstruct their life in light of having made a different decision.  For example, “If I would’ve gone to that college twenty years ago instead of the one I went to, I would be much happier now. I’d be driving a much better car and live in a much nicer house!”

Pink solicited stories of regret from people around the world.  They’re short — often a sentence or two — but they’re embedded throughout.  Listening to other people recount their short stories of regret make me think about my own, too.

One experience of mine that comes to mind is a fairly pivotal decision that I made in high school.  I decided to spend the last two years of my high school career attending classes at the local community college.  Those classes counted for both high school and college credit.  Instead of going to high school every day during my junior and senior years, I had a full load of college classes.

Taking two years of college while in high school had a huge impact on my life — I was able to transfer all of my course work to a traditional four year college.  I spent two years at the four year college getting my bachelor’s degree and graduated college with a four year degree before my 21st birthday.  I exited college two years before everyone my age, and with exponentially less student debt.  I was “ahead” of my peers in life — I had a full-time job before most people my age, bought a house before most people my age, etc.

When I look back at the decision to forego my last two years of high school to attend college, I don’t feel regret.  I would make the same decision again.  But I do wonder what could’ve been had I not made the same decision.  I wonder about all of the relationships that I had with peers in high school that inevitably suffered because I wasn’t in the same building that they were every day.  I wonder about the relationships that I built while at the community college and how transient they were (remember: most folks were older than I was).  I also wonder about the relationships I built while at my four year institution, and how my life may have been different had I spent the full four years there.  The emotion I feel is not regret, though.  It’s fear — the fear of having missed out on a time in life that most people look back on fondly.  Some look back on it as the greatest years of their life.  I don’t.  I look back on it as the steps that were necessary to make me the person I am today.

The Lesson

Regret is an emotion that forces us to think about changing some element of our lives.  It gnaws at us — for minute, hours, or even years.  Change is tightly coupled with regret.  Each time we cast our minds back to experiences we’ve had and feel regret, we’re implicitly proposing a change.  Whether it’s a change we imagine (“If only I’d have…”) or one we can instantiate in our present tense (“I’ve done a lot of that in the past, and I’m not going to do it anymore.”).

New Order — “Regret”