living with(out) regrets.

My day started off on an interesting note. Since I woke up early, I spent a leisurely morning on Google looking up "life's biggest regret's". Recently I have been nursing mixed feelings about a BIG decision I made couple of years ago, and on this particular morning I was in a state of regret. Did I make the right decision? Where would I be if I'd taken the other road? Had I been blinded by pride?

Needless to say, that lemon tart pie has left the bakery. But I also began to think about the emotion regret. There is a sense of defeat associated with feeling regret, and often people will deny feeling this forbidden emotion. But let's be honest for a minute: What do you regret in your life? What do you wish you could have done differently in your past?

A 2005 study by Roese and Summerville evaluated Americans' biggest life regrets by looking at nine articles studying regret and organizing the answers from 3,041 participants into six major categories. Biggest percentage of people expressed regrets on decisions they made on education.

Biggest life regret by far: education

• Career: jobs, employment, earning a living (e.g., “If only I were a dentist”)
• Community: volunteer work, political activism (e.g., “I should have volunteered more”)
• Education: school, studying, getting good grades (e.g., “If only I had studied harder in college”)
• Parenting: interactions with offspring (e.g., “If only I’d spent more time with my kids”)
• Family: interactions with parents and siblings (e.g., “I wish I’d called my mom more often”)
• Finance: decisions about money (e.g., “I wish I’d never invested in Enron”)
• Friends: interactions with close others (e.g., “I shouldn’t have told Susan that she’d gained weight”)

I laughed out loud when I saw the examples- look at #1! The paper suggested that education may be the biggest life regret in this study for Americans because 1) education is widely available (university, professional schools, associate degrees, leisure learning classes) and 2) education opens the door to other possible desirable outcomes which may further be a source of regret ("I would've had a different job if I'd graduated").

Also fascinating was the Zeigarnik effect: "Regrettable failures to act tend to be more memorable and enduring than regrettable actions."(Gilovich and Medvec 1995) When asked "what they'd do differently", most people answer they should have done X, rather than that they should not have done Y. You can probably imagine thousand scenarios for what would have happened if you'd done something (picture a tree sprouting hundred branches) as opposed to reality where the possibility did not happen at all.

xkcd.com knows regret

I haven't lived enough to feel regret to soak my dinner bread with tears, but should I be so worried about regretting a decision that I am terrified to make a move? Nah. But rather than declaring yourself immune to regret, I think it's important to recognize why you may be feeling regret: for me, I wonder if I'd spent enough time pondering the implications of my decision before I made it, if I gave my alternative a fair chance. So lesson learned, moving on and living in the now (especially since the past does not exist anyway).