The Thing About Regret — You Chose It
What is regret? Think about one thing you regret in your life. What’s that feeling? That gnawing feeling tugging at your heart, that cognitive dissonance in your brain that glitches like a broken TV.
All the “Oh, I should have’s and “what could have happen”s. All the possible ways things might have turned out if a certain action was taken instead. But the most crucial thing is — It already happened.
Regret is a state of mind, like happiness, sadness, anger, frustration. You are happy because you choose to be happy, you are sad because you choose to be sad. Likewise for regrets. Say a loved one died of cancer, you can choose to be sad and grieve for the loss, you can choose to be happy that they are finally released from their suffering after all these years, you can choose to regret that you never spend enough time with them. Or, you can choose to feel all three at the same time.
And it’s totally fine.
Being humans, we are not in full control of our neurotransmitters in our brains — like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, et cetera. They control our lives, our behaviour, and our moods. But that doesn’t mean we have no control over our logic. In a state of visceral emotional roller coasters, it is a skill to be able to reason and fight your way through the murkiness of clouded rationality.
Regret will always be there, because it a result of opportunity cost.
Jim chose to focus on his career so that his family can live a comfortable life with his high salaries and promotion up the corporate ladder, but then he regrets not spending enough time with his wife and son.
Bill chose to be back home everyday for dinner instead of working overtime like his coworkers, they get raises and promotions while he’s stuck at the same position for years. He deeply regrets not working hard enough to get raises and promotions so his wife and daughter can live a more comfortable life.
Both Jim and Bill did the opposite options and they both regret the opposite thing. Switch them around and the same scenario plays the same way, only in the other direction. Why? Because they chose to be regretful for not achieving something else rather than being thankful and appreciative of what they already have.
Regret is a thing to get over, everyone will experience it at some point in their lives. It comes up as an arrow of doubt jutting out of your heart, as the archer says, with a glee of schadenfreude:
“Are you sure you want to study the arts?”
“You should have married that previous girl you dated, you two were more compatible.”
“You should not have bought that apartment, it’s small and expensive, the other one down the street is way better.”
Well, what would you have me do? Do another few years to get an engineering degree instead? Divorce my wife and get back with my ex and marry her? Sell my current apartment and buy the other one now? Many times regrets show up as a flash, a thought in your mind, but you just have to reason with it and dispel it from your mind.
You have to know that you can never have all the possible information from the past, present and future to make a certain “best” decision. You will regret something.
The reward comes when you are able to get over the hurdle and live on, to be optimistic, to know that regret is inevitable and once it has dissolved, even if it leaves a scar, we must wear it like armour and it can never be used to hurt you again. Life gets easier if you can deal with regret, when you can choose to come out of it unscathed, because sometimes, regret can break a person.
You have to be comfortable to accept what was already done and not wallow in self-pity, making yourself miserable and a whiny bitch.
Imagine a life without regrets, on paper it looks wonderful, isn’t it? No more what ifs and could haves. But regret is a big part that makes us human — that remorse, that lost cause, that forgone opportunity. What other species can have that deep, irritable feeling that gnaws at them and send them into paranoia and anxiety as the brain plays out all possible scenarios that can happen. How can you say you have truly lived if you lived a life of zero regrets?
But still, regret is a bit of a dick most of the time.
Thank you for reading my brain dump! It means a lot if you could punch the ❤ button if you agree with me and share it if you liked it! Regret is a big psychological topic and I’m no expert, but I feel like I’d like to talk about it because I’m at a time of my life where regret will play a big part as I make my life decisions these couple of years.
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