Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you could do that back then!) and would have basically won the lottery if I hadn't basically just given it away to a friend of mine who was trying to do something (Which ended up being getting scammed by that butterfly labs scheme)... That friend ended up probably one of the most anxious people I have ever seen, ended up threatening to hit me over some petty shit, doesn't talk to me nor a bunch of our old mutual friends because he dragged them into the scam, and all this drama that I probably would have been subject to in some way had I been the one to blow that cash. Hell - I likely would have been dead if I was in my early 20s with that much money. Reflecting on who I am now vs who I would have been if I had done the "less regrettable" thing and been way too rich way too fast is fine, I think I just paid for having everything in life put into perspective and that's invaluable. I'm doing fine these days which is good enough for me.

The best advice I've read about avoiding regrets was in “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” by William B. Irvine. William B. Irvine has an entire chapter dedicated to it titled; Fatalism. The basic approach of the Stoics was that the past (and present) should be viewed fatalistically; fate would have it so, and therefore there is no rational (again a key word for the Stoics) reason to regret this or that. Have you spent years coming to one realization or another? Lived too long in one place? Worked too long in the same workplace? It was fated to take so long. The same goes for the present; enjoy it because you can't change it. The future, on the other hand, you must influence to the extent you can.

William B. Irvine starts chapter six with:

> “ONE WAY TO PRESERVE our tranquility, the Stoics thought, is to take a fatalistic attitude toward the things that happen to us. According to Seneca, we should offer ourselves to fate, inasmuch as “it is a great consolation that it is together with the universe we are swept along.”

A related mental trick I use to move on from some mistake I'm stuck on is to think the following:

In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this. So I should focus on the present and the future, and try to identify and avoid that mistake (pick a different future!), rather than obsessing over the past.

It's incredibly obvious, of course, but going through the exercise of thinking it out explicitly really helps.

Study was a bit silly. Losing $10 in a game of chance is one type of regret but real regret is normally several shades darker, or at least more embarrassing. Could make an anecdotal argument that losing a small stakes game of chance is one of the easiest levels of regret to move on from. Anyone whos seen a casino on tv could tell you this. (EMPHASIS: SMALL STAKES. Yes, gambling at advanced levels is as dark as anything i can conjure.)

The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move on without a mental breakdown.

My whole life is regret and I found the article very insightful. I heard a religious quote that I wish I could remember: it's better to earn gold along the way by investing in relationships than to bet it all on a gold mine.

As a hacker trying to win the internet lottery since.. 1992-ish, I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's like flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which feels like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent. My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage. I only have the smallest bandwidth now to get anything at all done, and 90% of that is a waste of time due to conceptual flaws in languages, frameworks, operating systems, hardware, etc. In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning, but I chose poorly or lost, so now it's too expensive to get back the sunk cost that I've invested. Making it ever-harder to keep going. Sometimes it feels like regret is all I have.

Unfortunately the winners usually don't have this experience. They don't have the gumption to lose for a lifetime. So they don't go through the same healing and growth process. Vanishingly few wealthy people can step back and use their money for social wellness altruistically.

Meanwhile some of us stumble onto concepts like duality and see through the matrix. We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation. Then we look around and wonder why everyone is acting so strangely, having strong attachments to materialism in the 3D. The more we have, the more we cling to our ego and accomplishments, eventually living in fear of losing it all. While the people with nothing are more likely to lose their risk aversion and live in service to others.

Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality. Which works out well for the rich, while the poor suffer under systems of control they have little say in.

Zen Buddhism and Taoism touch on the idea that life is suffering, and suffering comes from attachments. So something that helps me is to go into situations knowing that I'll likely fail, but trying anyway, without expectation of outcome or regret.

So that one day if/when the win comes, I don't waste it like so many others. And maybe, just maybe, we can change the world.

I try to follow a 'butterfly flaps its wings' mindset. In the alt universe where I had done the 'right' thing, other tragedies might have befallen me.

In the alt universe where I aced the interview and gotten my dream job, I might have died in a car crash.

In the alt universe where I didn't say something stupid and alienate a friend, my husband might have been stricken by cancer.

We just don't know and can't know. Every night, whatever happened, I try to feel a moment of gratitude. My family is here and secure and happy and that is not true of everyone and not to be taken for granted.

The actual study: Reeck, C., & LaBar, K. S. (2024). Reining in regret: emotion regulation modulates regret in decision making. Cognition and Emotion, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2024.2357847

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2024.2...

I realized in my late 30s that I have almost no sense of dread when I think back on all of the cringey or embarrassing things I've done.

I think this was a huge super power for me early in my career. I embarrassed myself over and over again and didn't care or even think about it. Right back at it the next day.

> They were paid $10 for the one hour of questioning as well as bonus money for points they’d racked up during the experiment. If they answered questions incorrectly, they lost real money and may have felt a pang of — you guessed it — regret.

But they didn't "lose real money". They lost theoretical money that they didn't actually have. This is a trap people fall into with gambling, the stock market, and other up-and-down financial systems. What matters is the money you're holding in your hand, not the money you could have been holding in your hand. If I go to Vegas and put $20 on roulette and watch it multiply over rounds to $20,000, do I have $20,000? Not until I cash out I don't. So if the next round wipes all of that out, how much did I lose? $20. Not $20,000 — $20.

I realize this is sort of tangential to the point, but it's also a valid strategy for avoiding regret.

What people experienced during a trivial, 1 hour study doesn't really compare to regret over decades of someones life.

One thing I tell myself: a lot of mistakes I made when I was younger - or things that I regret others having done to me - if they hadn’t happened, it is almost certain I would not have had the children I do. Sure, I might have still had children - but I wouldn’t have had these children. These kids, and those regrets, are a package deal. So in loving them and saying “Yes” to their existence, I have to say “Yes” to those regrets too, which are necessary to their existence.

I got this idea from reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, although it is my own personal spin on some of his ideas.

Faith and religion also work well.

Curious. I think this applies less to me than I had hoped. I don’t feel regrets over these „you win some, you loose some“ coin toss decisions. Looking back, I clearly made avoidable mistakes but they where the obvious one (for me, back then, in that context) and I can clearly learn from them. But the ones I truly regret don’t fit in that scheme for me. They are just pure loss, no reasoning whatsoever, just stupid. Most of them socially. Not finishing my bachelor but instead canceling and going to work due to financial pressure I can deal with easily. I can „sell that“ to myself. Threading people poorly and loosing good friends that? No way I’m ever forgiving myself that. But these don’t fit in that „portfolio“ framework. They where just stupid decision. I still learn from that and know what to work on. But I cannot reason them away.

"For some, regret might be slow-brewing indecision that amounts to loss, like not having children."

Or ... having children!

Somewhat connected to the approach proposed in this article is something I've found that really helps when I've taken a hit:

Reframe the loss as a learning experience that will save you much more in the long term.

Example: You can read and listen to all the advice in the world, say, about being careful who you lend money to, but when you get stung for $100 by a "friend" that is going to register very, very much more strongly and will possibly save you $1000s in the future as your antenna will be much more effective.

It isn't something that can always be used but being able to see seemingly painful hits as cheap lessons can be quite empowering.

I just rewatched Drive My Car. The director has a new movie that's quite different, but if you want to watch a deep exploration of grief and regret, that's your movie.

Now I wish I knew Uncle Vanya better.

This assumes people’s regret focus on things they did by applying sound logic which had undesirable outcomes. And in those situations it’s a no brainer to apply this framework

The ones that are harder are where you regret something that occurred as a result of not applying logic. There, you need to learn how to cut yourself slack, understand the context you existed in at the time, and acknowledge that you’re a better person who has learned from it.

It’s not obvious to me why this experiment induced regret specifically. Are we sure the participants didn’t feel some other emotion like annoyance at losing?

  Regret, by definition, comes too late;
  Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

https://reactormag.com/sonnet-against-entropy/

Regret comes from a sense of loss or embarrassment typically. You missed a job, a partner and opportunity. You flubbed a social event, you missed a signal or you messed up at work.

Each has a strategy to deal with specifically. Typical ways are gratitude, acceptance, understanding and more. You just need to change your perspective on the event and it should minimize its impact. Extreme events excluded.

tl;dr Focus forward. Backward is the direction of blame, forward is the direction of improvement.

“Boy that sucked, I’m sure gunna remember not to do that again” Read the SRE book on blameless postmortems for more blindingly obvious and wildly underused psychological and institutional hacks.