How to Deal With Regret

Ask people what they regret and the answers arrive in two very different shapes. Regrets of action are specific and loud: the thing said at the funeral, the money lent, the message sent at one in the morning. Regrets of inaction are vague and quiet: the course not taken, the person not called, the years spent somewhere reasonable. The loud ones fade. The quiet ones do not, and by middle age they outnumber the others by a wide margin.

The reason is unflattering and useful. A regret of action has a fixed outcome to argue with — the loan was not repaid, the message was ignored, the damage has a size. A regret of inaction has no outcome at all, so imagination supplies one, and imagination is a generous scriptwriter. The unlived version has no dull Tuesdays, no illness, no bad manager. We are not mourning a life. We are mourning a highlight reel produced by a person who knows exactly what we like.

This is why the standard consolations fail. Telling someone everything happens for a reason invites them to defend the reel. What works better is to make the reel boring: describe the unchosen path in full, at ordinary resolution, including the commute, the money, the person you would not have met. Not to prove the choice was right — often it was not — but to compare a real life with a real life instead of with an advertisement.

Then there is the part regret gets right. Psychologists who study it consistently find it is the most future-oriented of the painful emotions: it exists to update behaviour, not to punish. A regret that has already changed something has finished its job, and continuing to feel it is like keeping a fire alarm sounding after you have left the building. The honest test is simple. What have you done differently since? If the answer is nothing, the feeling still has work to do, and the work is a change, not a mood. If the answer is a list, the alarm can stop.

The hardest regrets are the ones where the door is genuinely closed — a person who died, a decade that is gone. Here the only real option is the one nobody likes, which is to let the regret become a preference. You cannot call your grandmother. You can decide that you are now the sort of person who calls, and act on it this week, with someone else, without announcing it.

Regret is often described as useless. It is not useless; it is expensive. It buys exactly one thing — a changed instruction for the future — and having bought it, most people keep paying anyway, monthly, for years, for an item already delivered.