Dinosaurs, Regret, & Forgiving Oneself For Mistakes

"Don't lose your dinosaur" - Step Brothers

I am going to be brutally honest with you: between a broken laptop, a broken heart, and a broken glimpse in the mirror, I, like many of you, am tired.

I am tired of rising gas prices; I am tired of red tape surrounding my every moment; I am quite wholeheartedly missing my dinosaur. Now, what exactly, does that mean?

There is a scene in the movie: "Step Brothers" that ignites the dual purpose of this article:

Watch this first.

Back? Good. I hope you understood the metaphor: we all have lost our dinosaur.

Yesterday's Nightmare

Yesterday, I fell into a deep, lucid state where I could not fight the needles under my skin. I could not fight the anxiety of having to pay $300 for a repair that cost me $600 to buy.

(I also hate the fact that the Geek Squad technician did not even bother to diagnose the problem. He tricked me into believing it, and now, I am thinking he did not even look!)

That is not what this is about, I promise, but I will say one last thing:

Always, always buy a two-to-three-year warranty on your laptop.

If You Are Like Me...

If you feel like me, you have lost your dinosaur.

If the video's metaphor did not quite explain what I am getting at, think about this: when you were younger, would you have ever imagined that in ten, fifteen, twenty, or even thirty years ago, you would be doing what you are now? This will come up later, but first:

Yes, Geek Squad...

Before I continue on this tale of "righting wrongs," I cannot maintain due reason to be mad at the Geek Squad attendee. He works for a conglomerate corporation.

I also cannot be mad at my school's Financial Aid office for not giving me a clear answer on if my tuition is covered or not. The school year has not even stated yet. So why stress?

And this is the point here: we all have choices in life, and we have to start taking into consideration that just as we carry emotional baggage, so did this Geek Squad attendee.

After all, how much power do I have as a person to fight them on it? Times have become warped by a sense of stagnation: nobody truly wishes to be a jerk, but yet we still behave in accordance to one. Sorry, Geek Squad "Aaron," but I would rather just save up and fix it.

Regret & Misdeeds

A recent study by Isabelle Bauer and Carsten Wrosch found that over 90 percent of the United States population, with no regard to age admitted, regret some part of their lives.

When you think about it, what is regret? It is a strong feeling that we wish we could have made better (or at least, different) choices. In fact, according to the study, this is occurring at a younger and younger age. In one of the qualitative research examples, it was stated that:

"...I feel like I have wasted my life...I feel hopeless about the future, and I have no idea where it will be taking me, good or bad, versus right or wrong..." - Anonymous

At first glance, this sounds as if it is stated by someone perhaps in their middle-to-older adulthood years, but guess what? You'd be wrong if you said that.

This was stated by a 25-year-old participant, and they could not help but note this crucial phenomenon: even at that young of an age, we find tender ways to regret our decisions.

Not only that, but we choose to avoid facing those regrets.

When you say: "I regret," in context you are saying that you are holding onto an experience that, perhaps, represented a breakup, a contractual work delay, or not getting married earlier. Almost all of the study participants strongly correlated regret with love.

When 25-year-olds are saying they regret their life choices, before life has even begun, the human race seems to have far more problems now than ever in recorded history. We need to begin to take back the dinosaur within all of us, and that comes from personal freedom.

Your Dinosaur Is There

You dinosaur is there, whether you believe it or not. You may just not be able to find it. I chose to write this article today for myself, and me? I am a writer.

If you ask me what my talent is, that one thing I am always good at, it is writing. Even when my writing is at its worst, I never once question it; I know it will return to me.

But many get caught up in daily life, and this leads to regret, when the solution was there the entire time: we have lost our dinosaurs, and we have to earn them back.

The Dinosaur Feeds

So, think back to when you were younger. Think back to what you planned on doing rather than what you ended up doing. Did you want to be a poet? Travel the world? Or did you simply want a balanced, clearcut life? Did you want to be famous? Rich?

In my case, as of yesterday, did I want to grow up into a 33-year-old adult who is still in college, still living in his father's house, staring fate in the eye, and remaining (even a day later) angry and complacent at the idea that this "Geek Squad attendee" named "Aaron" would not fix my darned laptop? Or, should I use this as a lesson to renew my warranty?

I think we can all agree that 90 percent of people, at some point, wanted to travel, and no one wanted a simple and balanced life. This is hinderance in the making: we make choices, blindly, and hope they lead to a foundation we can be proud of.

We Forget We Have Choices

An example is my youngest cousin (well, second youngest now). When his family visited a few months' back, they told me he wanted to (and I quote:) "Be a video game designer."

So, I did my best, trying to teach him how to design levels. His father made a good point: "This is one of seven career choices he'll make in the next year."

A few months later, my cousin (his mother) emailed me back after I had sent her several tutorials on how to design a level in the Unity3D gaming engine. She said simply:

"No, he gave up that dream a long time ago. Just a month, actually."

Of course, my cousin was exaggerating the notion that we give up far too easily. When things seem to get out-of-reach, we seek answers from our immediate environments, and his is surrounded by Judaic tradition and the up-and-coming Barmitzvah he has to do.

(Against his own choices, but moving on....)

The Principle We Abide By

My cousin was demonstrating a psychological phenomenon I have no choice but to come up with my own word for it. Ready? It is called "confusion."

Yes, it is that simple. As human beings, we are a very intelligent species. Not quite as intelligent or emotionally-grounded as, say, a dolphin, but we are relatively up there.

We have the ability to perform metacognition, as an example, which simply means that we know when we are thinking about knowing what we think we are doing.

That was not a typo. It is an example of the irrational nature of the human mind.

Yet, as people, we are focused on malcontent.

"The human is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it..." - Tommy Lee Jones, Men In Black

I cannot say to you that you can just magically go back in time and redo things. But just because you did not achieve your long-term goals does not mean you are failing.

As the aforementioned study demonstrated, no matter what age the participant was, it was conclusive that the age does not matter; the gender does not matter; the race does not matter; the socioeconomic status does not matter...9 out of 10 people regret their choices.

And guess what?

It Is Just A Part Of Life...

...But regrets are not meant to cause malintent.

I can understand the mentality, and I may be a bit different in my thinking.

I am just a writer and a former entrepreneur, as well as a man who always holds his head high (yes, even high enough to spit on the Geek Squad employee in my mind).

I also once abided by the candor of what I call "No Regrets Syndrome."

It is counterproductive to me, as it is for you, too.

Oh, how I "wish" my college's "Financial Aid" department would just give me an answer to the simple question: "Am I good for Grad School?" Oh, how I wish I could have taken my broken laptop over to Geek Squad before the warranty expired for free coverage.

Wish, wish, wish.

Wishing Is Not Doing

It has good, bad, ugly...the only difference is, at a certain point (relative mostly to the manner in which you are raised, unfortunately) you begin to realize you made a choice that you wish you had not. You "regret" this decision, and yes, health implications are abound.

According to one of my favorite bloggers, Kendra Cherry on the topic of regret:

It is...counterfactual thinking, which involves imagining the ways your life might have gone differently. Counterfactual thinking might mean appreciating your good luck at avoiding disaster, but at other times it focuses on being disappointed..."

When you are regretful, you induce stress on yourself, and can even fall into a state of depression like I did yesterday. But rather than wallowing in regrets and wrongdoings, I did not take the laptop over early enough, and guess what? I have a Mac Air my school paid for, so why am I complaining?! You see, that is everyone's problem, as we will discuss.

"That's your problem, Bruce...that's everybody's problem. You keep looking up"

- Bruce Almighty

The Emotional Wall

As stated in many past articles, majority of our behaviors are solely based on emotion.

When we make a buying decision, we are relying on perceptual cues that tell us that this pair of $80 shoes is better than the $30 ones (even after the $80 shoe breaks a month later, we regret it, but at the end of the day, how do we know the $30 ones would have lasted?).

We hone ourselves in on aggression, and if anyone knows a darned thing about that topic, it is me. Aggression has become a new way of life for me, and I react in ways I regret.

The Miami Mindset

I live in Miami, Florida, where you can barely step foot further than fifteen miles from my quant and suburban life, you reach Kendall Drive. Kendall Drive is a main street.

It acts as the outlet that, by 8am every morning, indicates traffic.

We know road rage is a thing; it is proven every time you cut someone off, every time you honk your horn (knowing all too well that if you honk in traffic, people do not have the choice to move, so why are you honking?!), there is road rage.

But not many realize that their tiresome journey down this key street of Kendall (where I live) is awful not because of the traffic or the idea of being late for work. Even if it were, we are still abiding by the same acute backward movement: we honk because of frustration.

Getting Back Your Dinosaur

So, LinkedIn is not known for a place where people angrily react, and I do hope that up until this point you have not taken this as a rant. I was trying to make a point:

Your dinosaur is there, just look up!

If you are angry, hurt, relished in thought, or simply lost, do yourself a favor and think about this before you honk at someone in traffic this morning:

The solution to finding your dinosaur is to realize that dinosaurs are extinct...

:)

Now, if that metaphor does not make sense, allow me to explain: the idea that we had dreams of something once (a better life, a better car, and so on) does not mean it is effective.

I hate to say: "Don't regret your choices," but I will ask that in hindsight by next saying: "Can you really help it?" Again, backing up to humanistic psychology, we fear what we cannot control, and we have two choices to avoiding being eaten alive by our own T-Rex:

1) Accept, apologize for our mistakes, make amends, and live as best as we can, or

2) Wallow in sorrow, wonder where we went wrong, and blame everyone but ourselves

Bringing Back My Original Example

I blamed Aaron at Geek Squad for not checking my laptop further, but I cannot control his actions. In fact, I should be grateful that my father actually offered to send me a backup laptop just in case. Now, not to sound greedy, but there is more to this than a laptop.

It was the manner in which the situation was handled.

$300 for a repair on a laptop that cost $600-700 to buy? Ridiculous, right? But guess what? What other choice do I have than to release my anger into something productive?

Ask me why I woke up and felt immediately more constructive. I felt something rising up in me, and this is key: I was not angry, nor frustrated. I was filled with relief.

Because I have a laptop that does work, and when I get $300 available to me, I will go and fix the laptop, or perhaps seek out another cheaper alternative.

See my point?

I can react negatively, return to Geek Squad, and punch Aaron in his smug face, or I can find a solution to the problem (if it is even a "problem" to begin with!).

The Frustration Exists, I Know

Yes, sitting in traffic every morning to go to a job you hate may not have been in your requisites as a child, or even a young adult. But you have to accept that things can change, if we choose to forgive ourselves. Yes, no one but ourselves.

Now, for the grand finale before I bypass the 3,000-word limit of mine (i.e. before I break the flimsy server that holds this website up), I will give you some fond advice.

Do not think about what, or who, you lost. Do no think about when, or where, you lost your dinosaur. Rather, realize dinosaurs die.

"There's a saying around here at the zoo: sometimes...well...monkeys die"

- Friends

But you can find fossils. :) In other words, you can still uncover the dinosaur's extinct body, and you can either wallow that it died, or be happy you have the memory of the fossil.

You can then take that fossil and figure out what killed it; what it did when it was alive...

I always found that very interesting about paleontology.

We can study and study and study based on fossil records (whether realistically or metaphorically), but at the end of the day, we cannot bring it back to life (unless equipped with a DNA sample obtained by a mosquito, if you get the movie reference).

All we can do is learn, to dream about what it looked like when it was alive, and to assess a new mentality, and let this be your new way of thinking about the "bad" in life:

If you lost you way, perhaps, just perhaps, you are on the right path.

Thank you for allowing the rant. As you can see, I dissected this problem; I realized it can be fixed; I realized I can save up $300 and fix my laptop; I realized I could have made much worse choices like punching stupid Aaron from stupid Geek Squad in the face...

....but I left thinking: "Maybe I'll just wait."

If you can do that even once today, i.e. feeling your hand shifting to the "honk" button and resisting that urge, just once or twice, you may learn that the problem does not solve itself; the car in front of you does not magically move, because guess what? They are also stuck behind a driver. The only difference is, one chooses to listen to music and sing.

The one that regrets their life honks.

Think about this before you head off into your Friday morning, and talk to you soon!

Like, Share, Repeat, & Share With Me Your Dinosaur Story!

www.Circle5Books.com for any writing help you need

www.ValianceCoaching.org to find your dinosaur