Living Without Regret

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

– Ursula K. Le Guin

Thanks for taking the time to look at a phenomenon that all of us experience at some point in our lives. In my research about this experience, I’ve learned that regret, or the anticipation of it, affects our decision-making in almost every area of our lives.?

“Regret” comes from an Old French word meaning “to bewail the dead.” Over time, it evolved to mean feeling sad or disappointed about something you did or didn’t do. It’s like wishing you could go back and do things a bit differently.

There are many different kinds of regret:

• Regret at not having done something we should have done. For example, not exercising your hip or knee to help the body get back to normal flexibility, resulting in stiffness that doesn’t go away.
• Regret at having done something we should not have done. For example, speaking harshly with someone we love.
• Regret for taking a long time to accomplish something that we think we could or should have done more quickly (see Sally’s story below).

In this article, we look primarily at work-related regrets.?

In their 1986 seminal study about regret, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman explored the psychological concept of regret in decision-making under uncertainty. It’s called “counterfactual thinking.” Counterfactual thinking is when we imagine different scenarios of what could have happened instead of what actually did happen. For example, after missing a bus, someone might think, “If only I had left the house five minutes earlier, I would have caught the bus.” This kind of thinking involves looking at past events and imagining different outcomes by changing some details, like our behavior, in our minds.

Read the full article here.