This scenario is not related to any particular situation I am facing, but simple curiosity as to what opinions will be expressed.
Let’s say that you are faced with a choice to partake in something or not partake in something. At some point in the future, you look back and can say one of two things related to the choice you made:
“Gee, I wish I wouldn’t have…”
“Gee, I wonder what wouldn’t happened had I…”
Hi, Opal!
(The “Gee” is optional.)
Assume that the outcome of the choice is not life-threatening or otherwise something that makes it obviously deserving of regret. Which is the preferable of the two in your opinion?
Does your answer change any if you had some amount of evidence before the choice that partaking would lead to possible or probable regret?
Oh, and if this question is asinine and nobody can understand what I’m getting at, sorry. This seemed really difficult to frame for some reason.
I’ve heard people say “I don’t regret anything in my past.”
I think thats a crock. We all make mistakes. I’m not afraid to say I wish some things had turned out differently.
I think taking everything as a learning experience is very noble, and that’s the way I try to live my life. But in practice, yes, there are things I regret–some very bitterly. But I have found as I grow older the number of things I regret is getting smaller. I won’t be so stupid as to claim that I will come to a point where I don’t regret anything, but it seems to be easier to say “I was stupid. Oh well, that’s life!” when you’ve got a more experience under your belt.
I freely admit that I have many regrets. I will tell you how I define regret: the feeling I get when I KNOW I shouldn’t do something, but I do it anyway and it goes as badly as I knew it would. Yes, every new experience has a lesson, but when you make the same mistake in seven different iterations of the same situation, then you’ve just been a bonehead.
I’m a bone head quite often.
I do not, however, regret it when something goes really wrong but I could not have foreseen it, or something good comes out of it somehow. There are mistakes that I can’t find the good in, though, so all I can do is try to forgive myself and not make the same mistake again.
But, for discussion, your choice here is one of two paths. Would you prefer to choose to do something and have it not turn out like you’d have wished it to, or choose not to do something and always wonder which way it might have went?
Geez, why didn’t I say it that succinctly to begin with?
I would have preferred to have done something and not have it turn out like I had hoped instead of not doing anything, and then being stuck wondering what would have happened if I had done something, but didn’t. (If that makes any sense.)
I try to stay positive (corny as that may sound) about my screw ups and try to get something good out of them so they won’t bug me as much. When i do something i regret (im talking major regrets mind you) i try to ‘make it up to myself’ by making something better about myself that i wouldn’t have normally done had i not had the regret to motivate me. I may try harder to mediate more often, or try harder to lose weight, or consider a more advanced education or something along those lines.
Um . . . I’ve sat here for a while trying to think of anything I regret. Since I have a very strong feeling of, “Regret is useless - you can’t change the past, so get over it,” it’s a very small list of things I regret only very mildly.
Dumping my first gf for my first bf. She treated me wonderfully, he treated me like crap. But I learned from it, so it’s not a big deal.
Dumping my last gf at all. She was sweet, even if she was kinda I Want To Be A Mommy focused. Oh well. Because I wasn’t dating her, I was able to start dating my now-fiance (no, I didn’t dump her for him - this was a few months later).
Quitting my job at B&N. I may have hated it, but I would’ve been able to stay in Tx if I’d kept that job. After I quit there, I couldn’t find another job, and eventually had to move up here. But, I think it’s good for people to live in different areas, so it’s fine. Plus, we’re doing a lot better up here than we were in Tx, due to the job my fiance got about 2mo after we moved. And I got to know my dad better.
So, any “bad” decision I may have made has just been part of my journey and has made me what I am today. So I don’t really regret anything.
Sorry if that sounds like a crock, but it’s true. I don’t know how people can linger over a bad decision for their entire life when they can’t change it, no matter what they do. shrug
I tend to lean towards “learning experience” than “regret”. I make a great many mistakes and, frankly, so do you. I don’t expect to perform perfectly, and don’t care if I buy gas at the lowest possible price of a fluctuation or get the space closest to the shopping mall.
I don’t waste time regretting anything small. All of the larger life-changing regrets were learning experiences too. I merely regret not learning more and earlier.
Regrets are an unavoidable side effect of living. I have my share of regrets from my 40 years. I think that one of the keys to happiness in life is to learn not to dwell on your regrets, and figure out good and positive ways to get on with your life.
That said, I hope that 40 years from now, I can look back on things and realize that I regret a lot more of the things I did do than things I didn’t do.
I’ve got some regrets but try to at least treat everything as an experience. Every choice made was the right choice at the time, or at least you need to live like it was because that is your reality.
Being my own self-proclaimed Zen master, I look at things this way:
I can’t change the past, so there is no reason to waste energy on regrets. If I think I made a mistake in judgment in the past, then I am at least better prepared to deal with that situation should it ever arise again. I believe guilt is the number one thing people have to conquer before they can be truly happy. Guilt is nothing more than a persistent regret. Now I’m not saying to perform immoral acts and not feel guilty about it, just don’t let other people project guilt onto your personal happiness.
A lot of things have happened to me during my life, which could quite easily cause me to feel deep regret that I ever ventured along that path. Having said that, though, perhaps because of my optimistic nature, I don’t sit back and regret situations or actions, but analyse what happened and hopefully learn from them.
To a certain extent, everyone is the master of their own destiny. If one does something that they later regret, I believe, they should hold their head up high, not blame the rest of the world and simply move on, but perhaps be aware of being a little more forward-thinking the next time, if possible.
Sometimes I look back, and go over all the stupid things I’ve done in my life (and there are a lot of them, believe me) and wish I could’ve done at least some of those things differently. But then I look at my life today, where I’m at, how I feel and what I have, and then I feel alright with those choices.
I feel good about myself, I’m happy (I just landed a new job, yay!), and maybe I wouldn’t be had my life run a different course, who knows?
I’ve no regrets.
If I had to do it again, I’d probably make other choices, but that would be more out of curiosity than regret.
I regret very, very few things in my life - it is wasted mental energy.
That being said, there are two things that I regret deeply. I’ve learned to live a little better with my regrets, but they’re still with me. As my mother has told me on more than one instance, “I forgive you - you need to forgive yourself.” Much easier said than done, sometimes.
I live with regret pretty much constantly. I can still remember back to grade school and get weird ‘attacks’ of the stupid stuff I did/said back then. A lot of it has to do with my upbringing and the constant pressure to perfom that was placed upon me by my parents.
I’m sure that it’s not healthy…but I try to channel how I feel about that stuff into being the best I can be now, and learn from my mistakes…there are very few things that I regret in the last few years with my wife…and that makes me happy.
It’s all an experience. Situations that have turned out both bad and good should be learned from. Regret is your superego saying “you shouldn’t have done that, shame, shame”. Experience is your conscience saying “you should learn from that”.
I don’t act on every whacked out whim that I have. My past experience and the shared experiences of others will guide me. Once I reach a decision on a course of action I never look back. I’m convinced it’s the right thing to do and I never try to second guess myself.
I can live with the stupid stuff and can mostly laugh about my various fuck-ups. It helps that I’ve been very lucky in the choices I’ve made. Things have generally worked out well, albeit often in ways that I could never have envisaged at the time.
