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What Do People Most Regret? —
The Paths They Failed to Take
When people sit back and take stock of their lives, do they regret the things that failed, such as a romance that foundered, the wrong career path chosen, bad grades in school? Or do they most regret what they failed to try?
A small but growing body of research points to inaction — failing to seize the day — as the leading cause of regret in people’s lives over the long term. These findings are painting a new portrait of regret, an emotion proving to be far more complex than once thought.
Regret is a “more or less painful emotional state of feeling sorry for misfortunes, limitations, losses, transgressions, short comings or mistakes,” says University of Michigan psychologist Janet Landman, author of several studies and a book on regret.
“As a culture, we are so afraid of regret, so allergic to it, often we don’t even want to talk about it,” Landman says. “The fear is that it will pull us down the slippery slope of depression and despair.”
But psychologists say that regret is an inevitable fact of life.
“In today’s world, in which people arguably exercise more choice than ever before in human history, it is exceedingly difficult to choose so consistently well that regret is avoided entirely,” say Cornell University psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec.
Regret involves two distinct types of emotion, what psychologists call “hot” and “wistful”. Hot regret is quick anger felt after discovering that you have made a mistake, like denting your car, accidentally dropping a prized vase and seeing it smash into a thousand pieces, or buying a share that suddenly plummets in price. This is when you want to kick yourself, and it is associated with a short-term perspective.
Wistful regret, on the other hand, comes from having a longer range perspective. It is a bittersweet feeling that life might have been better or different if only certain actions had been taken. Typically, it means something that people should have done but didn’t do. That might mean having the courage to follow a different career, gambling on starting a new business or pursuing what appears to be a risky romance.