Regret has huge benefits

A common phrase from adventurous people is to live with “no regrets”, but that’s not really possible.

Say you’re considering breaking up with your girlfriend. The “no regrets” side would say to do it and test the open waters, but it’s entirely possible that 10 years from now you’ll have huge regrets about that breakup instead. Sticking with her OR leaving could cause a future regret, so you can’t always avoid it.

Daniel Pink’s book “ The Power of Regret “ digs deep into this. I’ll start with an interesting quote that explains how people that really have “no regrets” often feel that way due to brain damage:

However, one group didn’t feel any worse when they discovered that a different choice would have produced a better outcome: people with lesions on a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. “They seem to experience no regret whatsoever,” neuroscientist Nathalie Camille and her colleagues wrote in the journal Science. “These patients fail to grasp this concept.” In other words, the inability to feel regret-in some sense, the apotheosis of what the “no regrets” philosophy encourages-wasn’t an advantage. It was a sign of brain damage.

As Pink goes through things, he summarizes regrets into four buckets:

1. Foundation Regrets, focused on long-term efforts often around health or finance.