The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(20)

By all appearances, Jason Drent is a success story—a young man who endured a difficult childhood, including a stint at a group home, but whose brains, ambition, and grit fueled his ascent in corporate America. But his story, which he told in the World Regret Survey, comes with an important footnote:

    I regret not saving money diligently ever since I started working. It’s nearly crushing every day to think about how hard I’ve worked for the last twenty-five years or so, but financially I have nothing to show for it.



Jason has a sterling résumé, but barely a dime in the bank—a positive record of achievement, but a negative net worth.

From his first paycheck at Best Buy, he vowed to himself, “I’m going to buy whatever I want as soon as I can.” He wasn’t especially extravagant. “It was a lot of nonsensical day-to-day stuff,” he told me. A decent car. Some clothing. “The big man on campus” pride, as he described it, of always picking up the tab at restaurant dinners with friends. It felt good.

But the small, daily choices that once beguiled him now haunt him. “It’s kind of sad looking back,” he told me. “I should have more resources at this point.”



* * *



—

For a guy whom antiquity scholars say might never have existed, Aesop has enjoyed a pretty good run as an author. The fables that bear his name (but are likely the product of many creators over many years) date to five centuries before the Common Era. They’ve been bestsellers for more than two thousand years—fixtures of bookstore children’s sections and bedtime story sessions. They remain popular even in the age of podcasts and streaming services, because who among us does not enjoy hearing life lessons delivered by talking animals?

Among the best-known of Aesop’s fables is “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” The story is deceptively simple. During a long summer, the grasshopper lolls about, plays the fiddle, and tries to entice its friend the ant to join in dancing and other insect debauchery. The ant declines. It chooses instead the more arduous task of lugging corn and grain into storage.

When winter arrives, the grasshopper realizes its error. It clutches its fiddle for warmth, but soon dies of hunger. The ant and its family, meanwhile, eat well and happily from the store of food that this more forward-thinking creature has collected during the summer.




During one of my conversations with Jason, I told him he reminded me of the grasshopper. He shook his head ruefully. “I never took steps to prepare,” he said. During the summer of his life, there were “a lot of cavalier moments where I enjoyed saying ‘So what?’ and just rolling through it.” But in the end, he said, it “was twenty-five years of fiddling.”



* * *



—

The first of the four categories in the deep structure of regret are what I call “foundation regrets.”

Foundation regrets arise from our failures of foresight and conscientiousness. Like all deep structure regrets, they start with a choice. At some early moment, we face a series of decisions. One set represents the path of the ant. These choices require short-term sacrifice, but in the service of a long-term payoff. The other choices represent the path of the grasshopper. This route demands little exertion or assiduousness in the short run, but risks exacting a cost in the long run.

At that juncture, we choose the path of the grasshopper.

We spend too much and save too little. We drink and carouse at the expense of exercising regularly and eating right. We apply minimal and grudging effort in school, at home, or on the job. The full ramifications of these incremental choices don’t materialize immediately. But over time, they slowly accrue. Soon the full consequences become too towering to deny—and, eventually, too massive to repair.

Foundation regrets sound like this: If only I’d done the work.





THE LURE AND THE LOGIC


Foundation regrets begin with an irresistible lure and end with an inexorable logic. Take this Canadian woman, who hails from Alberta but whose regret comes straight out of Aesop:

    I regret not looking after my health through the years. I did lots to hurt my health and not much to help it. Also, I did not save for retirement, and now I’m sixty-two, unhealthy, and broke.



We typically read “The Ant and the Grasshopper” as a morality tale, but it’s also a story about cognition. By partying all summer instead of gathering food for the winter, the grasshopper succumbed to what economists call “temporal discounting.”[1] He overvalued the now—and undervalued (that is, discounted) the later. When this bias grips our thinking, we often make regrettable decisions.

Aesop’s preferred explanatory tool was the parable, but we can convey the point with equal clarity using a simple chart:





Temporal discounting





The grasshopper prized fiddling in the moment more than eating in the future. The Alberta woman valued gratification in youth more than health and satisfaction in maturity. Jason Drent says his early paychecks made him feel so “invincible” that they blinded his view into the distance.

In both the American Regret Project and the World Regret Survey, respondents described their experience of temporal discounting with the language of early excess. A thirty-one-year-old man from Arkansas said: