The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(22)

    I should have worked harder in college. Achieving better grades would have allowed me to get a better job, earning more, sooner in my career.



At age nineteen, this man’s foundation seemed sound. At age twenty-nine, it creaked. At age thirty-nine, it wobbled. Now, at age forty-nine, it feels like it’s disintegrating. His footing is shaky because of a set of seemingly small decisions he made three long decades ago. But even younger people, who hadn’t yet witnessed the results of their mistakes compound, shared this category of regrets. “I wish I would have studied harder,” said a twenty-five-year-old Malaysian woman. “I wish I had worked harder in college and spent my time more judiciously,” said another twenty-five-year-old woman, who lives in India.

Many respondents lamented not only the practical ramifications of not tending to one’s foundation, but also a more wistful sense of lost opportunity. A forty-nine-year-old woman, more than two decades removed from college, wrote:

    I wish I had appreciated the privilege I had to be able to go to university and had worked harder to get a better degree.



The pattern is similar for health decisions—including poor eating habits and lack of exercise—which also gather force and imperil people’s foundations. In the World Regret Survey, regrets about tobacco use, particularly starting at a young age, came from respondents on six continents—including this thirty-nine-year-old man from Colombia:

    I regret I smoked so much in my life, even though I clearly knew how bad for my health and surroundings this was. I kept smoking a pack a day, sometimes more. I escaped my frustrations and anxiety by smoking cigarettes.



On mental health, foundation regrets often involve a failure to recognize the problem and seek a remedy. As a forty-three-year-old Oregon man put it:

    I regret that I didn’t take my mental health seriously in my twenties and, in doing so, utterly lost my sense of self-worth.



Many people who did take steps to rebuild a collapsing psychological foundation regretted not beginning the process sooner. For example, a forty-four-year-old Arizona woman said:

    I regret not finding a good therapist ten or fifteen years earlier.



And a fifty-seven-year-old nonbinary person in Oregon regretted:

    Not taking antidepressants in 2002 when first prescribed, and waiting until 2010. They have been a godsend, and I regret that those eight years could have been so much different had I started earlier.



Embedded in each of these regrets is a solution. Just as foundation regrets can be defined with a well-worn fable, one response to them is contained in a hoary Chinese proverb:

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.

The second-best time is today.





FOUNDATION ATTRIBUTION ERROR


Foundation regrets are trickier than the other three deep structure regrets I’ll describe in upcoming chapters. Remember that what distinguishes regret from disappointment is personal responsibility. Disappointments exist outside of your control. The child who wakes up to discover that the Tooth Fairy hasn’t left her a reward is disappointed. Regrets, in contrast, are your fault. The parents who awaken and realize they forgot to remove their child’s tooth and replace it with a reward are regretful. But when it comes to matters like physical health, educational attainment, and financial security, the border between personal responsibility and external circumstance is murky.

Are you overweight because of your poor nutritional choices or because nobody ever taught you, let alone modeled, healthy eating? Do you have a meager retirement account because you spent too much on frivolities or because you started your career burdened with student debt and lacking even a thin financial cushion? Did you drop out of college because of your faulty work ethic or because your mediocre secondary school didn’t prepare you for the rigors of university classes?

One of the most prevalent cognitive biases—in some ways the über-bias—is called the “fundamental attribution error.” When people, especially Westerners, try to explain someone’s behavior, we too often attribute the behavior to the person’s personality and disposition rather than to the person’s situation and context.[5] So, to use a classic example, when another driver cuts us off on the highway, we immediately assume the person is a jerk. We never consider that the person might be speeding to the hospital. Or when someone seems uneasy while giving a presentation, we assume that he’s an inherently nervous person rather than someone who doesn’t have much experience in front of a crowd. We load too much explanatory freight onto the person and too little onto the situation.

With this category of regrets, something similar might be happening—a foundation attribution error. We attribute these failures, in ourselves and others, to personal choices when they’re often at least partly the result of circumstances we can’t control.[*] That means that the fix for foundation regrets, and a way to avoid them, is not only to change the person, but to reconfigure that person’s situation, setting, and environment. We must create the conditions at every level—society, community, and family—to improve individuals’ foundational choices.

Which is what Jason Drent is trying to do.





LESSONS FROM A GRASSHOPPER