The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(30)

Jocelyn, who is not religious, says her regret has made her more empathetic. “Before this happened, I had this sort of righteousness about me. I was the good kid. I would never do wrong. And then I did really wrong. That opened my eyes that people make mistakes.” When she was younger, she says, she divided the world into good people and bad people. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that’s not true.”





3. Disloyalty


When Charlie McCullough graduated from the University of Maryland in 1981 with a degree in mechanical engineering, he considered enlisting in the armed forces. He admired the dedication the military required and the camaraderie it fostered. But more lucrative job offers beckoned—and he chose the private sector. “Those who serve, especially in the military, really do love our country,” he told me. “I regret I wasn’t part of that.”

Loyalty to a group is a core moral value. It’s expressed with greater gusto in some political and national cultures than in others. And perhaps because of that, regrets about this moral foundation were not as numerous as those about harm and cheating.

What’s more, the regrets people expressed were less about renouncing the group than falling short of one’s obligations to it. For instance, among respondents in the United States, which ended active conscription in 1973 and does not require national service from its citizens, a large number of people offered reflections similar to Charlie’s.

A forty-four-year-old woman in Michigan reported that her greatest regret was:

    Not joining the military and going into the air force.



A fifty-eight-year-old New Hampshire man regretted:

    I did not serve my country by joining the military prior to college or after college. Am the only member of my family not to join, and looking back, wish I had served.



A fifty-three-year-old woman in Wisconsin:

    I regret not joining a branch of the military. . . . Service to the country, no matter where or what the role, be it in AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, etc., is tremendously valuable.



As Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind, the moral foundation of loyalty helps groups cement bonds and form coalitions. It shows “who is a team player and who is a traitor, particularly when your team is fighting with other teams.”?[8]

To my mild disappointment, the surveys unearthed not a single modern-day Benedict Arnold or Judas Iscariot. Charlie, in fact, ended up working for a large defense contractor that equips the armed forces. Yet merely being adjacent to the military was insufficient. He regrets not having “the experience of hardship and sacrifice,” of depending on others for survival and of their relying on him. “If you’re serving someone, it means you’re not serving yourself,” he told me. “The act of sacrifice is good for the other, but it’s also good for the soul.”





4. Subversion


The fewest moral regrets involved the Authority/Subversion foundation. A handful of people regretted “dishonoring my parents” and “being disrespectful to my teachers”—like the twenty-four-year-old man from India, who relayed this tale:

    My father and I run a shop. A teacher who taught me at school comes for shopping. My teacher knows me and my father, but my father doesn’t know him. We give a little discount to whoever who has a long relationship with us and my teacher is among them. I thought my father knew him, so I didn’t tell him that he was my teacher. Sir paid full amount, not that he minded. But after he left, my father demanded that I should have told him that he was sir. It was such a shame and disrespectful for us that we didn’t discount the price to show some respect and gratitude. I deeply, deeply regret that incident every time that memory is recalled.



Such entries, though, were relatively rare. One reason for the dearth of this type of moral regret is that the quantitative portion of my survey sampled only Americans and the qualitative portion included more respondents from the United States than from any other country. Had I taken larger samplings in nations and regions where the cultural values of deference are often more prominent, this type of regret might have been more common.





5. Desecration


Regrets about violating sanctity were more numerous than regrets about subverting authority. These regrets were also emotionally intense—especially when they centered on one of the most fiercely contested issues of the last sixty years: abortion.

Americans share a rough consensus about abortion’s legality, but they are deeply split on its morality. According to Gallup, about three-quarters of people in the United States believe that abortion should be legal in at least certain circumstances. However, 47 percent believe it is “morally wrong,” while 44 percent believe it is “morally acceptable.”[9] That divide came out clearly in my research.

Regrets about abortions were not as pervasive as regrets about bullying and infidelity, but they were prevalent. A fifty-year-old woman in Arkansas said:

    I had an abortion at age twenty. That is the biggest regret of my life. My second-biggest regret is that I had another one at age twenty-five.



These regrets were partly about harm, but they were bigger than that: a belief that the actions amounted to a degradation of the very sanctity of life.