The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(35)
Or this seventy-one-year-old Floridian:
When my daughter came out as transgender at the age of fourteen, I did not understand and did not handle the situation well. As a result, I inflicted incredible pain on my only child and the person I love most in this world. Things have changed since then and I am her number one supporter now, but I will never forgive myself for not being the parent I should have been when it mattered most.
One remarkable (non)finding in the World Regret Survey involved parents. Hundreds of people described regrets about marrying the wrong spouse or choosing a disappointing partner, but fewer than twenty respondents out of more than sixteen thousand regretted having children.[9] In some sense, both behavioral science and popular culture have focused too much attention on romance and not enough on other forms of family connection. In fact, in 2020, a group of more than forty international scholars, representing two dozen countries, examined data from twenty-seven societies around the world and concluded that while academic journals were packed with research on mate-seeking, people across the globe actually “prioritize goals related to familial bonds over mating goals.”[10] Directing more research to long-term family relationships, which produce greater and more enduring well-being with fewer downsides than romantic entanglements, would expand our understanding.
George Vaillant, another Harvard psychiatrist, headed the Grant Study for more than thirty years. In an unpublished 2012 manuscript, he reflected on what he’d learned from the experience. After eight decades, hundreds of subjects, thousands of interviews, and millions of data points, he said he could summarize the conclusion of the longest-running examination of human flourishing in five words: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”[11]
In the end, the problem we contend with as people is remarkably simple. What give our lives significance and satisfaction are meaningful relationships. But when those relationships come apart, whether by intent or inattention, what stands in the way of bringing them back together are feelings of awkwardness. We fear that we’ll botch our efforts to reconnect, that we’ll make our intended recipients even more uncomfortable. Yet these concerns are almost always misplaced. Sure, we’ll get rebuffed sometimes. But more often—much more often, in fact—we overestimate how awkward we’ll feel and underestimate how much others will welcome our overtures.
So, this simple problem has an even simpler solution. Shove aside the awkwardness.
When Amy Knobler considers her closed door regret, she wishes she could travel backward in time and whisper advice to her previous self. She’d assure young Amy “that even though it feels awkward, and it is super uncomfortable and scary, on the other side of it, you will be glad that you went through that experience, not only because you don’t have those unanswered questions in your mind at that point, but also for what it does for the other person.”
And when Cheryl Johnson gazes at the open door of her relationship with Jen, she has an instinct about her next move even if she won’t—for now at least—act on it: “You’re almost always better off to err on the side of showing up. And if it’s awkward, then it’s awkward and you’ll live. It’ll be fine. But if you don’t show up, it’s lost forever.”
All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With connection regrets, the human need is love. Not love only in the romantic sense—but a broader version of love that includes attachment, devotion, and community and that encompasses parents, children, siblings, and friends.
The lesson of closed doors is to do better next time. The lesson of open doors is to do something now. If a relationship you care about has come undone, place the call. Make that visit. Say what you feel. Push past the awkwardness and reach out.
“My biggest regrets stem from not being more assertive at various life points about my needs and wishes—education, relationships, vacation plans, right down to the food that winds up in my house.”
Male, 51, New Jersey
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“I wish I had planted more trees.”
Male, 57, United Kingdom
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“I regret putting my life on display for so long on social media. There are too many times I overshared and now it feels like too much of me is just ‘out there.’?”
Female, 27, Washington
11.
Opportunity and Obligation
Photography was more complicated and expensive back in the twentieth century before every phone had a camera and every pocket had a phone. Gather round, youngsters, and I’ll explain.
In those bygone days, photographers shot their photos on film. They’d press a button to open their camera’s shutter, which would momentarily let in light. The light would then interact with chemicals on the film to memorialize an image.
The result was a bit odd. On the strip of film that photographers removed from the camera, the light spots appeared dark and the dark spots light. This was called a “negative”—and it was the middle step in the production process. When photographers printed that negative on paper, the light and dark would be reversed and the original color tones restored.
Regret works much the same way. The four core regrets operate as a photographic negative of the good life. If we know what people regret the most, we can reverse that image to reveal what they value the most.