The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(37)

Regrets about education were most prevalent among people who had attended college but had not graduated. For one in four people in this group, education constituted their greatest regret. In this case, impeded opportunity may be the reason.

Thwarted opportunity is the likely reason for the one racial gap that emerged in the survey. Racial differences in regret were minimal—except on a single dimension. People who were not White had more regrets about education than White people, which is likely explained by the racial disparities in access to educational opportunities in the United States.

Age also showed the importance—and paradox—of opportunity. In the American Regret Project survey, twenty-year-olds had equal numbers of action and inaction regrets. But as people grew older, inaction regrets began to dominate. By age fifty, inaction regrets were twice as common as action regrets. Indeed, according to the data, age was by far the strongest predictor of regrets of inaction. When the universe of opportunities before them has dwindled (as it has with older folks), people seem to regret what they haven’t done.





Inaction regrets increase as people age.


         SOURCE: Pink, Daniel, et al., American Regret Project (2021).





Yet they also look for opportunities in different places. For example, among those ages thirty through sixty-five, regrets about career and finances were most prevalent—likely because, at that stage of life, opportunities were still alive in those realms. But as people aged, they tended to have fewer regrets about education, health, and career—and more regrets about family. One reason: at age seventy, the opportunities are relatively limited to get a PhD or launch a new career or compensate for decades of hard living. Those doors are closing. But the opportunity remains to reconcile with your estranged brother before both of you pass on. That door remains open.

Differences between men and women were not vast, but they were present. For example, men were more likely than women to have career regrets. About one in five men expressed regrets in this category, but only 12 percent of women. By contrast, women were more likely than men to have family regrets—24 percent of women versus 18 percent of men. The survey didn’t ask questions that can deliver a definitive explanation for this difference. But we can speculate that men, on average, may be more likely to value professional opportunities, and women, on average, may be more likely to value relationship opportunities.[*]





DREAMS AND DUTIES


We regret foregone opportunities more often than unfulfilled obligations. Yet we also know that a wholly realized life involves a mix of both dreams and duties.[5] The photographic negative that regret offers makes clear that being fully human combines our dreams for ourselves and our duties to others.

A life of obligation and no opportunity is crimped. A life of opportunity and no obligation is hollow. A life that fuses opportunity and obligation is true.

How to build that life by transforming your existing regrets and anticipating your future regrets is the subject of the rest of this book.





Part Three


    REGRET REMADE


//

“I stopped being nice to Jessica, and when she got her period at school, which lasted three days, I called her Bloody Mary.”

Female, 39, North Carolina

//


“I regret every kiss I could have given to my wife but didn’t because I was too busy during our sixty-two years of marriage before she died of COVID.”

Male, 84, Texas

//


“I regret not learning how to read music or play an instrument. I realize now it is a valuable skill that’s good for you even if you are not into music.”

Female, 17, Japan





12.


    Undoing and At Leasting



Jeff Bosley was just trying to be cool.

He’d enlisted in the U.S. Army at age twenty-nine, and was now the oldest grunt at Fort Bragg—older even than his drill sergeant. He wanted to fit in. So, one night, he and a few buddies left the base, drove into town, and entered a tattoo shop.

Jeff was seeking an image or phrase that would impress his comrades, a “hyper-macho” symbol, as he put it, to broadcast his warrior philosophy. He chose his left arm as the tattoo’s site, because “that’s the arm I’d see when I’m holding my rifle barrel.”

The shop artist opened a Microsoft Word program on a nearby computer, and they selected the Papyrus font. And there on Jeff’s left arm, for about one hundred dollars, the artist inked nine black letters:

    NO REGRETS



Jeff served in the army for nearly a decade and became a Green Beret. After the military, he worked as a firefighter in Colorado Springs, Colorado. During that stage of his life, he and his wife of twelve years divorced. And when his marriage ended, he discovered something about himself: he had plenty of regrets. He regretted not taking college—eight years, two schools, no degree—more seriously. He regretted hurting his wife by seeking a divorce. He regretted never pursuing his longtime love of acting.

Fourteen years after that impetuous evening decision, Jeff realized that his tattoo wasn’t just unaesthetic. (The Papyrus font is “the lamest and most cliché I could have chosen,” he told me.) It was also untrue.