The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(38)

“Regret is a thing,” Jeff said when we talked. “I do have regret. It fuels me. Regret sucks, but I like that better than people who say, ‘No regrets,’ or, ‘I don’t have regrets.’?”

Prodded by this regret, he moved from central Colorado to Southern California, where he’s now making a living as an actor. And prodded by the constant reminder of a credo he no longer believed, he decided to have the no regrets tattoo removed. The process is painful, time-consuming, and expensive. It involves regular laser sessions at a dermatology office and costs more than ten times the original ink.

“Every time I go to the removal place, if it’s a new nurse or technician, I say, ‘I get it.’ The joke is not lost on me.”



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What do we do with our regrets? If regrets make us human, how do we enlist them to make us better, more satisfied people?

The starting point is to revisit one of the key distinctions in the architecture of regret: the difference between regrets of action and regrets of inaction—between regretting what we did and regretting what we didn’t do. Action regrets are less prevalent. And in this short chapter, I’ll explain how you can transform them to adjust the present. In the next chapter, I’ll take on the more complex challenge of how you can transform both varieties of regret to improve your future.

For action regrets, your initial goal should be to change the immediate situation for the better. That’s not always possible, but we have two ways to advance toward that goal. We can undo many such regrets: we can make amends, reverse our choices, or erase the consequences. Think of Jeff and his now fading tattoo. We can also respond to action regrets by using At Leasts to help us feel better about our circumstances. Neither tack does much to prepare us for later, but both can help us realign now.





STEP 1. UNDO IT


Suppose that without provocation, you slapped your best friend in the face or said something snarky about the deceased to his relatives at his funeral. You’d probably regret it. Most of us would. But only an entertainment executive would see within these indiscretions the seeds of a television show.

Het Spijt Me was a program that began airing on Dutch television in 1993 and continued to run in various iterations for the next twenty years. The basic format of the show (in English, the title is I Am Sorry) always involved two protagonists. The first was the person with a regret—say, the one who’d smacked her bestie. The second was the person who’d been wronged—the individual on the receiving end of said smack.

In the original version of the show, the regretter, sitting on a couch, talk-show-style, before a studio audience, would tell Het Spijt Me’s host about her regret. Then together they’d watch footage of the show’s producers tracking down the regrettee, hearing the story from her point of view, and asking if she’d accept an apology. It being Holland, flowers were always involved.

If the regrettee accepted the apology, she’d stride through a pair of sliding doors and greet the regretter on stage. (In subsequent versions of the program, the regretter waited down the street from the regrettee’s home.) As amends were made, tears were shed and hugs exchanged.

Three Dutch researchers, led by social psychologist Marcel Zeelenberg, a leading scholar of regret, analyzed two seasons of Het Spijt Me to determine which regrets people sought to reverse. They found that on the show, as well as in the nontelevised parts of life, people are much more likely to undo regrets of action than regrets of inaction.[1] We’re more apt to repair what we did than what we didn’t do.

The reasons are many. As we saw in Chapters 8 and 9, action regrets typically arise from concrete incidents and elicit “hot” emotions that we respond to quickly. Inaction regrets, by contrast, are often more abstract and elicit less immediately intense emotions.

What’s more, many inaction regrets are inherently difficult to undo. If in my twenties I regret not studying hard enough in high school, I can’t reenroll in eleventh grade. My only option is to focus on the future.

But with regrets of action, I still have the chance to recalibrate the present—to press Ctrl+Z on my existential keyboard.[*] For instance, with moral regrets, which often involve actions like bullying a weaker kid, cheating on a spouse, or insulting coworkers, one form of undoing is to apologize. Apologies, wrote the great sociologist Erving Goffman, are “admissions of blameworthiness and regret for an undesirable event that allow actors to try to obtain a pardon from audiences.”[2] If that pardon is granted, the emotional and moral debt of the past is reduced, which at least partially rebalances the ledger.

When we undo what we’ve done, we improve our current situation. That helps. But undoing a regret is not quite the same as erasing it. Jeff Bosley told me that even after many tattoo removal sessions, the words on his left arm are impossible to read, but they haven’t fully disappeared. “It almost looks like a light bruise now,” he says.

So, to address regrets of action, begin by asking yourself these questions:

         If I’ve harmed others, as is often the case with moral regrets and sometimes the case with connection regrets, can I make amends through an apology or some form of emotional or material restitution?





         If I’ve harmed myself, as is the case for many foundation regrets and some connection regrets, can I fix the mistake? For example, can I begin paying down debt or logging a few more hours at work? Can I reach out immediately to someone whose connection I severed?