Tuesday's TED Talk: Don't Regret Regret
We should always look forward, not backward, right? What's done is done, so just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Live without regret. This seems to be a cultural value that we all generally buy into.
But maybe regret has its place. In fact, the inability to experience regret is one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths, as Kathryn Schulz explains in the TED Talk that's inspiring me today. We just need to put the right framework around it.
My Takeaways
Regret requires both agency and imagination. The more we have of both, the more acute we feel the regret.
The easier it is to imagine a different outcome, the more we will regret what happened (or didn't happen). We will regret missing a flight by 3 minutes more than we regret missing a flight by 20 minutes. (As a person who has missed three flights in her lifetime, one due to being stuck in a no-way-out drive thru at In-N-Out Burger for an uncharacgteristically long time, I can personally vouch for this fact. :)
As a society, we are incredibly used to not dealing with life's hard realities. In so many situations, we can undo, unfriend, and unfollow. So it can be all the more jarring when we are faced with a huge regret.
The "Reply to All" button is one of the biggest regret generators in modern times. I know I've been a victim of the dreaded "Reply to All."
Regret is useful in that it teaches us that we can do better.
We CAN make peace with regret by: 1) realizing it's universal, 2) applying humor to the situation, even black humor if necessary, 3) realizing that all things improve with the passage of time, 4) believing that our regrets (like Kathryn's tattoo) are not as ugly as we think they are.
I LOVE this quote: "All of us who have experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor, and even black humor, plays a crucial role in helping us survive. It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us."
And this one, "If we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them."
What are your thoughts about regret?