3 Unfortunate Consequences of Trying to Live a Better Life
By: Tenzin Ozaki
Tags: Personal Development, Life, Self, Self Improvement, Life Lessons

You Will Regret the Past.

As I worked toward my personal success, I felt my past holding me back.

The closer I got to my goals, the more salient my past failures felt. The closer I came to a better life, the more I realized how much time I had wasted living without direction. Regret is the emotion we feel when we think that our present experience might be better if we had done something different in the past.

In a paper published in 2008, studies revealed that:

We perceive regretful experiences as offering the least opportunity for improvement in the future. People experience the most regret for outcomes that are not repeatable. Perceptions of higher past than future opportunities and low psychological closure predict regret intensity.

Therefore, missing in the definition are two necessary components to feeling regret — agency and imagination. The more agency we have in a particular situation, the more we feel regret. And similarly, the more we can imagine a better present experience if we had done that one thing differently, the more we feel regret.

In my case, I had a strong sense of agency and imagination. Therefore, I felt a powerful sense of regret — if only I had decided to live a better life sooner, I would be XY% happier or YZ% better off. At first, I tried to rationalize my regret to avoid it. Our society tends to demonize regret. We say there’s no point crying over spilt milk. There’s no value in lamenting about things that happened in the past. We prescribe methods always to look forward, never to look backward. I bought into this regret-avoidance narrative. And it made me miserable.

For a long time, I lived an uninspired life. I woke up tired, went to work, came home and watched movies till late, inevitably leading to another tired morning. On the weekends, I drank and partied and engaged in purely hedonistic behaviour.

I had aspirations to be more, but I made excuses. I didn’t have enough time; I was too busy. I didn’t have the resources; I needed more money or access to learning materials. It was just my age; my 20s were to have as much fun as possible. It was my friends; they were always asking me to go out. It was everything — except for me.

At that moment, I rationalized my experiences, justifying my actions based on the person I was, the information I had or lack thereof. I’d think about a particular string of decisions, concluding that my life happened exactly how it was supposed to, despite any regretful choices.

We’re a “BirdBox” society — we prefer blindness. We don’t like to face our realities. We put our faith in some futuristic new technology that will solve global-warming instead of modifying our behaviour. We believe money and social-welfare are satisfactory solutions to resolve decades of oppression, injustice, and hate. We block our exes because it’s easier than dealing with the emotional pain. And we silence our regret.

But I realized that when trying to live a better life, regret becomes inevitable. As you build momentum, increase your productivity, and create better outcomes, you’ll face the stark contrast between present and past. You’ll wonder how you could have been so lazy, so uninspired, so negligent.

We undoubtedly need to accept our past — we can’t live in denial. To this point, the lesson is to perceive the past in a different light. We shouldn’t rationalize our past nor hate or beat ourselves up for our mistakes. Instead, we should use the past as a metric for performance, a cautionary tale of the possibilities of living uninspired.

I needed to be broke so I could learn how to budget. I needed to be treated poorly so I could appreciate being treated well. I needed to have jobs I hated so that I could work hard doing what I love. To ignore or try to suppress regret is to live an inauthentic life. To regret is human. To live through and accept regret is okay.

I believe life isn't about living regret-free. It’s about living a life where we don’t hate ourselves for having regrets. We’re imperfect, we’ll do imperfect things, we’ll create imperfect memories — but we should forgive ourselves. Regret doesn’t need to remind us about all the things we did poorly, all the mistakes we made, all the time we wasted. Regret reminds us that we can do better.