Upon reaching a certain stage of life, usually after the age of 30 but always when enough time has elapsed to make you wonder about the slowly accumulating rubbish heap of your past, regrets come up as an infallible sign that you are getting older. You start to hem and haw. You lament the paths not taken, gnash your teeth, gaze in the mirror for longer intervals at the sunken and lifeless lumps of coal that have now replaced your once-bright and innocent eyes, that grotesquely receding hairline that has taken on the appearance of a wet scarf, that putrescent liquid that has been seeping from your navel for weeks. You daydream in the middle of crosswalks as you dart across downtown in the late afternoon, slowly veering into traffic as your footsteps fade away in the last gleams of sunlight until an old lady with a giant red handbag smacks you across the face and says, “why are you tangling my dog leash?”
Regrets in life are inevitable, and they can often leave you disconsolate. That can lead to self-blame and what I would consider to be unwarranted self-cruelty as a result of the mistaken notion that you are somehow responsible for your regrets, for what didn’t go right, for what could have gone better. It is somehow all your fault—life has become nothing but a bleak postlude to the immutable past. But regrets, ultimately, are fallacious and irrational, and recognizing this fact is an important part of avoiding the kind of harmful inward cruelty and self-hatred that come when people are unable to forgive themselves.
The first reason that regret as a phenomenon is fallacious and irrational is that the knowledge you have about what happened in your past was unavailable at the time it happened. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, and not knowing something a priori is a symptom of the human condition rather than of your personal failings. That is easy enough to grasp. But it is the second reason that is truly pivotal: even if you had known what you now know, it is not necessarily the case that the situation would have unfolded in the way expected from this regretful projection into the past.
Because any given situation is a complex interplay of a number of factors and your control over these factors is limited (if that control exists at all, to say nothing of the factors of which you are entirely unaware), changing any one factor would entail changing all of them in relation to each other. That means that the knowledge you now possess, if introduced as prior knowledge into a situation in the past, would be a single factor in a more complex alternate reality that you embellish and oversimplify by all this retrospective wishful thinking.
This brings me to a broader philosophical idea that underlies this line of reasoning: nothing you do is really the product of your own doing—the outcome of your own volition—since your actions always exist in a situation ruled by conditions that are the result of a long, complex interplay of causes and effects over which you have had no control. When people imagine a set of options before them at any given moment and assert that they have free will because they can seemingly choose one of them, they fail to realize that that set of options already depends on an almost-endless chain of prior conditions that have led them to that moment of choosing, or to the context in which that moment of choosing occurs. Their options have been forcibly whittled down to two (or three or four) from the hundreds or thousands or millions by dint of that eternal combination of environment and genetics that precedes even a person’s birth.
So how can we really blame ourselves for the outcome of any given action, however terrible or egregious? That we were completely free agents at the time of the action was really only an illusion, and the idea contrived ex post facto that we could have acted otherwise by introducing a different variable at the time of its occurrence is likewise illusory.
Regret is ultimately an illusion, and one that is not only absurd but harmful. Human instinct and human ego are the culprits that delude us into thinking that life is simpler and freer than it is in fact. The reality is that life is extremely complex and human beings, despite all their wonderful strengths and impressive abilities, extremely limited in their powers and always subordinate to the conditions to which they are bound to respond—always, in this case, after the fact. So let’s stop kidding ourselves. That, at least, will bring people one step closer to being self-aware and compassionate beings, borne aloft by a sound understanding of themselves and others in a world that doesn’t stop turning.
