How to Let Go of Your Regrets by Mark Manson. Regret is a form of self-hatred. If who you are today is a culmination of all of the acts that have led up to this moment, then the rejection of some past act is therefore a rejection of some part of you in this moment. Hating some part of yourself in the present messes you up psychologically. But hating a part of your past is not much different. It harbors shame and resentment. It inculcates self-loathing. And it makes you a real drag at parties, metaphorical and otherwise.
I would argue a regret is simply a mistake that we haven’t learned the proper lesson from yet. Often, we regret because we did something so cataclysmic that it’s difficult to learn the appropriate lesson. But often, we regret not because our actions were so heinous, but simply because we lack the imagination to pull something productive out of them.
The Deathbed Fallacy (Medium). People on their deathbeds regret not spending more time of their life with their family, traveling more, worrying less, etc. I’ve heard this truism echoed by growth gurus and spiritualists…The fallacy is to assume that whoever you are on your deathbed knows how you should live your life right now. They wish they would have done things differently, meaning, they think you should do something differently, right now. You should consider yourself over a lifetime not as a single person, but a line of many people with different views and priorities.
A Gunman’s Regret (scientificamerican.com). Science can help society grapple with the horrors of modern gun violence
How Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Made One of the Toughest Decisions of His Career (inc.com). “I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,'” explains Bezos. “I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.”