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If it helps, energy really really should be worked on. Do that. Also, that's not really how regrets work. You will be comparing the path you took to what you i

If it helps, energy really really should be worked on. Do that. Also, that's not really how regrets work. You will be comparing the path you took to what you imagine to be the roads not taken. It's very dependent on your own unique experiences and outlook, and very hard to safeguard against. Your way of evaluating your life will change over time, so optimising for your current values gives no guarantees. Best thing to work on is stoicism and self forgiveness in my opinion.

kd5bjo 8y ago
As a corollary, your brain tends to imagine things towards the happy end of the probability space. Choosing the uncertain path means you’re comparing against a reasonably accurate alternative instead of an imagined utopia.
sethammons 8y ago
My philosophy: make the best choice given the information you have at the time. If you do, you have no cause to regret anything in your life. Thinking of alternative paths you could have taken might be a fun exercise or could yeild insights to make better future choices, but if you chose the best you could, there is no sense in regretting a choice, even when that choice hurt.
- ianai 8y ago
  Reminding myself of this has helped many times in the past. It’s always easy to critique in hindsight. It’s thus even more easy to criticize harmfully in hindsight. Just yesterday I got to regretting how a few dates failed to pan out...almost 12 years ago! I think of this concept as similar to the excluded middle in logic. In hindsight, a decision is apparently either good or bad depending on the outcome. But it’s impossible to know the outcome with certainty the vast majority of the time. So a decision needs to be judged in the context of the information known at the time of decision - which does not include the information about the decisions outcome.
  - ianai 8y ago
    Replying to myself, The value of a decision before uncovering its value is similar to the value of a lottery ticket before the draw. Before the drawing a lottery tickets value is nonzero-the aggregate value of the expected payout. But after the draw the lottery ticket is worth its realized value. When the pre-lotto expected value of the ticket meets or exceeds the cost of the lottery ticket the purchase of the ticket is rational. After the draw, the monetary value of the ticket is whatever the ticket won or did not win. Most likely the value of the ticket is 0$. That doesn’t make the purchase of the ticket irrational before the draw.

kd5bjo 8y ago

As a corollary, your brain tends to imagine things towards the happy end of the probability space. Choosing the uncertain path means you’re comparing against a reasonably accurate alternative instead of an imagined utopia.

sethammons 8y ago

My philosophy: make the best choice given the information you have at the time. If you do, you have no cause to regret anything in your life. Thinking of alternative paths you could have taken might be a fun exercise or could yeild insights to make better future choices, but if you chose the best you could, there is no sense in regretting a choice, even when that choice hurt.

ianai 8y ago
Reminding myself of this has helped many times in the past. It’s always easy to critique in hindsight. It’s thus even more easy to criticize harmfully in hindsight. Just yesterday I got to regretting how a few dates failed to pan out...almost 12 years ago! I think of this concept as similar to the excluded middle in logic. In hindsight, a decision is apparently either good or bad depending on the outcome. But it’s impossible to know the outcome with certainty the vast majority of the time. So a decision needs to be judged in the context of the information known at the time of decision - which does not include the information about the decisions outcome.
- ianai 8y ago
  Replying to myself, The value of a decision before uncovering its value is similar to the value of a lottery ticket before the draw. Before the drawing a lottery tickets value is nonzero-the aggregate value of the expected payout. But after the draw the lottery ticket is worth its realized value. When the pre-lotto expected value of the ticket meets or exceeds the cost of the lottery ticket the purchase of the ticket is rational. After the draw, the monetary value of the ticket is whatever the ticket won or did not win. Most likely the value of the ticket is 0$. That doesn’t make the purchase of the ticket irrational before the draw.