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This relates to something I’ve thought a lot about, which is how to have a healthy relationship with regret. I think it’s easy to get caught up in the kind of r

This relates to something I’ve thought a lot about, which is how to have a healthy relationship with regret. I think it’s easy to get caught up in the kind of reasoning the author gives here and to end up feeling like regret is a fundamentally pointless thing. After all, if I go back ten years in a time machine and fix that mistake, I’m not only completely “re-rolling” every good thing in my life after that point, but I’m also replacing every child born in the last nine years or so with different people. What am I, history’s greatest monster? Which is why useful regret is forward-looking. It makes no sense to entertain a regret like “if only I’d left the house one second earlier,” because there’s no systematic connection between leaving the house slightly sooner and not getting hit by a car. It really is just wishing you could redo a specific dice roll. There’s no actual lesson. But a regret like “if only I’d noticed the warning signs” is different. That’s a functional, forward-looking regret which you can learn from. You don’t have to want to get in a time machine and redo your life from that point, and you can acknowledge that you simply didn’t have the experience needed to make the right decision at the time. But the feeling of regret can still help you to internalize the systematic relationship between that decision and its outcome.

StevenWaterman 3y ago
That matches my perspective perfectly, in a much clearer way than I've been able to express. As much as we may think we could change one event in the past to fix one problem today, it doesn't work like that. We are, as you say, pining after the chance to re-roll every event since that point in history, in a futile attempt to try and fix one small problem today. I think there definitely are situations that would warrant the desire to re-roll your entire life. But I'm nowhere near that point today. Your point about forward-looking regret has definitely given me something to think about.
SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
I will warn against “if only I knew the warning signs” in situations where you actually cannot reasonably predict or it isn’t reasonable to take initiative in preventing. This is common with anxiety where something awkward or weird happens and, at some point in the past it might’ve spun out (especially in childhood where children also don’t have the capacity to gracefully handle another awkward kid), but generally most people can laugh it off and promptly forget it— treating small awkward moments as warning signs a friendship is over isn’t actually true for most friendships. (This also happens about more serious circumstances like domestic abuse, where most partners aren’t abusive but due to experiencing abuse in the past suddenly normal things are warning signs of oncoming harm that isn’t actually happening.)

StevenWaterman 3y ago

That matches my perspective perfectly, in a much clearer way than I've been able to express. As much as we may think we could change one event in the past to fix one problem today, it doesn't work like that. We are, as you say, pining after the chance to re-roll every event since that point in history, in a futile attempt to try and fix one small problem today. I think there definitely are situations that would warrant the desire to re-roll your entire life. But I'm nowhere near that point today. Your point about forward-looking regret has definitely given me something to think about.

SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago

I will warn against “if only I knew the warning signs” in situations where you actually cannot reasonably predict or it isn’t reasonable to take initiative in preventing. This is common with anxiety where something awkward or weird happens and, at some point in the past it might’ve spun out (especially in childhood where children also don’t have the capacity to gracefully handle another awkward kid), but generally most people can laugh it off and promptly forget it— treating small awkward moments as warning signs a friendship is over isn’t actually true for most friendships. (This also happens about more serious circumstances like domestic abuse, where most partners aren’t abusive but due to experiencing abuse in the past suddenly normal things are warning signs of oncoming harm that isn’t actually happening.)