Why you should try to ban the word “regret” from your inner self-dialogue
My journey to understanding why this word can be so destructive and depressing
It’s always struck me as particularly arrogant that some people will say things like “I live my life with no regrets” and “10 years down with no regrets, only lessons learned”.
To me, it just seemed like a ridiculous thing to say; after all, we are all human, we are all inherently flawed and we all make mistakes. I heard these kinds of ideas and just thought to myself: “come on now, get real, just own your mistake and move on”.
Cambridge defines regret as feeling sorry about a situation, especially something sad or wrong or a mistake that you have made.
Isn’t it completely natural to feel a little sorry or sad about our mistakes? Especially when we do stuff all the time that is objectively, resoundingly dumb. Just think over the last month of your life. I can almost guarantee there was at least one silly thing, that you know you shouldn’t have done, but you did it anyway. I’ve had three just this week. So these kinds of confident proclamations just sounded to me like denial and delusion.
You just impulse-bought a new phone, even though you actually like your previous one better, and you went into debt to do it? That’s silly. You should regret it! How else would you learn?
And so previously, I sort-of prided myself on being able to be brutally honest about these kind of things. You know what I mean? I would say things to myself and to others like “Well, I just wasted a year of my life” and it was like I almost enjoyed making other people wince and feel sorry for me.
A change of heart
But now I’m trying to think about this differently and I’m going to explain why.
For a personality type like mine, negativity, pessimism and nihilism have always been a kind of comfort blanket. If life is **** and pointless anyway, what’s the point of trying? I don’t have to take particular responsibility for my own actions, failures and feelings because none of it matters anyway. It can be a good coping mechanism, but it can also be like walking around with an extra 10 kilograms of weight on your back. And it certainly doesn’t make you the most enjoyable person to talk to at parties.
Coming off of a job that I’ve just spent the last three years doing, I found myself slipping into the exact same patterns. “Well, that three years went nowhere” & “Wow, that was a waste of time and I definitely regret it” was my inner and outer dialogue. It’s my default gear and it’s easy & comfortable to slip into.
But here’s the problem. That attitude is not going to pull me up, it’s only going to bring me down. Also, life is just not that damn simple. Complicated experiences can’t be easily divided into the categories of good or bad, especially if we want to learn from them. And thirdly, we just have no way of knowing how the particular path we’ve just gone down is going to lead to our final destination.
There are just so many google-able famous examples of this, but here are two: Frank McCourt worked as a teacher for 30 years before he became a best-selling author at the age of 66. And imagine if college-dropout Steve Jobs had directed his energy into feeling sorry for himself instead of starting a society-altering company
What’s the point?
The point I’m trying to make here is obviously not that we are all going to be suddenly and incredibly successful one day. I’m not trying to give you false hope. The point I’m making is this: Taking a balanced yet optimistic view of your past experiences is the best next step forward you can take.
So while you won’t ever find me saying things like “I have no regrets”, I will be trying to remove that word from my inner-vocabulary and to change my inner-dialogue & reflections to be more positive.
And I think you could possibly benefit from that too. It’s not even that hard to do. Write a diary. Meditate. Reflect. Catch yourself when you start falling into negative thought-patterns. You might end up being 2% happier.
