This essay was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the topic was Regret.
[If you are a writer, you might consider joining us.]
It was a hot day, I remember that much.
I was on a packed coastal train filled to capacity with sweating, excitable, underdressed (and frankly for the most part overfed) holidaymakers with their bright summer clothes and overstimulated children and bags filled with snacks and Factor 50 and beach paraphernalia. As I remember it, I was heading to work, probably the only commuter in the whole clammy carriage. I was sandwiched in the vestibule holding onto a handrail with 3 or four other hands, though in truth the sheer mass of standing bodies would have stopped me from falling on my face were the train to suddenly stop.
It was then, sweating, thirsty, hating life, that I saw it.
On the forearm of the well-nourished woman pressed up against me- among a whole cluster of doodle-like pictures of dreamcatchers and clouds and candy coloured cartoonish animals- was a tattoo in faded black cursive that read ‘no regrets’. As the Tannoy reminded us all for at least the 17th time to drink water to avoid dehydration and to seek the train staff if we felt unwell, I pondered that sentiment. No regrets.
Imagine, having either nothing in your life that provoked feelings of regret or, stranger still, having regrettable things happen to you and not feeling any of those pangs of self-recrimination or ruminating introspection.
It made no sense to me then and it doesn’t make much more sense now. But even if it is impossible to avoid at least some regrets in life, the concept of a regret-free life was at least plausible enough- or a worthy enough ideal- for at least one person to decide to have it etched on their flesh for all to see1. It deserves contemplation then, this business of looking back ruefully and wondering what could have been. Does it have a place? Does it hold any value? And is regret an inevitable fact of life or something that should be avoided or strived to be overcome, with or without the help of the tattooist’s gun?
Though I am not haunted by them to the point of stare-at-the-ceiling sleeplessness, I do carry my share of regrets. And unlike the case of Sinatra they are not ‘too few to mention2.’
And- to be clear at the outset- I won’t be delving into any specific regrets here today. Firstly, because I don’t think it is necessary to wallow in my own particular sorrows to get my point across and secondly because I think there is a real trend in contemporary non-fiction (and literature and cinema and many other mediums as well for that matter) to deal in what my wife often refers to as exploitation masquerading as exploration. Serial killer podcasts and lurid documentaries instantly spring to mind as examples of this but there are many more subtle variations. The confessional essay is one of them.
In this, the essayist acts as a penitent, as an (intentionally and overly) harsh judge of themselves and in doing so builds up a cache of clout to then feel able to judge others while sidestepping standard ethics and the agreed upon rules of engagement, as it were. Camus, for one, was aware of this gambit and when his character Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall3 notes that “the more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you — even better, I provoke you into judging yourself”, he got right to the heart of the matter.
There will be no such tricks here today. Honesty is vital to the writer, as is integrity, as is- I believe- the intention of approaching the reader conversationally, as one person to another, equal in shared humanity if not identical in shared experience and viewpoint. But dignity is important too and rending your garments and airing your dirty laundry in public strikes me as unseemly when done merely as a means of garnering attention and not because of a greater moral obligation.
So I have regrets, let’s take that as a given. In fact, let’s go further and state that we all carry our share of regrets. The best evidence I can find of this- if we are to refer to the literature rather than the common-sense that comes from living life and working jobs and being around people as they go about their days4 - comes from Daniel Pink’s World Regret Survey. In this over 15,000 people across 105 countries were asked ‘How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently?’5 Only 1 percent of those surveyed said they never feel regret, a number which coincidently matches the prevalence of psychopathology in a given population pretty neatly6. At least according to the PCL-R psychopathy scale, which is the current accepted standard for measuring this. Conversely 21 percent of those surveyed said they feel regret ‘all the time’ and the vast majority (82 percent) responded by saying that regret plays at least an occasional part in their lives.
We can say then that ‘no regrets’ doesn’t really exist in any meaningful way, the odd tattoo and Instagram post notwithstanding. Which poses two questions, firstly- why do people espouse the idea of having no regrets even though that is effectively impossible or at the least extremely unrealistic? And secondly- what is the purpose of regretting? Is there any way that regret can be instructive or useful for those who are currently preoccupied with it?
Unless you own a time machine, holding regrets is not a rational thing to do. You can’t go back and fix the mistakes you’ve made. You can make amends now and moving forward, you can ask for forgiveness, you can forgive yourself, but you can’t go back and make the regret-inducing incident go away. There are no do-overs. So why worry? Why not just embrace the ebb and flow of life and accept things as they are and as they will be, whatever that ends up looking like?
This, essentially, is the view that Nietzsche argued via his idea of ‘amor fati’, or love of fate, which is to say simply that we should embrace our fate. Which sounds nice, if not somewhat naive in its idealism. There’s the ring of just forget about it or just get over it behind that tidy little Latin phrase (which I also imagine has been inked on more than one arm in recent years), which even if it has some truth to it does not really constitute practical guidance. And in case you may think I’m being unfair on old Nietzsche take a look at this quote on ‘amor fati’ from his book The Gay Science:
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”
See what I mean? Behind the bluster and the puffed out chest there is a lot of pain there. This was written when Nietzsche was dealing with a great deal of ill health and heartache his life. The quotation strikes me as someone trying to cope. Elegantly worded, heartfelt and sincere to be sure, but still the act of someone trying to put on a front. And if putting on a brave face or shouting LALALA…LALalalala… with your fingers in your ears is what ‘no regrets’ amounts to then it can be discarded. Resignation is not the same thing as acceptance.
But maybe there is a distinction to be made here. Yes, feeling unequivocally good about all aspects of your destiny and the path you have trodden so far may be a fanciful daydream (or at least dependent on such emotions being medically managed), but surely it is possible and certainly desirable to feel less bad at least. Clearly it would be helpful to take the sting out of regret.
What makes regret really hurt, what makes it shift from being potentially useful (which we’ll get to shortly) to being paralysing (and bizarrely self-satisfying) is when regret gets mixed up with guilt and grief. Grieving over past actions and really wallowing in that pain is what removes all sense of clarity and proportion. This is when sense goes out the window and the guilt and regret become unhelpful. If the initial transgression that is the subject of regret was caused by rashness and thoughtlessness then grieving over it only acts as a means of perpetuating further rashness and self-absorption. Remorse like this just compounds impulsiveness and ultimately nothing is either done or learned which makes the whole sorry ordeal an unhelpful waste of time for all involved. You as the remorseful party do not grow or learn or change by such self-obsessed self-flagellation. Stupidity is not fixed with further stupidity and sorrow by itself does not make amends for sorrowful behaviour.
When regret becomes wallowing in grief there is a shirking of responsibility. Sounds harsh I know, but feeling as bad as you can, as bad as is humanly possible even, does not do any good. Bad does not bring about good on its own. Knowing this means that the remorseful switch from focusing on their (emotional) responses to their responsibilities. Regret can become suffocating remorse or it can be turned into repentance (that is, seeing things in a new way) and the resolve to change how you have been living and will live. That, to answer the question above, is the purpose of regret. That is how you make use of it. And rather than thinking in terms of good or bad, it can be more useful to think in terms of what is unhelpful, and what is helpful to ourselves and to others.
A refusal to acknowledge regret and its associated emotions will trap us in a continuous cycle of making the same mistakes over and over again. Rather than being a freeing slogan ‘no regrets’ is an indicator of moral stuckness, if not now then soon. Deep regrets are moral regrets, and they are a sign if nothing else that your moral compass is at least in part still functional. In that sense they are good and perhaps even necessary.
Regret is a gift when seen in the right light. It can be a catalyst for change and the precursor to a breakthrough.
Kierkegaard, a subtler and more spiritually attuned thinker than Nietzsche, although no less tragic, said that:
“Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.”
I think the same goes for regret too, especially when you face it head on and let it guide you rather than consume you. The often poorly translated concept of repentance (metanoia) in Christianity is not about self-flagellation and wallowing in regret. It’s about experiencing life in a new way, it’s about thinking and being in a new way7. It’s about- in a very real sense- changing your mind.
As I think back on this I am reminded of the meme of the guy in the wifebeater sporting a ‘NO RAGRETS’ chest tattoo. I gather this is from some film but I couldn’t tell you which. I didn’t want to mention this at all because the sheer amount of lifehours I have wasted online and the brainrot such as that meme that I have absorbed as a consequence is a real regret of mine. Having my mind instantly turn to such things is something that I hope will fade with sufficient time offline. But the image is so well-known that I think that it does warrant acknowledgment here, even if I do end up regretting this strangely confessional footnote.
My Way is a funny old song. The lyrics, when read on the page, are the simple bold-faced braggadocio of the unrepentant. But, they can be the vehicle for a singer to deliver all the shades on the emotional spectrum, from the wounded-heart-beneath-a-cheery-exterior of the more soulful balladeer to the nihilistic psychopathy of a Sid Vicious performance to the ubiquitous, defiant whiskey-drunk slurrings of an uncle on the Karaoke mic. An uncle who may have had a tough couple of years since his retirement was forced, or his divorce was finalised or his kids stopped picking up the phone. The singer is revealed in the act of singing.
The Fall, like so much existentialist literature, is something that I read in my teens thinking that I got it. Evidently I didn’t, at least not beyond the most superficial of surface level readings. Going back over such works in my thirties I may possibly have more of a handle on them. Maybe. The moral, then, is that we profit by placing as much emphasis on rereading as we do on seeking out novelty. But that’s another topic for another time.
Common-sense is something that I often find myself wanting to appeal to in my writing as a form of evidence but the advertising-mediated, astroturfed and bot and algorithm driven griftopia of the contemporary internet makes this difficult to do. With a sufficient deluge of decontextualised information it is easy to drown out whole masses of accumulated folk wisdom, aphorisms, rules of thumb and other time-tested truth. Truths, incidentally, that keep us grounded and- more importantly- much more hesitant to make impulse purchase and consume beyond our means.
I’m not going to quibble and delve into the nature of self-reporting, cross cultural differences in social psychology and the biases and limitations of surveys as a research methodology. I said I would present the best evidence to bolster my point and the World Regret Survey, as it stands, is it. You can read Pink’s book The Power of Regret if you want to take a further look at the methodology and so forth.
Yes, I’m aware of correlation vs causation and the mammoth issues in attempting to use questionnaires cross culturally. I’m just having a little fun. But it is interesting to think that given these numbers that if you live in a western country you are about 4 times more likely to be a millionaire than you are to say that you never feel regret. Something to ponder.
This is just one aspect of an ancient concept which contains a wealth of meaning. As is often the case when trying to interpret terms from different cultures and eras, we have to be careful that attempts at clarification don’t end up becoming oversimplifications.
and this shall be an essay that i use as a guidepost going forward.
I deleted an entire section in my recent essay about the false positivity of "no regrets!" thinking and how like any other feeling and emotion, we developed it for reasons we should be tuned into.