Regret

A woman I knew and respected used to say that she never regretted anything she'd ever done. This frankly struck me as — well -- at least unlikely, or as some sort of aspiration or affectation. I mean, ask about anyone if they have any regrets, and I'll bet some really safe money that the answer is some version of "of course I do".

But now, years later, I think I understand what she meant, and I should have been listening more carefully, in her context instead of mine. She was using the word "regret" as an emotional label, which it truly can be. I, on the other hand, was using the word "regret" as a label to sum up the unwanted by-product of the logical gestalt of "this was a mistake, I shouldn't have done that, I was a dumbass, learn from the pain it caused and don't do it again".

But, you see, that's not her mode of thinking. It's mine. Whatever her blessings or faults, she was/is not a rationalist. "Feelings" and her internal experience of a thing were, and probably still are, vastly more important to her than the thing itself. This is a concept I still do not entirely understand and likely never really will. Most people operate in some version of that world, but hers is one of the more pure examples I know. In my world, priority is always given to the real, as opposed to the perception. I don't continue to believe in something proven false, even if I "feel like" it should be true, and I strongly believe in things proven true even if they "feel like" they're wrong.

This has huge consequences in the present, wherein facts versus feelings often lead to irreconcilable differences across all kinds of dimensions. But I didn't understand that the differences converge to the same result as to past events, at least in a Stoic analysis.

In her calculus of giving first priority to emotional evaluation and judgment (and I should have known this), never having a regret is 100% pure Stoic thought. "Regret" as an EMOTION has almost always negative connotations — "regret" for many people, and certainly for her, is feeling bad when you've done something more-or-less horrible and are thinking back on it. Her response, from an emotional/feeling perspective is to simply decide "regret" doesn't exist.

My response recognizes the emotional component of regret, finds nothing of value in it, and refuses to indulge it. The practical effect is exactly the same, although in her terminology, she has never had a regret. In my terminology, I have, but it's stripped of emotional content altogether and not allowed to bother me beyond being an instructional set of lessons learned.

In the Stoic view (and that of most physicists and cosmologists who study this sort of thing) the past is something you have ZERO control over¹.

Let's say you have made a bad decision in your life which is affecting you even up until today. The Stoics' view was that whether you FEEL bad about it or not, the facts are that you've done it and that you are still on the path it irrevocably set. These facts continue to exist outside of your control. Your sole input into the matter at this point is to:

(a) Avoid doing it again; and,

(b) Decide whether or not you're going to insist on being miserable about it.

In short, it's a blend of the logical and the emotional halves of our working definitions of "regret".

Consider a simpler example of how the real world works in which you have a boss who is a complete and inflamed asshole. We've all been there and/or are there now. You have two choices:

(a) Have a boss who is a complete and inflamed asshole and be miserable about it; or,

(b) Have a boss who's a complete and inflamed asshole and ignore it.

Note that either way he's still gonna be an asshole — that part of the equation is utterly out of your control. The only "control" that's within your grasp is how YOU emotionally react to him BEING an asshole, and what you propose to do NOW to mitigate or change it if it's even possible. After all, "now" is all we have, really. We don't (despite poetic license) live in the past. Nor do we live in the future. Literally everything we are is "now" and nothing else. In that sense, our lives are as long as any on earth, as all life is the same length — that infinitesimal now. Everything else is speculation and the unreliable heresay of shoddy memory^2,3. So why would you waste any of it feeling bad if it's up to you?

Back to the subject at hand: You can review and regret your choices that got you into this place where you're under the control of an inflamed asshole. You can steep yourself in misery over every wrong turn, every warning flag you missed or disregarded over your life that led you to this place, or even curse every random piece of bad luck in which the chaos of real life drowned you before it spit you up on this shore.

But does any of this angst and misery change so much as a single second of it? It does not. From the time the first batch of random chemistry discovered it could reproduce itself billions of years ago up until the exact second now that you're reading this, how much can you affect? Zero. None. Nada. If there's an ironclad rule, it's this: Timelines don't allow do-overs. You are where you are, and how you got here is nothing but a set of physical facts and decisions whose sole value is to instruct your now.

In short, you can either be miserable about them or ignore them beyond deciding to do better now. Either way they stubbornly continue to exist.

But which of those seems more useful, or at least makes for a more peaceful life?

Haven't a clue whether my friend still reads me. But if she does, I'm sorry for dismissing what I assumed was an emotional quirk without recognizing it as a rational response to life. You were right after all.

Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions — not outside.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

<sup>1. It's very probable that you don't have all that much say in the future, either, but that's another discussion for another day.↩

2. Memory is Malleable, A Study By Donna J Bridge, PhD ↩

3. Why memories are an illusion and forgetting is good for you, New Scientist ↩</sup>