Comment by abalashov
15 years ago
I guess it remains to be seen conclusively when I fall terminally ill or get close to death of old age, but in my mind, it is not possible to have a life without some kind of theoretical regrets. Every choice you make to spend every moment a certain way is necessarily mutually exclusive with spending it any other way, and there are only so many moments and so many things one can realistically do.
I'm quite positively certain that if asked to reflect on all the things I regret near death, and truly chose to entertain the question from that angle, then I would find something to regret no matter how I lived my life until that point. There will always be could-have-beens, should-have-beens, what-ifs and maybe-if-I-did/didn'ts.
Furthermore, in a practical sense, life is an economically bounded experience; life in a world with finite resources, finite time, and within a society of other people always entails strong elements of concession, compromise and accommodation. You cannot lead a purely hedonistic life unconstrained by material or political limitations. What you do will always be subsumed to some extent by exigencies you would rather not have, by the needs and wants of others, by nature, and various forces you can't control. So, I don't think it's intelligible to implore people to "lead a life without regrets."
I'm not saying there isn't wisdom in being aware that life is short, and you only get one, and that there are some things you will wish you had done if your life ends up being a lot shorter than you expected. However, it seems to me that an important part of finding peace is acknowledging and coming to terms with the objective facts of the human condition and the inescapable psychological truths that accompany them. Seeing your existence as it is and not as it could hypothetically be is an important pillar of peace and comfort for the soul. The reality is, you will always have "regrets": there are always infinite alternate possibilities for any conditional branch, there are practically infinite variables.
"Live a life you won't regret" is the wrong way to look out at the world and your relationship to it. A more constructive approach may be to say, "Lead a good life," whatever that means to you. It is not logically equivalent to "lead a life about which you will never wish something could have been different."
Edit: Also, it is important to emphasise the critical distinction between a) regretting that you had not done something differently, in that all it would take for you to not regret it is to have made a different - and equally accessible - choice, versus b) regretting that you could not have done something differently, in the sense that you wish circumstances or conditions had been such as to make possible or make more likely that you could have made - and actually carried out - a different choice.
It's not so much being satisfied that every choice you made in life is the best one, but, being satisfied with who you are today (on the whole), coming to understand that who you are is the sum of every choice you've made, every relationship you've entered into, and every experience you have had. Change anything in that chain, and you are somebody different.
As long as you haven't lived the life of Methuselah (nearly a thousand freakin' years to get on with something, and the only thing posterity has to say about him is that he had sons and daughters before he died[1]), as long as you've tried to participate in your own life and haven't found a reason to loathe who you are, then there is no room, really, for the what-ifs or the coulda-shouldas.
[1] I'm no Bible literalist (or believer, for that matter), but I think that was the point the writer was trying to get across as a moral lesson.
Yep, be satisfied with who you are today (on the whole) and who you are on the day of your death. Recogonize now, the urge to speculate on what more you could have done as just another urge. Naturally, when one is dying and their own life is becoming scare in their own estimation, their longing for meaningful activities is going to be heightened. I'd argue that the more one has experienced in life, the more intense this longing will be. How many times can one go around and say final farewells to cherished friends? Never enough!
I try to read a lot of fiction, old and new, but I know that when I'm close to death, I'm liable to be choked up about those dozen or so books that I never got around to reading. Someone who doesn't like fiction will probably not think at all about what they never got around to think about reading. We're all that way about our own set of cares and don't cares, so none of the wishes and regrets are ever cosmically meaningful anyway.
Usual meaning of regrets are things you really wanted to do at the time, had a chance to try, did not and didn't do anything else that was particularly exciting. Then felt a nagging about it your whole life, which only gets worse when you're out of time.
If you took an alternate path that made you happy, you probably won't have regrets. If your life was crappy, you will have regrets about lots of little things. But a good life means whatever regrets you have will be minor curiosities, not severe psychological problems.
The bits that resonated with me were the references to "courage", i.e. overcoming one's fears in order to do that which would make oneself happier, more fulfilled etc. When I think of "regrets", I think of this wish that I'd overcome more of my own fears of other people's reactions, fear that the universe would not somehow provide at some minimum level etc. in order to try to follow my own dreams and passions.
At least if you try and things don't work out, you won't regret never having made the effort to seize the opportunity.
There is a difference between not having done something and regretting not having done something.