Comment by roenxi

Well, yeah. Regrets are cheap and plentiful. Which raises the salient point of why deathbed regrets would suddenly become a source of wisdom. But they are often a sample of things that the person thinks they were consistently miscalibrated on over their entire life so it isn't clear why they'd suddenly gain clarity into what they should have done instead.

The top 5 list in the article is some really basic stuff. And a lot of people do get that wrong (most people, really) but (1) if they get told they will persist in making the same mistakes and (2) there are a lot of people in absolute sense who actually get those things about right if you look for them and practice a bit. You don't need to be dying to regret those things and the dying still probably don't actually understand what they got wrong. If they actually understood the mistakes they were making they wouldn't make them and most people keep making stupid mistakes like not expressing their feelings or working too hard instead of talking to people for entire lives of 50+ years. Expressing feelings and not working too hard are actually pretty easy things to do if you keep chipping away at it; these people probably don't really understand what they did wrong.