The Science of Regret

That's best selling author Dan Pink, who believes that negative emotions can be a force for good in our lives. Dan is most interested in the emotion of regret, which is the focus of his book The Power of Regret, How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. But it took Dan a while to figure out why regret was such a valuable emotion. You know, reading through all these regrets every day here in my office, why was I not more

bummed out? I got these people opening up their hearts and telling me the mistakes that they made and how terrible they feel about it. Why did they not bring me down? And I finally, over time realized that when people tell you what they regret the most, they're telling you what they value the most. On today's episode, how to transform our relationship with regret to live happier and

more fulfilling lives. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is a slight change of plants, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. So I guess I'll start Dan by talking about how much I loved this very visceral description of regret that you share in your book. You call it the stomach churning feeling that the present would be better, in the future brighter, if only you hadn't chosen so poorly, decided

so wrongly, or acted so stupidly in the past. Of all the feelings to study, why did you choose this

one to examine in particular? Because my stomach was churning, because I had that emotion and I wasn't sure what to do about it, And at some level I was at a point in my life where, to my surprise, I had Mila john By, I had a room to look back, and like many people who look backward, I look backward and I see, Oh, if only I had been kinder, if only I had taken more risks, if only I had worked harder if only I had done that rather than that, And my stomach was churning in

a way that made me want to talk about it. And when I very tenderly began mentioning it to other people, I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about regret, and that our perception of this emotion and what it meant to people was very different from how it lived in people's hearts and heads. Yeah, I love that. I think you probably identified there was something counterintuitive we might discover

if you were to go down that path. Before we analyze how regret affects our lives, I first want to recognize just how remarkable it is that we as humans are even capable of feeling this thing called regret. I mean, as a cognitive scientist, I'm always marveling at human abilities, but this one, in particular kind of knoxster socks off. You say that our ability to feel regret depends on at least two pretty complex mental abilities. Do you mind painting a picture of what those are? Sure? The two

mental abilities are time travel and storytelling. So time travel is essential in our ability to experience regret. If you think about this, So suppose that somebody has a regret about marrying Steve rather than Bob. I married Steve, and I should have married Bob if only I'd marry Bob. All right, So the thing about that, so what are you doing. You're getting into a time machine and your traveling back in time to when you first got to know Steve and Bob. Now, that itself is pretty amazing

that we can travel through time in our heads. That's amazing in itself. But wait, there's more, because what we do is we go back and imagine what happened, but then rewrite the story, essentially negate what really happened, overwrite it with our own tail. Hey I'm going to marry Bob. That's amazing too. But wait, there's more, because then we get back in our time machine and come back to the present, and suddenly the present looks entirely different because

we've reconfigured the past. And so that's an incredible cognitive ability. This ability of counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thinking is when we imagine a situation that runs counter to the actual facts. So counterfactual thinking can be it rained yesterday, if only it were sunny yesterday, that's counterfactual thinking. How would my life be different if it were sunny yesterday. It's one reason why I mean, as a a scientists, you know that little kids can't do this. Their brains are not

fully developed enough to do this kind of processing. So I love to dig into the fact that kids can't do this because it is fascinating from a child development perspective. Absolutely. So. This is an experiment done by a couple of developmental psychologists and what they did is they told kids a story about two boys. One was named Bob and one was named David. Now these boys live near each other, and each day Bob and David would each ride their bikes to school and they would take a path that

went around a pond. Now, you can go around the right side of the pond to get to school, or you can go around the left side of the pond to get to school, and both paths are equidistant. It's the same length, the same amount of time. But every day Bob goes around the right side of the pond and David goes around the left side of the pond. Okay, so what they tell the kids is, this is the

following story. One morning, Bob rides around the right side of the pond, but unbeknownst to Bob, a tree has fallen, smacking itself into the center of the path, and Bob collides with the branch. He falls off the bike, He hurts himself and is late to school. The left side of the path was fine now that same morning, David who gets up. I guess a little bit later, David who always takes the left side of the pond. He says, no, what today, I want to take the right side of

the pond. David also hits the branch, he gets thrown off his bike, He's injured two and he is late for school. And so the question that these researchers asked these young children is who would be more upset about riding along the path that went around the right side of the pond. Bob who does it every day, David who just did it that one day, or would they feel the same? So five year olds said, ah, they'd

be the same. They would be totally bombed out because they hit a branch and fell out their bike and relate to school. But seven year olds realized that it was actually David who would be more upset because he deviated from his ordinary path. He'd be more likely to feel regret. In this case, exactly, David would feel more regret because a seven year old is saying, if only David had taken the left side of the pond, he would have avoided that branch and gotten to school safely

and on time. You know, five year olds and seven year olds are only two years apart, but a lot goes on in that time for these young brains to acquire the strength and the muscularity to perform this kind of mental trapeze act that we're talking about, where you're swinging back and forth between past and present, between reality

and imagination. That's a very hard act to perform. And you need the muscle memory, you need the strength, you need the dexterity, and that happens somewhere probably between the ages of five and seven. Yeah. Man, it's so funny. I'm literally in this moment, I'm feeling star struck by our own minds, so part of me while I just have a moment. It's incredible. Though I'm such a nerd. I'm with you. I'm astonishing what our minds can do. I mean, it should, honestly, it should take our breath away.

That is when I was reading the Neuroscience and the cognitive science. It's like, Wow, our brains are awesome. They're a little glitchy and certain circumstances, but it's a pretty good piece of equipment. You know. I'm not returning it to the factory. I've said. I've said before, I feel like we as humans are so hard on ourselves, but actually we should just feel like we're crushing it every moment of our existence, just by virtue of existing and doing like nine percent of the things we do on

any given day. So, you know, who needs celebrity sightings? Dan, When you got the human brain, That's what I say, you can get absolutely Just pull up your just pull up your your MRI. You'll and you'll see that's that's your celebrity sighting for the day. That's exactly right. Um okay.

So to summarize the Bob and David's study, we see that five year olds are able to identify, of course, that Bob and David are both experiencing negative emotions, right, They're probably feeling sad, there might be a little concerned about the bruises they have. Then there's this huge developmental milestone where for the first time we seem to understand intuitively that David would feel more of this thing called

regret than Bob would. And so with that in mind, you know, there's lots of negative emotions we feel, and one of the things you do in your book is you differentiate regret from some of these other negative emotions. I'm curious to hear what you see as the necessary ingredients for feeling regret as opposed to another kind of negative emotion. What race You're very different? Are two things.

It's compare and it is blame essentially, So with regret, we compare one set of circumstances to another set of circumstances. So regret doesn't exist in absolute terms. It exists in comparative terms, and so we're comparing one set of circumstances. It's a set of facts to another imagined set of facts. Perhaps even more important is blaming. Regret is your fault, all right, and that makes it different from other kinds of emotions. It makes it different from, say, the emotion

of disappointment. I could feel disappointed that it's raining today, but I can't feel regret that it's raining because I don't control the skies. I can feel regret if I leave the house without an umbrella, and I know that it's raining because that's on me. But regret and disappointment, the big demarcation is agency. Regret is your fault. And for those listening who are as self critical as I am, this is also why regret stings so much, right because

of this agency component. It just makes it such a painful feeling, right because you can't pin it on somebody else. Okay, So, now that we have a better handle on what regret is and the conditions that must be satisfied in order for us to feel regret, let's talk for a bit about how common it is for us to experience regret. Oh.

Absolutely so. There's research and social psychology from years ago showing that in people's everyday conversations, the negative emotion that people expressed the most in everyday to conversations is regret. It was, in this particular piece of research the second most common emotion of any kind that they expressed, even

after love. And one of the exciting things about this project was I was able to do some research of my own, and I was able to conduct a very large quantitative survey, the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret ever conducted, and I asked people a bunch of questions, including the question how often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently? Now I agonize over the wording of that

question because I wanted to describe regret without saying it. Yeah, but I didn't want to use the R word because there's such a stigma attached to the R word. And what we found is that eighty two percent of the US population did this thing at least occasionally. We have this performed idea that I have no regrets. I always look forward, I never look backward. But the proceuge of people who said they never do this was one percent.

You know, in this culture, especially Western culture, where it's you know, it's all about positive emotions, all about positive feelings, Luke, with no regrets is the anthem that people are just screaming from the rooftops. One thing that really landed with me when reading your book, as you say, to live is to accumulate at least some regret. It is almost definitionally the case that if one has lived, they will feel regret. And I think there's actually a common element

to that message. Yeah, I agree, I'll see that point and raise you and say that if you're feeling regrets actually a good sign. It's like, oh, my cognitive machinery is working. I am experiencing regret. If you don't experience a regret, truly, it's a sign of a potentially grave problem. You know. It's interesting, Dan, because when we engage in mental time travel and counterfactual thinking, we don't have to imagine how things could have gone better, right. We could

instead imagine how things could have gone far worse. But what's interesting is that we as humans have a very strong bias towards the former, which helps explain why we so often regret things. And you capture this point really nicely when you talk about framing a thought in terms of at least versus if only yes. So, when we think about counterfactual thinking, there are two different varieties of it.

One is an upward counterfactual. So you imagine how things could have been better if only I had become an accountant rather than an engineer. Everything in my life would be fantastic, Right, so you imagine a better scenario upward kund of factuals if only make us feel worse, but

they can help us do better. But there's another kind of counterfactual, a downward counterfactual, where you imagine how things could have become worse, and so you say, oh, I shouldn't have married Edward, but at least I have these two great kids. You find the silver lining in that. What that does is that minimizes the sting. It makes you feel better, but it doesn't help you necessarily do better.

And I think what's curious is that we're much more inclined to do the counterfactual thinking that makes us feel worse. Our brains are built for progress and efficiency, and they know that those upward counterfactuals, those if only while they hurt, they're going to make us better if we do it right. There's a really interesting study around Olympians and their response to winning different types of metals that I think illustrates this at least if only kind of thinking. Very well,

do you mind sharing that study? This is a really really interesting study of Olympic medalists. And what they did is they showed a group of participants photographs of medalists on the Olympic platform, the gold medal winner, the silver medal winner, the bronze medal winner, except they blocked out the actual medals that these olympians won, and they had these participants who didn't know what the researchers were studying evaluate how happy the people looked, and they ranked the

olympians based on how happy they were. And so, as we would expect, the person who won the gold medal looked the happiest, which makes sense, right, But then there was a bit of a surprise. The person who was the next happiest looking was the bronze medalist, and the silver medalist often didn't look all that happy, which is weird, right. You just want a silver medal in the Olympics. You should be pumped two And except they weren't. The bronze

medalists were beaming. The bronze medalists in some cases, we're looking as happy as the gold medalist. And the way we explain this riddle is through counterfactual thinking. The bronze medalist is doing and at least a downward counterfactual. They're imagining how things could have been worse. The bronze medals is saying iron and bronze medal, which is great because

at least it wasn't like that. Shmow finished fourth who's going home with no hardware but the silver medals is saying, if only I had they're a swimmer reached for the wall a little bit earlier. If only I had kicked a little harder, I would be wearing that gold medal

instead of this crappy silver medal. Yeah. You know, naturally, regret gets a really bad rap, right, because as you've just described with that swimmer, and it's just such an unpleasant feeling that you make the case stand and I think a very convincing case that we should see regret as something we should embrace and learn from. And so, what are some of the positive effects that you feel regret can have when we engage with it in the right way. Yeah, And the key is that we have

to engage with it in the right way. I think too often we're kind of conditioned to ignore regrets. Oh it's negative, don't even think about it. Just move on, look forward, don't look back. That's a bad idea. But sometimes I think if we're not equipped to deal with it properly, we get captured by our regrets. We wallow on them, we ruminate on them. Yeah, what we should be doing is listening to our regrets, confronting them, using them as signals, as data, as information. And when we

do that, there are many many benefits. For instance, there's research and social psychologies showing that it can help make us better negotiators. You do a negotiation, you think about what you regret in that negotiation, you often do better in the next one. It can help us become better problem solvers, better strategists. There's even evidence that it can actually help us deepen sense of meaning in our lives.

And so when we treat this emotion properly, and that's a big if we can use it as an engine for moving forward. Yeah, regrets really serving as a catalyst here right, for actually driving meaningful action. Sure, And I think I think what's I think what's puzzling here is to people is that, you know, a solution in some cases is to invite this negative emotion, not to bat it away, not to ignore it, but in some sense to invite it. And that seems a little counterintuitive because

you're inviting something that feels bad. And the thing about regret is that regret can clarify what we value and instruct us on how to do better. And people like that, but it comes with discomfort. It comes with some amount of pain and people don't like that, but that's not the deal. It's a package deal. You've got to have both. And arguably I think that pain and discomfort is the source of the clarification and the instruction. Yeah, it's signaling to your brain that you've acted in a way that

might conflict with value exact for example. Yep. There's also research you talk about in your book that when we engage with regret in a meaningful, constructive way, it can also increase our performance. Do you mind talking about some

of the studies in this area, sure. I mean there's a lot of research in experimental psychology where you give people puzzles, especially anagrams, and what it shows in general is that you put people into a problem solving situation, they solve the problem, and then you ask them to reflect on what they regret doing or not doing in that problem solving exercise. Again, you're inviting this negative emotion. They often do better in the next round because they've

felt bad. That bad feeling is a signal to the brain saying huh, maybe I should do things differently. It's a form of instruction, and so if you think about those puzzle solvers if they actually subscribe to the no regrets philosophy. They said, I screwed up this anagram. I did it slowly, I didn't get the right answer. But no regrets. I'm always positive, I never look backward. They're not going to get any better at performance on a whole array of problem solving skills. And how can regret

deep in our sense of meaning? Well, I mean what it does in many cases that when we think about counterfactually, at some level, we sometimes will appreciate what we have, which deepens our sense of meaning. But it can also help clarify what we actually value in our lives. So there's one person I wrote about who regretted not spending time with her grandparents. Every winter of the grandparents would

come and visit her, and she hated it. As a kid, she thought they were intruding, she didn't want to talk to them, she would standoffish, And when her grandparents passed away, she regretted it because she missed hearing their stories and hearing what their lives were about. And it actually prompted her to collect her own parents' stories because that feeling of regret spurred at least a quest for meaning and

understanding of her own life and her own story. I want to dig in a bit to this notion of doing regret right, because I think this is so important. We want to make sure that we are not ignoring the negative feeling, ignoring the regret. We also want to make sure that we're not marinating in it, We're not ruminating in this unproductive way. But just as importantly, we need to draw the right conclusion from the regret. And we shouldn't code or regret as something that reflects this

deep underlying flaw in our character and our personality. Instead, we should evaluate that behavior in isolation. Right. It's just a reflection of a behavior in a particular moment of time, and we shouldn't overgeneralize, which we as humans so often do, especially again hypercritical people. Oh my god, this must mean that I am a bad person. This must mean that I'm a terrible decision maker, or what have you. That is one of the secret to process and regret effectively.

But I also think it's one of the secrets to leading a life where you're not torturing yourself. We say that if I made a mistake, I'm a bad person, rather than I did a stupid thing, and you're always better off evaluating the behavior rather than making some kind of broader assessment of the person. So there's a temporal aspect of it as well. You have to understand that any mistake that you make, any screw up, any regret, any blunder, is a moment in your life, not the

full measure of your life. We're willing to make universal attributions about our entire lives based on a moment, always a negative moment, and essentially neglect the other ninety nine of our lives and our evaluation. Don't do that. That's a recipe for that's a recipe for unhappiness. And you know, when you explain this to people, they get it, and

if you coach them, they can stop doing that. The problem is is that, I think it's a bigger problem is that I don't think we've done a very good job equipping people with how to deal with negative emotions. I think at some level we've sold them a bill of goods about the need to be positive all the time, and what we should be doing is saying, yeah, have lots of positive emotions. Positive emotions are great. They make life fantastic. But you're going to have some negative emotions.

And these negative emotions are adaptive. They're functional if you know how to treat them. When we're back from the break, Dan teaches us how we should treat our regrets and why regrets about long lost romances and miss job opportunities are far more similar than we might think. And I come in with some hot takes about whether we're maybe putting too much weight on our deathbed regrets. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans.

As Dan Pink was researching regret, he first wanted to learn what people tend to regret. He launched the World Regret Survey and collected tens of thousands of regrets from people all over the world. Researchers have previously sorted regret into specific life categories, like romance regrets or education regrets, but when Dan analyzed the results of his survey, he realized these categories weren't telling the full story. What I found is that when you listen to what people are saying,

what matters is not the domain of life. It's something else going on just beneath the surface. And the easiest way to make that clear is With an example, I was shocked by how many people who went to college, especially in America, regret not studying abroad. It blew my mind. And the reason they didn't study abroad is that, oh, I don't know, it's kind of risky. I'm not sure I want to do that. And I was surprised by

how salient that regret was. And then there were lots of people all over the world who had a regret that basically went like this, X years ago. There was someone who I really liked wanted to ask them out on a date, but I was too chicken to do that, and I've regretted it ever since. Okay, that's a romance regret. We've got an education regret. We've got a romance regret.

Then I have lots of people all over the place who say, ah, I always wanted to start a business rather than staying in this dead end job, but I didn't have the guts to do that, and now I regret it. That's a career regret. But to my mind, those are all the same regret. They're in different domains of life, but they share a common root. And if the common root is this, you're at a juncture in your life. You can play it safe or you can take the chance. And most people regret not taking the chance.

Not all the time. There are people who take the who took the chance and regret it because things went south on them. But for every one of those, there are dozens and dozens and dozens who have the opposite regrets. So that's one of the four core regrets. Boldness regrets if only I'd taken the chance, And let's stick into

boldness of it, because this one's really interesting. You talk about the fact that when we're in our twenties right, what we would call in action regrets, so things that we didn't do an action regretting things we did do are roughly the same in number, but by the time we hit fifty, in action regrets are twice as likely to be felt than before. And help me understand why it is that as we age, we increase the ratio of the things we regret not having done then the

things we have done. I think it's an interesting question. I'm not sure we know the full answer to that, but I think that we can speculate certain kinds of action regrets. We can find the silver lining in. We can do it. At least we can say, oh, I shouldn't have moved to Houston, but at least there is in a state and come technics okay, So you can find the silver lining in that. The other thing is

that certain kinds of action regrets we can undo. If we fullied somebody, maybe we can make amends and make an apology. If we've stolen from somebody, maybe we can make restitution. I have one guy who I wrote about who got a tattoo that said no regrets, decided that he didn't like it and decided to have his tattoo removed. And so we can remove our tattoos. So with action regrets, we can we can make peace with them at some level. We can at least them, we can undo them. In

action regrets, you can't do that. You typically can't find it at least and there's nothing to undo. Could you haven't done anything? So I think that's a big part of it. You know, in the research on aging, like Laura Carsonson's work, for example, she finds that as we get older, we tend to have fewer anxieties because there's

just less future to be anxious about. And I do wonder if there's a parallel here, which is, as we get older, you know, the range of opportunity that lies ahead for us that we could potentially explore diminishes pretty considerably, and so that might make us lust after past moments when we actually did have opportunity but didn't take advantage

of it. I think that's very plausible. I think that we do have a sense that many of us, not all of us, have a sense that when we're young, there are boundless opportunities, and then at some point, relatively early in our lives, we get a bracing reality check. Okay, so we've talked about boldness regrets. Do you mind talking about the three other categories? Sure? So one category is

what I call foundation regrets. These are regrets that people have where they made small decisions or small mistakes early in life, no single one of which is consequential, but that accumulate into nasty consequences. So a very common one would be I spent too much and save too little, and now I'm broke. Now I have no money. And the same thing was true with health. You know, I didn't exercise, I didn't eat right, and it's not like

for one day I did that. For years and now I am in ill health or woefully out of shape. So foundation regrets are if only I'd done the work. Moral regrets are if only I'd done the right thing. So you're at a juncture in your life. You can take the high road, you can take the low road. And when people take the low road, not everybody, but most of everybody regrets it because I think most of

us are good and want to be good. And in that category, we had a lot of regrets about marital infidelity, a lot of a huge number of regrets about bullying. I couldn't believe how many regrets we had about bullying. Morality ends up being a little bit more complicated because people have different moral taste buds. And then finally, our connection regrets. These are regrets about relationships, and not only

romantic relationships, but all the relationships in our lives. And what often happens is that these relationships that were intact come apart. And what I found is that many of these relationships come apart in very uncinematic ways. They just drift apart. And what happens is that one person wants to reach out. They say, oh, man, I was such good friends with Maya ten years ago, I really should reach out and say hi to her, and then we say, oh man, no, no, no, it's been ten years. That's

going to be so awkward. And besides they don't want to hear to me, so and besides Mina doesn't want to hear from me. She doesn't care. And then we waited another few years, and then it's like, okay, and now it's thirteen years. Oh man, it's even more awkward to reach out. That ends up being a colossal mistake on both fronts, because it's when we do reach out, it's way less awkward than we think, and the other

side almost always cares. I like that there's a signaling here, which is, you know, these categories that you've talked about, because we tend to regret them. What that teaches us is that those are the things we care most about in life. Yeah. I mean, I think that for me, a personal pultle I was trying to resolve, was, you know, reading through all these regrets every day here in my office,

why was I not more bummed out? I got these people opening up their hearts and telling me the mistakes that they made and how terrible they feel about it. Why did they not bring me down? And I finally, over time realized that when people tell you what they regret the most, they're telling you what they value the most. So it is, as you say, this very powerful signal. If you think about all the decisions that any of us may today or yesterday, or this week or last week.

I don't remember half of I don't remember most of them. But if you remember a decision or an indecision from a year ago, or five years ago or ten years ago, and it bugs you still, you got to pay attention to that. Man, that's a very strong signal. That is an airhorn screaming in your psyche telling you pay attention to me. It's telling me something, and it's what's telling us is this is a signal about what you value, and it's a signal about how to do better in

the future. So let's see, Dan, I'm listening to this episode and I'm thinking to myself, Okay, Dan's convinced me I need to engage with my regret more proactively and also in this productive way. What are some strategies that you could give me the listener for taking a regret and actually turning it into something productive. When you have he agreat treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize that your regrets are part of the human condition. That's

a big part of it too. We have this kind of pluralistic ignorance where we think, oh my god, I'm the only person who regrets bullying. I'm the only person who regrets being too timid in my choices, when in fact, I got a database of nearly twenty two thousand people with your exact same regret. Another thing that we should do. I think there's a very strong argument to make for disclosing our regrets, even if it's only in private writing.

I actually think the power of disclosure, even if we don't disclose it publicly is a conversion process, is in some ways a transmutation process, because emotions, by their nature are blobby, their abstractions, and that's what makes positive emotions feel good, but it's also what makes negative emotions feel bad. And when we write about our negative emotions, talk about our negative emotions, we convert these abstractions into concrete words, and those are just less menacing, and they can begin

the sense making process and then we move forward. It's very important to draw a lesson to extract a lesson from our scroups from our regrets, the chat ledge is that we're terrible at solving our own problems. We're too

caught up in the details. And I actually like the technique of using our crazily amazing brain's ability for time travel is essentially having a consultation with the U of ten years from now and asking the U of ten years from now what you should do, Because I think we can make a pretty safe bet what the U of ten years and now is going to care about? I want to Okay, So I think I have a broader question, just generally about regret, which is why it is we put so much weight on regrets that we

may feel later in life. So there's this proverbial deathbed regret, and people often say, well, you know, Dan, when you're on your deathbed, are you really going to regret A? Aren't you going to regret B? Instead? And that calculus

can really influence our present day decisions. And I want to challenge this thinking a bit because it seems to be grounded in the idea that the values we express at the end of our lives somehow represent a truer or more accurate expression of either what we care about or what we ought to care about. Right, it's prescriptive, and this way of thinking implies that there is just one constant, true set of things that we ought to

care about. And another way to think about it, at different framing is that we are people whose values naturally change and evolve over time. And if you take that view, then there's no obvious reason why we should privilege the values of future Maya over present day Maya. Absolutely, and so this is one reason why there's a reason that I say ten years and not deathbed I am very skeptical of deathbed regrets. I'm skeptical of the accuracy of

the reporting of them, because it's purely anecdotal. The numbers are not very vast. And also I don't think that what we're thinking in a moment of fog when we're about to perish from the earth is necessarily the clearest and highest expression of what we value. Exactly as you say, well, look, I'm already super happy if we're just constraining the time frame with which we view the future. So I'm on

board with the like ten years from now, Maya. The deathbed stuff just drives me nuts, because, like you said, in our final moments, there's a lot of factors that are weighing into what we say we regret, what we think we should be saying about what we regret in order to maybe pass by people who live on planet Earth. I don't know, there's just lots of things. That's a very good point. That's one that I hadn't thought about, is that there could be a kind of performative side

of it. There could be a kind of oh my god, I gotta get you know, I gotta get my last argument in here before the final decider decides whether I go up or down, if you have kind of apologize or make right with so and so. But I just think it's important in general, as much as we can value regret, to remember it is also just a feeling. Regret is a feeling that can be transient and can pass, and it's not always something we I say this only Dan,

because regret often gets this trump card. It's like we're making a decision. We're trying to weigh costs and benefits. I don't really want a kid right now, but I think I might regret not having a kid later in the minute. Our society. Here's the word regret. It's like, oh my god, then go do the thing right. And so I just want to make sure we're not elevating it to too important a category, because, like a lot of other negative emotions, it is just a feeling. I

think that's a fair point. And the other thing empirically is that there's a decent amount of evidence showing that if we over index on our anticipated regret, we end up making suboptimal decisions. We can end up making decisions that actually are a little bit more risk averse, because, as Dan Gilbert says, we end up buying emotional insurance we don't need and so and so and so. Anticipating regret is not a perfect decision making tool. This is

why I think there's some nuance in it. I think one should anticipate what I think most people will regret in the future, but actually chill out on most stuff, and also recognize that some regrets are ephemeral. I'd love to end on a personal note. Dan, I'm wondering, you know you've been in the world of regret for I imagine several years now, right researching for this book, writing this book. What is something that you had long regreted, or you do still regret, but that you now see

through a different lens. I felt pretty bad about certain regrets that I had with regard to kindness, and I never talked about them, but I had them. I harbored these regrets about kindness. Now it's a moral regret, although it's a peculiar kind of moral regret, because my moral

regrets about kindness where regrets of inaction, not action. So they're not regrets about bullying people, but they're regrets about being in situations where people were not being treated well, where people were being left out or being made fun of or being excluded. And I didn't participate in that, but I saw it and I knew it was wrong, and I didn't do anything. And I have to say that has bugged me so much for so long, to the point where I kind of sublimated it. I said, Okay,

I don't want to deal with this. And one of the things about reading through all these regrets is that I started seeing that regret among other people, and I've started in a weird way that made me feel better. It's like, oh my god, I'm not the only person who did this, and the other thing that it did is that if you listen to that, Okay, so this is a good example of how you process or regret. So I could feel that that kindness regret and I could say, no regrets. It's in the past. I'm going

to look forward. I don't want to be negative. That's a bad idea. I could also say, oh my God, earlier in my life I wasn't as kind as I could be. I am just an wretched, awful, worthless individual. I am this the worst. That's a bad idea too. What I could what I could do instead is like, wow, twenty five years later, this is bugging me. This is something I need to pay attention to. And what it's teaching me is it's clarifying what I value in ways

that I didn't realize. I guess I value kindness more than I expected. And it's instructing me on how to do better so that when you know, I try as much as I can when people are being excluded in way smaller large to say something, to do something to pull people in. I'm not saying I'm perfect in doing that, but that spear of regret is prompting me to do better in the future because I don't want to feel that feeling again, and that feeling is telling me what

I value and I need to pay attention to that. Hey, thanks so much for listening. Please join next week for an episode that is really close to my heart. My guest, Christy Warren, is actually a Slight Change of Plans listener, and she reached out to me about her experiences working as a paramedic and firefighter for more than two decades. As a first responder, Christie made rescuing people her life's work, but she eventually had to learn to save herself when

the psychological impact of the job became too much. Every time I got off work, I'd start crying on the way home. So this day I said, I'm not going to cry, Like I'm going to make it home and I'm not going to cry. And then I was going to go meet somebody to play tennis. And I got in my car drive to the tennis courts, and the whole world came just tumbling down on me. Everything just blew open and blew apart, and I was like, I can't do this anymore. I can't go back to work.

I just can't. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our story editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special

thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you next week. And what they did is they told kids a story about two boys who lived near each other in the same neighborhood and each day rode their bikes to work. So one kid's name was Bob. Is it to work or school? Because they're little kids, right, Okay, these are some very advanced kids you've got, Yes, indeed,

indeed they're they're they're child actress. And so this is a is taking place in Hollywood, and they're going to quickly descend into drug addiction and despair. But first they're going to ride their bucke