“I have no regrets.” That was my motto. After all, you can’t change the past, can you? So why regret it? The alternative past, the one you wish you’d lived, isn’t real. It’s just a story you’ve made up. How can anyone regret a version of life that never existed?
“If I’d taken that job, I’d be doing X by now.”
Well, no. You don’t actually know what would have happened if you’d taken that job or walked a different path. Logically, there’s nothing to regret.
My argument felt airtight. Foolproof, even.
In conversations, I’d challenge others to rethink their regrets. They’d pause, caught off guard, question their feelings. I’d feel clever. Free from the weight of regret.
Then I read The Power of Regret.
Alright, so you can learn from your regrets. They can be useful. But even then, I didn’t feel regret in the way most people described. The way people spoke about their regrets made me feel relieved that I wasn’t weighed down by so much emotional baggage. My optimism bias was working just fine, thank you very much.
Then one day, I had a conversation with my coach about desire, or to be more specific, my lack thereof.
I mean, I wanted things in life. Or at least, I said I did. But how much did I really want them?
I wanted a good life, or rather, a life everyone else thought was good.
I wanted to help people, or rather I craved the validation I got from doing so.
I wanted to be in a good relationship, but not enough to risk rejection.
And that’s when it hit me: How easy it is to create a small life.
Not small in how it looks from the outside. Outwardly, my life looked great. But on the inside? It was small. Risk-free.
I stuck to what was comfortable. I’d push the edges of my comfort zone, sure, but only because my comfort zone was already pretty big. That can fool others, and even myself, into thinking I was living boldly. Especially when I compared myself to those with smaller comfort zones.
How do you live inside your comfort zone?
You dull your desires. Just enough to convince yourself, and the world, that you’re doing something worthwhile. But it’s a lie.
A life free of fear. Free of desire. Free of regret.
Numb.
A life designed to look good rather than feel real.
It succeeds and fails by everyone else’s definition of success and failure.
When life tells you you’ve succeeded, you’ll feel good because that hit of validation feels good.
When life tells you you’ve failed, you’ll feel bad because the world around you will remind you of the mistakes you made.
Within this box of a life, you’ll think you’re really feeling things, maybe even succeeding. But deep down, you’ll know there’s a void.
When someone asks you what you really want, you won’t know.
And when everyone tells you, “You have everything anyone could ever want,” you’ll realize it’s because you’ve built a life that everyone else would want.
But you didn’t build what you wanted.
And in that moment, you’ll feel it: a little regret.
