❛Regrets, I’ve had a few,’ Frank Sinatra famously sang in his 1969 hit ‘My Way’. But he’s quick to quantify: ‘But then again, too few to mention.’ Édith Piaf also sang about regrets, but she denied having any at all: ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ (‘No, I regret nothing’).
Like most uncomfortable emotions, regret is something many of us try to avoid. But we’re going to have to call Édith out on that one: to have no regrets at all is essentially impossible. Everyone has at least something they wish they had done differently, or hadn’t done at all.
My interest in regret began in the most obvious way: I had regrets, and I couldn’t shake them. How did I get here? What series of choices had I made that led me here, to this life that felt so out of sync with what I truly wanted? The more I thought about it, mentally wandering down all the different pathways I could – or should – have taken, the worse I felt.
‘I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of equipping people with how to deal with negative emotions,’ says Daniel H. Pink, author of The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, in an episode of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans.
‘I think at some level we’ve sold [people] a bill of goods about