In our survey, family took the top spot. Nearly 22 percent of respondents voiced a regret in this category, followed closely by the 19 percent whose regret involved partners. Running just behind, and bunched together tightly, were education, career, and finance regrets. Health and friends regrets rounded out the list.
Most common regrets （2021）
SOURCE: Pink, Daniel, et al., American Regret Project （2021）。
In other words, the largest and most representative survey of regret ever conducted reached a clear conclusion: American regrets span a wide range of domains rather than cluster into any single category. People do indeed regret a lot of stuff—family relationships, romantic choices, career moves, educational paths, and more.
Maybe that shouldn’t surprise us. After all, regret is universal. It’s a fundamental part of being human. Human life spreads across multiple domains—we’re parents, sons, daughters, spouses, partners, employees, bosses, students, spenders, investors, citizens, friends, and more. Why wouldn’t regret straddle domains, too?
What’s more, regret makes us better. It sharpens decisions, boosts performance, and deepens meaning. Why would its benefits not reach across life domains?
Yet even this outcome remains unsatisfying. It offered a glimmer of understanding, but not nearly the illumination I was seeking. And as I returned to the data, and collected thousands more entries worldwide in the World Regret Survey, I discovered the reason. The question was sound. I was just looking for the answer in the wrong place.
“I didn’t practice or ‘give it my all’ while playing high school basketball. I think it’s because I was afraid of being compared and then being worse than my brother—which ultimately happened because of my lack of effort.”
Male, 24, Utah
//
“Pretending to be less smart and inventive than I actually am, simply to please/not upset others. This also includes business meetings with clients and then later hearing, ‘She’s useless in client meetings.’？”
Female, 39, Saudi Arabia
//
“I regret not learning more, sooner, about racism.”
Female, 78, Pennsylvania
6.
The Four Core Regrets
Kevin Wang has an education regret. In 2013, when he was a senior biology major at Johns Hopkins University, he planned to become a doctor—just like all four of his grandparents. His grades were strong. The only step that remained was the Medical College Admission Test （MCAT）。 But, as Kevin explained almost a decade later, he procrastinated “so badly on studying for my MCAT that I bombed the test and ended up not getting into medical school.” Today, he works in a New York City hospital, but as an administrator who monitors costs rather than a physician who sees patients.
On the other side of the United States, in Southern California, John Welches also has an education regret:
As I neared the end of completing my BA in creative writing, my professors urged me to apply for an MFA. They said my writing was strong and would benefit from that level of focus. I’d even won the two fiction awards put out by the program.
The problem: I was getting married a month before graduation. What does a newlywed do after graduating college? Gets a job.
So, instead of heeding his genuine interests and his mentors’ counsel, he skipped the master’s program, “slunk my way into bank work,” and landed a “soul-sucking” job as a copywriter.
Two American men harboring the same regret—a graduate education they didn’t pursue for a career they don’t have. But how similar, really, are they?
Kevin regrets not taking his future seriously. John regrets not taking a risk. Kevin regrets not meeting other people’s expectations. John regrets not setting the right expectations for himself. Kevin regrets a failure to be conscientious. John regrets a failure to be bold. On the surface, their regrets occupy similar terrain. Below the surface, the roots diverge.
* * *
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Sometimes when I was analyzing entries in the World Regret Survey, I felt less like I was studying our most misunderstood emotion and more like I was operating a gigantic online confessional.
For instance, hundreds of people offered a partner regret like one that came from a sixty-one-year-old man in Australia:
Being unfaithful to my wife and justifying it selfishly by convincing myself she was the problem is my biggest regret.
A few weeks after that submission arrived, a thirty-seven-year-old Canadian man described a regret about how he once treated his peers:
I regret bullying a few different kids in my grade growing up. When I think back on it, I cringe and I can’t help but wish for a chance to go back and change it.