Our brains therefore play a double trick on us. They entice us into valuing the now too much and the later too little. Then they prevent us from understanding the nonlinear, compounding effects of our choice. Overlay the two charts, and they form a trap that can be difficult to escape.
Foundation regrets are not just difficult to avoid. They are also difficult to undo. That is especially the case for financial regrets like Jason’s, which people described in vivid terms. A fifty-five-year-old California woman said the debt she’s amassed from shortsighted money choices “entangles my feet.” For a forty-six-year-old Indian man, lacking a financial foundation prevented him from “having the space to live life.” “The money I could have saved makes me a bit sick to my stomach when I think about what I wasted,” said a forty-seven-year-old female from Washington State. And a forty-six-year-old woman from Massachusetts who didn’t learn “how to manage money better, sooner” concluded that “most of my other regrets all seem to lead back to that one.”
Foundation regrets were evenly spread across geography and gender. But they were slightly more prevalent among older respondents, because weaknesses in one’s foundation take time to develop and recognize. Said a Tennessee man:
I should have worked harder in college. Achieving better grades would have allowed me to get a better job, earning more, sooner in my career.
At age nineteen, this man’s foundation seemed sound. At age twenty-nine, it creaked. At age thirty-nine, it wobbled. Now, at age forty-nine, it feels like it’s disintegrating. His footing is shaky because of a set of seemingly small decisions he made three long decades ago. But even younger people, who hadn’t yet witnessed the results of their mistakes compound, shared this category of regrets. “I wish I would have studied harder,” said a twenty-five-year-old Malaysian woman. “I wish I had worked harder in college and spent my time more judiciously,” said another twenty-five-year-old woman, who lives in India.
Many respondents lamented not only the practical ramifications of not tending to one’s foundation, but also a more wistful sense of lost opportunity. A forty-nine-year-old woman, more than two decades removed from college, wrote:
I wish I had appreciated the privilege I had to be able to go to university and had worked harder to get a better degree.
The pattern is similar for health decisions—including poor eating habits and lack of exercise—which also gather force and imperil people’s foundations. In the World Regret Survey, regrets about tobacco use, particularly starting at a young age, came from respondents on six continents—including this thirty-nine-year-old man from Colombia:
I regret I smoked so much in my life, even though I clearly knew how bad for my health and surroundings this was. I kept smoking a pack a day, sometimes more. I escaped my frustrations and anxiety by smoking cigarettes.
On mental health, foundation regrets often involve a failure to recognize the problem and seek a remedy. As a forty-three-year-old Oregon man put it:
I regret that I didn’t take my mental health seriously in my twenties and, in doing so, utterly lost my sense of self-worth.
Many people who did take steps to rebuild a collapsing psychological foundation regretted not beginning the process sooner. For example, a forty-four-year-old Arizona woman said:
I regret not finding a good therapist ten or fifteen years earlier.
And a fifty-seven-year-old nonbinary person in Oregon regretted:
Not taking antidepressants in 2002 when first prescribed, and waiting until 2010. They have been a godsend, and I regret that those eight years could have been so much different had I started earlier.
Embedded in each of these regrets is a solution. Just as foundation regrets can be defined with a well-worn fable, one response to them is contained in a hoary Chinese proverb:
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.
The second-best time is today.
FOUNDATION ATTRIBUTION ERROR
Foundation regrets are trickier than the other three deep structure regrets I’ll describe in upcoming chapters. Remember that what distinguishes regret from disappointment is personal responsibility. Disappointments exist outside of your control. The child who wakes up to discover that the Tooth Fairy hasn’t left her a reward is disappointed. Regrets, in contrast, are your fault. The parents who awaken and realize they forgot to remove their child’s tooth and replace it with a reward are regretful. But when it comes to matters like physical health, educational attainment, and financial security, the border between personal responsibility and external circumstance is murky.