A fifty-three-year-old man from the United Kingdom said:
I regret being too shy and polite as a teenager and young adult, always taking the safe path and not offending people. I could have taken more risks, been more assertive, and had more life experiences.
As a card-carrying ambivert who prefers the company of quiet people, I’ve cheered from the sidelines when others have decried the “extrovert ideal” in Western culture. Yet the evidence shows that modest efforts to move slightly in that direction can be helpful. For instance, Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, have found that asking people simply to act like an extrovert for one week appreciably increased their well-being.[2]
Similarly, many people who overcame their apprehensions and poured out even a small tincture of temerity reported being transformed—including this fifty-six-year-old North Carolina woman:
I did not learn to find my own voice until having children and being their voice. Before that, particularly in school, I never said anything in classes where there were bullies or mean kids. I did not know how to speak up then. I wish I would not have been so quiet.
STEPPING UP AND STEPPING OUT
A few months after his encounter on the Eurail train, Bruce was living in College Station, Texas, when his mother forwarded him a letter bearing a French stamp and Paris postmark that had arrived at her home. Inside was a sheet of paper filled top to bottom with billowing handwriting.
The letter’s English was imperfect, and perhaps consequently, its sentiment was slightly inscrutable. Bruce now knew the woman’s name—Sandra—but not much else. “Maybe it’s crazy, but when I think about you, I’m smiling,” Sandra wrote. “I’m sure you understand what I feel about although you don’t know me well.” The words sounded tender—except for the oddly perfunctory conclusion: “Have a great day!” Sandra didn’t sign her last name, nor did she include a return address.
In the pre-internet era of the early 1980s, that halted communication. For Bruce, the doors had opened—and closed—again.
Rather than try to track her down, he chose to throw away the letter.
“I decided I could not keep it,” he told me, “because I would dwell on it.”
The pain of boldness regrets is the pain of “What if?” Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and other researchers have repeatedly found that people regret inactions more than actions—especially in the long term. “Regrettable failures to act . . . have a longer half-life than regrettable actions,” Gilovich and Medvec wrote in one of their early studies.[3] In my own American Regret Project survey, inaction regrets outnumbered action regrets by nearly two to one. And other research has likewise found a preponderance of inaction regrets even in less individualistic cultures, like those of China, Japan, and Russia.[4]
A key reason for this discrepancy is that when we act, we know what happened next. We see the outcome and that can shrink regret’s half-life. But when we don’t act—when we don’t step off that metaphorical train—we can only speculate how events would have unfolded. “Because regrettable inactions are more alive, current, and incomplete than are regrettable actions, we are reminded of them more often,” say Gilovich and Medvec.[5] Or as the American poet Ogden Nash once wrote in a long verse about the differences between regrets of commission and regrets of omission:
It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,
That lays eggs under your skin.[6]
The consequences of actions are specific, concrete, and limited. The consequences of inaction are general, abstract, and unbounded. Inactions, by laying eggs under our skin, incubate endless speculation.
That might be why boldness regrets in the realm of romance were pervasive. I could probably create my own Tinder-for-regrets smartphone app, given the hundreds of entries like that of a thirty-seven-year-old male in Ireland:
Met the most amazing woman in college and never found the courage to ask her out.
Or the sixty-one-year-old woman from Oklahoma whose regret was:
Not calling someone I’ve been in love with for forty-five years.
Or this, from a sixty-five-year-old California man who regretted:
That I didn’t ask her out. It would have been life changing.
Boldness regrets endure because the counterfactual possibilities are so vast. What if Bruce had left that train with Sandra that November evening? Perhaps just a short-lived December romance. Or maybe an adulthood spent in Europe rather than in the Pacific Northwest, where he ended up. Or even a brood of Belgian-American children tired of hearing the sappy story of their parents’ chance meeting.