Consider Piaf, the consummate performer. She claimed—indeed, proclaimed—that she had no regrets. But a quick review of her forty-seven years on earth reveals a life awash in tragedy and troubles. She bore a child at age seventeen, whom she abandoned to the care of others and who died before turning three. Did she not feel a twinge of regret about that death? She spent one portion of her adult life addicted to alcohol and another addicted to morphine. Did she not regret the dependencies that stifled her talents? She maintained, to put it mildly, a turbulent private life, including a disastrous marriage, a dead lover, and a second husband she saddled with debt. Did she not regret at least some of her romantic choices? It’s difficult to picture Piaf on her deathbed celebrating her decisions, especially when many of those decisions sent her to that deathbed decades before her time.
Or take our far-flung tattooed tribe. Talk with them just a little and it’s clear that the outer expression of “No regrets”—the performance—and the inner experience diverge. For example, Mirella Battista devoted many years to a serious relationship. When it collapsed, she felt awful. And if she had a chance for a do-over, she likely would have made different choices. That’s regret. But she also acknowledged her suboptimal choices and learned from them. “Every single decision brought me to where I am right now and made me who I am,” she told me. That’s the upside of regret. It’s not as if Battista erased regret from her life. （After all, the word is permanently marked on her body.） Nor did she necessarily minimize it. Instead, she optimized it.
Amber Chase, who was thirty-five when we talked over Zoom one evening, told me, “There’s so many wrong turns you can take in life.” One of hers was her first marriage. At age twenty-five, she married a man who, it turned out, “had a lot of issues.” The union was often unhappy, occasionally tumultuous. One day, with zero notice, her husband disappeared. “He got on a plane and left . . . and I didn’t know where he was for two weeks.” When he finally called, he told her, “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not coming home.” In a blink, the marriage was over. If she had to do it over again, would Chase have married the guy? No way. But that unfortunate move propelled her journey to the happy marriage she has today.
Chase’s tattoo even winks at the flimsiness of the philosophy it claims to endorse. Hers doesn’t say “No Regrets.” It says “No Ragrets”—with the second word intentionally misspelled. The choice was an homage to the movie We’re the Millers, an otherwise forgettable 2013 comedy in which Jason Sudeikis plays David Clark, a small-time marijuana dealer forced to assemble a fake family （a wife and two teenage kids） to work off a debt to a big-time dealer. In one scene, David meets Scottie P., a sketchy young fellow who’s arrived on a motorcycle to take David’s “daughter” on a date.
Scottie P. wears a cruddy white tank top that reveals several tattoos, including one that runs along his collarbone and reads, in blocky letters, No Ragrets. David sits him down for a quick talk, which begins with a tour of Scottie P.’s tattoos and leads to this exchange:
DAVID
（pointing to the “No Ragrets” tattoo）
What is the one right there?
SCOTTIE P.
Oh, this? That’s my credo. No regrets.
DAVID
（his expression skeptical）
How about that. You have no regrets?
SCOTTIE P.
Nope . . .
DAVID
Like . . . not even a single letter?
SCOTTIE P.
No, I can’t think of one.
If Scottie P. ever does muster second thoughts about the words encircling his neck, he wouldn’t be alone. About one of every five people who get tattoos （presumably including people whose tattoos read “No Regrets”） eventually regret their decision, which is why the tattoo removal business is a $100 million-a-year industry in the United States alone.[6] Chase, though, doesn’t regret her tattoo, perhaps because most people will never see it. On that cold Calgary Sunday in 2016, she chose to locate her tattoo on her rear end.
THE POSITIVE POWER OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
In the early 1950s, a University of Chicago economics graduate student named Harry Markowitz conceived an idea so elementary it now seems obvious—yet so revolutionary it earned him a Nobel Prize.[7] Markowitz’s big idea came to be known as “modern portfolio theory.” What he figured out—if I may oversimplify in the service of getting on with the story—were the mathematics that underlie the adage “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”