For example, a fifty-two-year-old New York man admitted:
I bullied a new kid in the seventh grade. He was from Vietnam and hardly spoke any English. Horrible!
A forty-three-year-old woman in Tennessee said:
I made fun of a kid in middle school, dubbing him “Ziggy” for having a short, stubby body and spiky blond hair. I’ll never forget the look on his face as he realized that the name would stick. It was cruel, putting me in the “power” position after I had endured years of bullying myself, but I regretted it immediately and have never done anything like it again.
Steve told me that in the moments preceding the bullying, “I knew I shouldn’t be doing this.” Yet he did. He enjoyed the attention. He relished the feeling of power. But he knew better. In fact, he’d occasionally been bullied himself, both at home and at school. “Having been on both sides of it, and knowing what it felt like, and then still having done it to someone else, is what I find most regretful,” he told me.
Unlike boldness regrets, moral regrets are more likely to involve actions than inactions. But for some people, including Kim Carrington, simply being a bystander to bullying was enough to trigger regret.
When she was eight years old, Kim took a daily school bus from her small town on Minnesota’s Iron Range to a larger town where her elementary school was located. Each day, the bus would pick up another girl, who lived in a farmhouse in a more remote area. And each day, when the girl boarded the bus, the other children would hold their noses as if she smelled, pelt her with rude names, and refuse to give her a place to sit.
One day, Kim scooted over in her seat to make room for the bullied girl. The two chatted amiably the rest of the ride. But because of that kindness, Kim herself was bullied at school that day. So, the following day, when the girl boarded, Kim refused to let the girl sit with her.
“I lost my integrity and it haunts me in the middle of the night and still makes me cry,” said Kim, who is fifty and now lives in Kansas City. The other girl soon stopped riding the bus. “My regret is that I didn’t befriend her. I didn’t stand up for her. I did the wrong thing and never had a chance to make it better.”
Regrets in this subcategory weren’t limited to childhood malice. People described insulting work colleagues, “ghosting” romantic interests, and threatening neighbors. Most hurts were delivered with words, though a few were with fists. And for all the American associations of behavior like bullying, these regrets were international.
A fifty-three-year-old man from the United Kingdom:
I physically hurt a man when I was eighteen years old. I have spent the next thirty-five years hiding from life in every way. I am a coward.
A fifty-seven-year-old man from South Africa:
I regret telling a woman I was dumping her because she was fat. Thirty years later I’m waking up at night in disbelief at the hurt I caused then.
Hurting others is so unequivocally wrong that many people seek to channel the regret into more respectable future behavior. “You look back on your previous self and you’re just embarrassed,” Steve told me. But “as an adult, I’ve tried to be a better person.” After graduating from high school, he earned degrees in psychology, nursing, and criminal justice. He’s worked as a pediatric nurse and as a counselor to delinquent children. “I’ve done badly by people in the past and I want to do right by people in my current state,” he told me. “There’s a certain part of me that takes a lot of pride in trying to make people feel safe these days.”
2. Cheating
Kaylyn and Joel, whose stories opened this chapter, weren’t the only unfaithful spouses the World Regret Survey turned up. Regrets about hurting others, especially through bullying, were the most pervasive. But regrets about cheating, especially in marriages, finished a close second. On this, too, most people in most cultures agree: we should tell the truth, keep our promises, and play by the agreed-upon rules.
In a few instances, people confessed to cheating others out of physical items—from a sixteen-year-old in California who regretted “stealing cash from a box” to a fifty-one-year-old in Romania who wrote, “I am ashamed that I stole a harmonica from one of my army comrades.”
Regrets about academic dishonesty, though not widespread, also spanned a range of ages—from a twenty-two-year-old woman in Virginia who wrote, “I regret cheating in school,” to a sixty-eight-year-old man in New Jersey who wrote, “I regret having helped someone cheat on a calculus test . . . my freshman year. I have not figured out how to make that right.”