DREAMS AND DUTIES
We regret foregone opportunities more often than unfulfilled obligations. Yet we also know that a wholly realized life involves a mix of both dreams and duties.[5] The photographic negative that regret offers makes clear that being fully human combines our dreams for ourselves and our duties to others.
A life of obligation and no opportunity is crimped. A life of opportunity and no obligation is hollow. A life that fuses opportunity and obligation is true.
How to build that life by transforming your existing regrets and anticipating your future regrets is the subject of the rest of this book.
Part Three
REGRET REMADE
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“I stopped being nice to Jessica, and when she got her period at school, which lasted three days, I called her Bloody Mary.”
Female, 39, North Carolina
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“I regret every kiss I could have given to my wife but didn’t because I was too busy during our sixty-two years of marriage before she died of COVID.”
Male, 84, Texas
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“I regret not learning how to read music or play an instrument. I realize now it is a valuable skill that’s good for you even if you are not into music.”
Female, 17, Japan
12.
Undoing and At Leasting
Jeff Bosley was just trying to be cool.
He’d enlisted in the U.S. Army at age twenty-nine, and was now the oldest grunt at Fort Bragg—older even than his drill sergeant. He wanted to fit in. So, one night, he and a few buddies left the base, drove into town, and entered a tattoo shop.
Jeff was seeking an image or phrase that would impress his comrades, a “hyper-macho” symbol, as he put it, to broadcast his warrior philosophy. He chose his left arm as the tattoo’s site, because “that’s the arm I’d see when I’m holding my rifle barrel.”
The shop artist opened a Microsoft Word program on a nearby computer, and they selected the Papyrus font. And there on Jeff’s left arm, for about one hundred dollars, the artist inked nine black letters:
NO REGRETS
Jeff served in the army for nearly a decade and became a Green Beret. After the military, he worked as a firefighter in Colorado Springs, Colorado. During that stage of his life, he and his wife of twelve years divorced. And when his marriage ended, he discovered something about himself: he had plenty of regrets. He regretted not taking college—eight years, two schools, no degree—more seriously. He regretted hurting his wife by seeking a divorce. He regretted never pursuing his longtime love of acting.
Fourteen years after that impetuous evening decision, Jeff realized that his tattoo wasn’t just unaesthetic. （The Papyrus font is “the lamest and most cliché I could have chosen,” he told me.） It was also untrue.
“Regret is a thing,” Jeff said when we talked. “I do have regret. It fuels me. Regret sucks, but I like that better than people who say, ‘No regrets,’ or, ‘I don’t have regrets.’？”
Prodded by this regret, he moved from central Colorado to Southern California, where he’s now making a living as an actor. And prodded by the constant reminder of a credo he no longer believed, he decided to have the no regrets tattoo removed. The process is painful, time-consuming, and expensive. It involves regular laser sessions at a dermatology office and costs more than ten times the original ink.
“Every time I go to the removal place, if it’s a new nurse or technician, I say, ‘I get it.’ The joke is not lost on me.”
* * *
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What do we do with our regrets? If regrets make us human, how do we enlist them to make us better, more satisfied people?
The starting point is to revisit one of the key distinctions in the architecture of regret: the difference between regrets of action and regrets of inaction—between regretting what we did and regretting what we didn’t do. Action regrets are less prevalent. And in this short chapter, I’ll explain how you can transform them to adjust the present. In the next chapter, I’ll take on the more complex challenge of how you can transform both varieties of regret to improve your future.
For action regrets, your initial goal should be to change the immediate situation for the better. That’s not always possible, but we have two ways to advance toward that goal. We can undo many such regrets: we can make amends, reverse our choices, or erase the consequences. Think of Jeff and his now fading tattoo. We can also respond to action regrets by using At Leasts to help us feel better about our circumstances. Neither tack does much to prepare us for later, but both can help us realign now.