Human beings are human beings. We have emotions. Things play on our mind. We think about them over and over again. We’re haunted with flashbacks of the past and we beat ourselves up in the moment. I wanted to write about why having regrets is pointless. It’s a tough subject to write about, because I’m a fairly normal person in this sense. I have experienced regret in the past. Crushing regret, as a matter of fact. It’s taken me a lot of time to not only come to the realization that regret is pointless, but to also fully accept it in my mind, heart, and soul. But regret is pointless. The sooner you let go of it, the better.
Life is random, and there are bloopers
There are always random bad moments to life. There are billions of us on this planet. We’re all moving around and interacting with each other in very random and unpredictable ways. New technologies are being developed, and no individual moment is anything like the previous one. Humans make errors. Machines make errors. There are natural disasters. We make mistakes. Life has bloopers, and there’s nothing we can do to control it. Regrettable moments are a part of life.
Your decision making improves with age
This means that your hindsight is 20/20 in all situations and cases, unless something happens to your brain in the meanwhile. You’ll always be able to look back and point to some kind of flaw in your decision making and twist yourself into knots wondering why you decided to do XYZ. Stop. It’s honestly pointless. Your decision making was worse, you literally weren’t capable of thinking more clearly. Think about it. Nobody chooses to be dumber. Forgive yourself.
Morality changes with time
This is the real truth of the matter. People become more moral as they age, and society adopts new moral stances as technology improves. Generally speaking, the trend has been for the lives of the global poor to improve with each passing year. Along with the extremely wealthy. This juxtaposition leads people to mistakenly think life is getting worse for the common man. It isn’t. People are, generally speaking, becoming more moral. Society does have backslides. Sometimes those backslides can last five years or a decade. But that doesn’t mean that the improvements to technology won’t improve society. There are dangers, but life generally improves when things get cheaper and easier to do. Morality will always change with time, so you never can know if what you are doing right now will be seen as evil in the future. You can make educated guesses, but it’s hard to predict the future.
If you did something wrong, you can own up to it
It’s better to just own up to the bad things that you did in the past. Generally speaking, most people don’t care. I’ve heard rumors of people doing some pretty crazy stuff, and I’ve had some pretty crazy (false) rumors spread about myself.
A lot of people don’t really remember
People remember if you wronged them, but people generally speaking don’t remember or give a crap about what you have going on in life. The wheels of time keeping spinning, and there’s a lot of stuff going on. People don’t have time to store information about you. The time that you spend making yourself feel bad is the time other people spend grinding and having fun and creating real new memories.
You wouldn’t have done things differently
Because you’re you. You should strive to make good choices, but free will is an illusion to some extent. Sure, you might be thinking and making rational choices, but what controls the underlying mechanism behind your decisions? Who knows.
Choose to be happy
Generally speaking, if you can remain optimistic and steadfast, life should get better for you. You should get lucky. Luck is math. Just create more opportunities for yourself. Choosing to be happy is possible, and it’s pretty much the only way to make your life better. Nothing matters if your internal experience sucks. The way I choose to be happy is by finding a decent amount of purpose in life and realizing that life is all about meaning and purpose.
Be thankful
Always be thankful for what you have. If you’re not able to be thankful, life will probably smack you in the face. The universe humbles everybody. Even if it’s in an indirect fashion. I figured that moving to a poor country would mean I would have a massive advantage, and be able to make easy money. Turns out that while I have an edge, I need to work hard just like everyone else. I was humbled, and smacked in the face. I’ll be able to create my island paradise for myself, most likely. But I’ll have had to have worked my butt off for it.
Let go of all regret. It’s a really pointless and painful emotion. It took me a while to accept this, and I honestly wish I had sooner. Regret does you no good. Moral self-analysis is different from regret. If you can look at your past actions dispassionately, do it. But don’t waste your life wallowing in emotional regret. It does you no good, especially if you’re young. There’s way too much life to be lived, and far too much progress to be made. It can’t happen if you’re wallowing in regret.
Thanks for paying attention.
