It is often said that regret is a wasted emotion. They claim it doesn’t do anything and serves no purpose. Not quite accurate. There are two sides to regret. In some instances, it helps us to live better. It can hold us back in a past we cannot escape. The question is not whether the experience of regret is good or bad. The question is what kind of regret is it that we are feeling and what impact is it having on us at this moment?
First, it helps to differentiate between regret and similar thoughts. Guilt is the feeling someone has when they have done something wrong. Shame is a matter of who we are. Regret is different. It’s about a choice and about a life that was taken away. The phrase “I regret not studying medicine” doesn’t necessarily mean that they made a mistake. They are grieving the loss of a type of life that they took out of their lives when they made a different choice. This is where the interest in regret lies. It makes us think of a life we didn’t have and makes us compare it with our own.
The philosopher Bernard Williams studied it closely. He explained the existence of an “agent regret”. This is the remorse felt by an individual who has hurt someone, even unintentionally. His example is simple. A child runs into the road and is hit by a driver. The driver wasn’t at fault. No one would blame him. Yet Williams said a good person would still feel a certain kind of regret. It’s not like regular sympathy. It is a consequence of participation in what went on, irrespective of culpability. Williams felt this was a natural emotion. If someone has no emotion, then they are missing something.
This is a great reminder that we can learn from our regrets. It aligns our actions with their outcomes. Someone who doesn’t regret is not necessarily innocent. Rather, they are likely to have become oblivious to the impact of their actions. Regret is like a signal in this regard. It tells us that something we value was hurt, either by chance or by our own choice. And it challenges us to make a change: to apologise, to change a habit, to make a different choice the next time. Now, regret isn’t necessarily a bad emotion. It’s more of a moral instrument. It acts as physical pain does to the body. It has revealed to us the source of the pain so we don’t do it again.
But there is another side to regret, and that is less helpful. This is the regret that has no end, for the loss it weeps cannot be reversed. It’s never easy to choose the other job, the other partner, the other city, but the mind seems to be saying, “Maybe we could.” It plays over the same scene over and over. Every rendition of what might have been is slightly cleaner, slightly better than it might have been in reality. This is a kind of false math. We make comparisons between the actual imperfect condition that we live in and the imagined perfect condition that we never really experienced in that perfect form.
Søren Kierkegaard came close to such a thing. He explained that “despair” is a denial of who we are and a choice to be someone else. The second type of regret is the same. It’s not the original decision again. It’s about not living the life we live. Someone who is trapped in this sort of remorse is not gaining any new knowledge. Whatever lesson there was, it was learned long ago. What remains is merely repetition. It resembles thinking but is without purpose.
Nietzsche offered a solution to this problem. He talked of amor fati, the love of destiny. He was not saying that we should not feel bad about what we have done wrong. He said that, to live a healthy life, we must embrace every experience, including the mistakes, and that we shouldn’t spend our lives debating them in our minds. Constant regret, for Nietzsche, was quiet resentment inwards. It was an attempt to reject the person we’ve become in our past.
So there’s no difference between people who feel regret and those who don’t. The real difference is between regret that leads to repair and regret that leads nowhere at all. Regret is always helpful; it always leads to something we can do. We can apologise. It’s possible to change a habit. We can make other decisions next time. It looks backwards, but it moves forwards. There is no such thing as useless regret, for the thing it appears to want, to undo the past, cannot be done. It can only be strengthened by looking back, and the more we look, the stronger it becomes. Real grief subsides with the passage of time. This sort of remorse often backfires. It sharpens with repetition.
This provides us with a straightforward test. The question isn’t “does this feel painful?” when regret arrives. The real question is: does this regret point to something I can actually do right now? If it is, then it is fulfilling its role, and we must go with it. If not, if all we can think of is conjuring the other possibility more vividly, then the feeling isn’t guidance anymore. It’s just a habit that has served no purpose anymore. The truth is, don’t feel it anymore. It’s time to recognise that this self that keeps pulling us back is no longer here, and perhaps never was.