64. REGRET
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
If inspiring others to follow a life of service still doesn’t sound all that fun, then consider the problem from this perspective: what happens if we don’t?
I happen to have an answer to that question, because I have let people down in my life.
I have chosen work over birthdays. I navigated a patrol of embittered soldiers carrying hundred-pound rucksacks a mile in the complete wrong direction, at night, through a swamp. Hell, I’ve let paperwork sit on my desk, and in doing so, disappointed people who had no idea I even exist.
Yes, over the years I’ve disappointed friends and family and coworkers and because I’ve disappointed so many people, and because I have also been disappointed, I can say that there is a feeling even worse than disappointment, and that is regret.
Disappointment is external, it’s the result of wondering how an actual outcome could have been better if world events had happened differently1. Disappointment is caused by things outside our control.
Regret, on the other hand, is internal. Regret comes from wondering how an actual outcome would have been better if we had made a different choice. Regret is worse because the outcome was within our control. For me, the voice of regret sounds like this: “I will regret not doing more to make the world a better place for my daughters and others in their generation.”
I don’t know about you, but at this point in my life, I don’t aim to disappoint anyone else, least of all my daughters about whether I did all I could to prepare our society for climate change, or any number of other threats that we face. As for you, well it comes back to whether you can live with having had the power to do something, and possibly chose to do nothing.
In other words, what does your voice of regret sound like?
Francesco Marcatto and Donatella Ferrante, “The Regret and Disappointment Scale: An instrument for assessing regret and disappointment in decision making,” in Judgement and Decision Making, vol 3, no. 1, January 2008, p 87-99, http://journal.sjdm.org/bb8/bb8.html, accessed 2 November 2020.