Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them
(latimes.com)136 points by lxm 10 months ago
136 points by lxm 10 months ago
I don't mean to pry but I often see people make statements along the lines of 'if Id been rich when I was younger I wouldve died' and I never quite get it. Just drugs stuff?
Early 20s is when people peak at risk taking behavior. Add a large amount of money into the mix and the types of risks can go way up. Think go from sitting around playing beer pong, to doing coke and speeding around in a Ferrari.
Even later in life, large amounts of money can cause people to do stupid things (see many famous people), but maturity has a chance then.
Yeah actually, I did a lot of travelling&living outside of such culture (Like a decade) on other earnings and while I was gone not fucking my life up with drugs stuff I watched a ton of my friends die or end up really messed up because of exactly that so your comment wasn't far off the mark like whatsoever. Some ended up in the news for shit like attacking paramedics or murder after fucking their minds up badly enough.
Very North American/European kind of problem with the way I seen people go hard and the sort of things being used here, primarily the appetite for stimulants and opiates that I'm glad I never stuck around to develop in the culture I was from. I have a few other friends who have managed to spend most or enough time away from the continent who feel the same.
I think there's a lack of family cohesion as a huge factor of difference here. Ties into shit like higher suicide rates jn the developed world and other sad shit
I have no idea. Likely just a combination of complete hyperbole and extrapolating a few poor decisions when young.
money leading to drugs, riskier behavior, suicide, etc.
Reminds me of "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang. It's part of his 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories.
In this story, people use a device called a *Prism*, which allows them to communicate with alternate versions of themselves in different quantum realities. The Prisms create a split in reality when activated, connecting two timelines that diverge from the moment the device is used. People can talk to their alternate selves in these parallel universes, and this communication brings up complex philosophical questions about free will, decision-making, and identity.
Chiang explores the emotional and ethical implications of interacting with alternate versions of one's life, focusing on how people cope with the knowledge of the different paths their lives might have taken.
-> thanx Chat.
Hmm, to me the worlds draw me in as soon as my eyes hit the paper, I love the world building, the detailed description, it make the whole reading experience so much richer for me.
It's like Peter F Hamilton, his stories are insane in length but you almost feel like you experienced the book, and what it is like to live in that world.
The BFL scam was where they were mining on equipment before sending it out, right? It's too bad they went that way. I bought two BFL Jalapenos with BTC I'd mined, and the hardware was pretty nice.
dusty circuit boards, broken hardware, delayed shipments, taking money and delivering nothing. The equipment would be pre-used and then delivered late, when it was much less useful due to the BTC difficulty increase.
how much is huge? thousands? I know it was easy back then to generate btc. You probably would have sold them at $10 or something ,congratulated yourself, and then felt massive regret anyway
This was my experience with litecoin. I bought some back in the day when it was < $1 from my minimum wage job and sold it all when it "skyrocketed" to somewhere above $1. In the end I made a few thousand dollars and thought pretty good about it. Only a couple years later when it touched (if I recall correctly) close to $300 did I have regrets. Oh well.
This is partly why I don’t feel bad about not buying bitcoin at $12. I did the math, and given my general investing strategies, where I rebalance periodically, I doubt I’d have made more than couple hundred thousand. It’s real money, but not the millions I once imagined I’d have made. Also, it felt risky at the time, so the money I might have lost would have been real to me at the time.
I never even saw it as a speculative investment. I had my eye on it at the same $12/coin price and thought "this is great, it will be the ultimate PayPal killer for online shopping". This was at the height of PayPals evil ages where they were enabling scammers and shutting down and blocking legitimate businesses. 12 years later PayPal has gotten a lot better, less relevant, and almost no one uses BTC for online retail shopping.
That's how I rationalize it. I had an early Bitcoin opportunity I missed out on but realized I'd have cashed out the second I could make a quick $1000 or something. Now my strategy with stuff like that is to keep a tiny "FOMO" amount even after selling the majority.
easy back then to generate btc
Was it? I ran a mining program for weeks with no results and finally deleted it because a) it was trashing my CPU the whole time and b) I was worried that Ihad been fooled and it was using my machine as a node for distributing CSAM or something.
this is why I never thrown out old computers or wipe out disks. They just sit around. Never know when you might need something on there
That's what I used to say, until I ran out of spare bedrooms, and the tunnel of carefully stacked old computers collapsed on me. Luckily I escaped and was able to buy a 32 TB NAS which is now 1% full of early 2000s disk images. Now it's just me, a NAS, and a mattress on the floor. I'm never going back.
The best advice I've read about avoiding regrets was in “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” by William B. Irvine. William B. Irvine has an entire chapter dedicated to it titled; Fatalism. The basic approach of the Stoics was that the past (and present) should be viewed fatalistically; fate would have it so, and therefore there is no rational (again a key word for the Stoics) reason to regret this or that. Have you spent years coming to one realization or another? Lived too long in one place? Worked too long in the same workplace? It was fated to take so long. The same goes for the present; enjoy it because you can't change it. The future, on the other hand, you must influence to the extent you can.
William B. Irvine starts chapter six with:
> “ONE WAY TO PRESERVE our tranquility, the Stoics thought, is to take a fatalistic attitude toward the things that happen to us. According to Seneca, we should offer ourselves to fate, inasmuch as “it is a great consolation that it is together with the universe we are swept along.”
My wife grew up in the Cultural Revolution. I grew up in an unsafe and disordered environment. When I made peak money we spent a lot on awesome experiences, then saved a good chunk. Instead of making payments on a house in the kind of enclave where pro athletes lived, we paid cash in a FAANG neighborhood. Both of us have zero expectations about the future. We have no debt and I retired comfortably but not too lavishly. Our farmhouse is not beautiful but we can afford a good health plan.
We both understood sunk costs from the beginning. We know governments love to take things. Of course we could have saved more. But the people I grew up with are dead or homeless addicts. Many of the people she grew up with were destroyed or disappeared by the government. If catastrophe strikes, and we have to move to a shoebox outside of Cleveland, that’s what we’ll do.
Fatalism has worked out well for us. We are exceptionally fortunate to think congruently on those matters.
> Fatalism has worked out well for us.
Why didn't she stay in China ? Why did you leave that unsafe and disordered environment ?
I almost wrote this:
> I disagree. The best thing to do to avoid regrets is to act, to take the step forward. Not to resign ourselves and diminish ourselves hoping to soften the nastiness the world is sending us.
> Stoicism is good when you are being tortured (hello John McCain), when you are in the final stage of incurable illness, when you are a slave (hello Epictetus edit: oops, I meant Epictus) and have no agency.
But upon re-reading the advice is about the past, not the future and it's not an endorsement of the whole of stoicism and I think I could agree with it. I just don't follow through with the whole Stoic ethos.
Especially in these days and age where it's being promoted by ex-marketing executives feeding off of people who are lost. It's Tony Robbins's exploitation of people in bad places all over again. It's mindfulness meditation training for employees instead of raising wages and getting rid of monthly quotas.
It sounds to me like you convince yourself there was no other way. It's an interesting dilemma - lie to yourself that it was fate and live a happy life, or torture yourself with the consequences of the truth.
I like the advice of the article better - approach every decision knowing not all of them will work out. It's what I ended up in the last couple years and it has worked ot out for me. Fear of failure can paralyze you and this will cause even more regrets. The advice doesn't help with old regrets though - for this it boils down to, for me: dwell and die slowly or forgive yourself for making a mistake and move on with your life. Can't change the past, but you can change the future.
Its not that they won't work out, it's that uncertainty at the time of the decision justifies it. Some then get lucky and others dont and most land in between. You did the best you could given the information at the time. There is then nothing to regret.
A related mental trick I use to move on from some mistake I'm stuck on is to think the following:
In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this. So I should focus on the present and the future, and try to identify and avoid that mistake (pick a different future!), rather than obsessing over the past.
It's incredibly obvious, of course, but going through the exercise of thinking it out explicitly really helps.
> In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this.
Why not regret all of them? I'm yet to see my capacity for regrets get saturated
Even better is to just focus on the here and now. The past cannot be changed and the future is just a mental construct, both can cause anexity and endless thinking.
My issue is i regret rather non-issues. Which makes it difficult to avoid because A. they're often small, stupid things that are difficult to avoid imo. And B. i'm sure i'd just find something else. The small things are objectively not reasons to be obsessing and regretting.. yet i do. So i think it's a problem in my frame of mind, not the action in focus.
Our brains are machines for trying to avoid future mistakes, and doubling down on focusing on them isn't ideal. It's good that at least you're not also tying them to the past, which is doomed, but that's not what the future has to be. It's better not to focus on fears and let the possibility of the future open up instead.
Study was a bit silly. Losing $10 in a game of chance is one type of regret but real regret is normally several shades darker, or at least more embarrassing. Could make an anecdotal argument that losing a small stakes game of chance is one of the easiest levels of regret to move on from. Anyone whos seen a casino on tv could tell you this. (EMPHASIS: SMALL STAKES. Yes, gambling at advanced levels is as dark as anything i can conjure.)
The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move on without a mental breakdown.
Totally agree. For the 'Portfolio' strategy to be effective you need all the bets to be of a comparable size. If I place 20 $1 bets and 1 $10,000 bet, winning the $1 ones is going to be cold comfort to losing the $10,000 one.
Similarly if I regret a 10 year relationship that ends in divorce, something like finding a great new restaurant isn't going to even that out.
> The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move on without a mental breakdown.
Thanks, I didn't want to watch that movie because even though I was interested by the setting I was not interested in the drama (and headlines I read in my feeds made it clear it was about drama). But your comment makes me reconsider.
Yeah, regrets like not telling "I love you" or telling it or "let's wait a bit before becoming parents" or "let's go for this career" or "don't call that friend back", etc. Those regrets.
Try not to make up too many regrets, people.
My whole life is regret and I found the article very insightful. I heard a religious quote that I wish I could remember: it's better to earn gold along the way by investing in relationships than to bet it all on a gold mine.
As a hacker trying to win the internet lottery since.. 1992-ish, I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's like flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which feels like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent. My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage. I only have the smallest bandwidth now to get anything at all done, and 90% of that is a waste of time due to conceptual flaws in languages, frameworks, operating systems, hardware, etc. In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning, but I chose poorly or lost, so now it's too expensive to get back the sunk cost that I've invested. Making it ever-harder to keep going. Sometimes it feels like regret is all I have.
Unfortunately the winners usually don't have this experience. They don't have the gumption to lose for a lifetime. So they don't go through the same healing and growth process. Vanishingly few wealthy people can step back and use their money for social wellness altruistically.
Meanwhile some of us stumble onto concepts like duality and see through the matrix. We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation. Then we look around and wonder why everyone is acting so strangely, having strong attachments to materialism in the 3D. The more we have, the more we cling to our ego and accomplishments, eventually living in fear of losing it all. While the people with nothing are more likely to lose their risk aversion and live in service to others.
Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality. Which works out well for the rich, while the poor suffer under systems of control they have little say in.
Zen Buddhism and Taoism touch on the idea that life is suffering, and suffering comes from attachments. So something that helps me is to go into situations knowing that I'll likely fail, but trying anyway, without expectation of outcome or regret.
So that one day if/when the win comes, I don't waste it like so many others. And maybe, just maybe, we can change the world.
I am just a stranger on the Internet, so I apologize in advance if my comments/questions are irrelevant.
> In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning, but I chose poorly or lost
Specifically in relation to picking up technologies. Unless you are working on something highly specialized, I am not sure your situation calls for such desperation. Learning new languages is not hard (as you are aware, as far as I can tell), and switching to a more agile stack like e.g. React/JavaScript could unlock new opportunities, considering how in demand it is across the industry.
> We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation.
Hm. That's a personal belief, right? It seems like you are convinced in it as a fact of life, and that might not be the most change encouraging strategy. Similar to fatalism in a sense.
> Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality.
You are romanticizing the poor. Certain societies have more family and community oriented lifestyles. Not because they are poor but because they have a cultural predisposition and a tradition. Poverty is not full of love, financial abundance is not full of fear.
Ya I guess I should have been a little more specific. I've learned React and Javascript and most of the domain-specific and functional languages like SQL, Octave/MATLAB, Lisp, Clojure, and mainstream languages from assembly, Python, Lua, Swift, Java, C#, Kotlin, etc over the years. Sometimes I wonder if I'd be better off unlearning what I've already learned, if I could.
I'm actually most fascinated now with simple spreadsheets and getting back to #nocode with stuff like Firebase and Airtable, although I don't believe that anyone has fully solved offline and distributed conflict resolution well enough to give us MS Access and FileMaker for the web. Although CRDTs can do a lot if we're willing to let ACID go, kind of like the eventual consistency fad around 2010. Dunno if I can do that though!
So really what's going on is that I'm not an artisan, I'm not a craftsman or even an engineer anymore (if I ever was, I never got my professional engineering license). I'm more of an architect or researcher. I want to write the building blocks for engines that are used to build other things.
But that ship has sailed. Open source isn't modeled right, since nobody solved funding. So nobody pays for the pure research that I'd like to do, so society misses out on proceeds from that investment in innovation. Banks only loan to match a multiple of collateral which doesn't kick in until someone has on the order of $100,000 saved. And there never was funding for ventures. VC firms vacuumed up all available capital so those trillions of dollars are now concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires and multinational corporations who pick winners and losers in the same role that democratic governments used to perform, except now through gatekeeping. The central challenge is how to get money for runway to get real work done, and that hasn't changed in the 30 years I've been doing this. If anything it's far worse today, with competition increasing an order of magnitude each decade, along with wealth inequality as winners hoard their gains and dodge their taxes.
On top of that, AI has already surpassed my knowledge and experience. It can whip up working code for mainstream frameworks like Laravel and React in seconds, whereas it would take me days just to formulate a plan of action. So the only thing going for me is that I know what not to do, from attending the school of hard knocks. But AI will solve that too within 5-10 years, removing even the minefield so that all programming has guard rails. Every innovation there just withers me, since I started down this course in life with the goal of creating AGI back when that was a joke. It's an all but certainty now, arriving by 2040 but maybe even 2030.
That's a good insight about reincarnation being akin to fatalism, I hadn't considered that. I feel that philosophies have merits that can be ranked under somewhat formal metaphysical conventions, even though they amount to sniff tests. So I find written religious accounts somewhat less believable than personal insights from experience. The most universal truths seem to come from epiphanies that can then be verified against other accounts.
So basically that means that a child's question of "how does my soul control my body?" is every bit as valid as "why don't dogs go to heaven?", except that the child's question is ranked higher because it's universal, whereas heaven is a construct and rules about who gets to go there are dogma.
We live in a mostly western capitalist economic model, with ethics rooted in Abrahamic religions. In other words, we live under dogma. So seeking universal truths is mostly discouraged, as they threaten the status quo and entrenched power structures controlled by dynastic wealth. It also threatens the psyche. The more I learn, the more my mental health suffers with knowledge that can't be shared, either because there are soul-crushing aspects to life that can't be changed (yet), or because I don't want to co-opt someone else's journey. Then people confident in their worldview mock me for trying, the way that hard-right politics mock any attempt to make things better. Because they are optimizing gain within a zero-sum game to find the best Nash equilibrium, while I and others are thinking outside the box at a meta level to change the rules, which again threatens their power. Leftist politics can also succumb to tribalism, so I'm not saying that hard-left or hard-right is best, but that strong attachments block insight and solutions. And unfortunately the people with the strongest attachments control the world right now.
So I guess my belief that we're all one in the consciousness field, destined to live out every perspective so as not to be trapped alone within a singularity as God, is not so different from believing that this is all there is and we're worm food when we die, or that we spend eternity in heaven or hell after this life. Except that I might say the worm food philosophy doesn't pass my personal sniff test, since being here again doesn't seem that much less likely than being here now.
And you're right, fear and love have no direct correlation with wealth or the lack thereof. I might say that the feeling of having enough can be personal or societal though. Someone may feel loving and not see the burden their lifestyle places on those supporting it. And conversely, someone may feel loving and not realize that it's a trauma response from exploitation.
I feel that my soul contract, the dream of my inner child, is to liberate future generations from unnecessary suffering so that they (we in the next life) can more easily self-actualize. Which IMHO is closer to a progressive planned economy with UBI like Star Trek than a libertarian wild west economy like Star Wars. Maybe our attention shifts though, the way that children in developing nations seem happier than children raised with a silver spoon. Maybe my personal journey through suffering has felt rewarding in some way. Like maybe I'd go crazy with anhedonia if all my needs were met.
All that said, what I really seek is peace, since I'm not sure that I've ever really felt at ease in my entire adult life.
The real problem we ultimately face as humans is that the human dopaminergic system always resets so that what was great yesterday is expected today and not enough tomorrow.
It is why a windfall when young can be problematic. It won't be enough tomorrow and there just isn't enough non-chemical experiences to get that feeling back again.
It is also why people romanticize poverty because it is so much easier to go from nothing to something than abundance to even more abundance that would subjectively give the same "kick".
> I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's like flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which feels like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent.
But it's not. It's more like playing the lottery over and over. The chance of succeeding even once is pretty low.
> My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage.
Bit of an odd choice. Not only is C++ still being used, as far as I know, but even if it weren't: If you know C++, you know C, and that is definitely very relevant. If you know C, you have vastly more low-level knowledge than the average programmer nowadays. C is not my favorite language by far (I like rust, or Haskell, depending), but just being proficient in it means I can program a lot of different things.
Anyway, to the rest of your point: I never wanted to get rich or anything like that, I always just did what interested me on a technical level. I fared very well with that.
Ya I kind of answered what you are getting at in my longer response. Basically it's a question of fulfillment.
I can feel how much more fulfilled I'd be if I got to make the personal contributions in my heart. I wanted to write languages and frameworks, even design hardware like multicore CPUs, that would have made tech work easier so I could accomplish more and maybe win the internet lottery in the process.
But instead, I just endlessly ran the treadmill to make rent, in the end only standing in place as if I had done nothing. That's what the very essence of the suffering of life is: we insert a coin from the astral plane to incarnate in this life and run the rat race, eventually losing it all to end up right back where we started. Do it enough and we might ascend to the next level, but even then, we eventually volunteer to start over as the fool.
So nothing against C++. In many ways, it's still the most capable bare-metal language. The catch is that the developer has to do everything by hand. It's like comparing a protected memory process to one that can take out the whole OS at any time. I know from personal experience, having programmed my first computer (a Mac Plus) with C++ in the early 90s and having to reboot up to 30 times per day.
Today my time is stretched so thin that in an 8 hour day, I usually get less than 1 hour of actual work done, and probably more like 20 minutes if I'm being honest. It's all logistics now. Travel, orchestrating containers, meeting with team members, researching workarounds for unfortunate snafus in whatever framework, navigating large codebases, maintaining the body and living area, etc.
If I was using C# or C++ instead of PHP and the shell, I simply wouldn't be able to get any real work done in any reasonable amount of time. And PHP is a lackluster language, a far cry from what I would design, but it's the only imperative language with copy-on-write arrays like functional languages, so runs circles around them and avoids countless conceptual pitfalls. It's like MS Excel, simultaneously the best and worst software that I've ever used.
I really want to learn Haskell and Scala to extend my functional programming knowledge, but so far have only made it to Lisp and Clojure. I think I need a course to overcome some of my misunderstandings around decomposition, currying, functors, monads, impurity, etc. The utility of MATLAB jumped out to me immediately (operations happen on arrays, not primitives, similarly to shaders), but I haven't found a use for lambdas as much.
I'm happy that you've fared well and are able to do what interests you. I'm struggling with discipline, motivation and giving myself the space to play as a people-pleaser. I've had a scarcity mindset and been in survival mode for so many decades that I don't know how to put myself first. I just procrastinate and project my frustrations onto the web..
Definitely go for it. My very fondest years were spent staying up until 4 in the morning 2 nights in a row making shareware games in C++ in the early 90s before video cards, until my programming partner at the time and I passed out from exhaustion. There is nothing quite as intoxicating as the full control that comes with C-style bare-metal programming.
If you grasp CUDA, you'll be ahead of me as far as programming GPUs goes. I was never able to quite let my love of desktop CPU programming go to transition to shader and cloud programming. I'm more into higher-order methods like map/reduce/filter. But languages like Julia are working to unite the two paradigms under a common runtime.
There are many tools available to help you get started. I would highly recommend also learning Docker and git (if you haven't yet), so that you can rapidly iterate with full undo ability to remove fear of failure. There are many operations in git that I find easier than the built-in SCM in Unity, for example. And I know they can be used together to give you a local scratch sandbox, then commit your final changes when you're ready. I still want to do this, so you'd be ahead of me again.
And if you could go ahead and build J.A.R.V.I.S. for the rest of us, that'd be great!
Hey Zack just checked out your linked-in and honestly it would be worth contacting a professional resume specialist. You have a double Bachelor in CS/EE and tons of relevant experience. A wordsmith could make you look like gold on paper. Grab the book ‘Cracking the Coding Interview’, do some leetcod practice. If you can grab a couple Google Cloud certs great and/or build a web app with the latest version of Angular, Next.js, whatever so you can update your tech stack perfect. Not sure why you believe C++ is not relevant anymore the concepts have not changed only the syntax.
Like others have said, just some random on the internet, but at a minimum seriously find a wordsmith to update that resume and some recruiter will be contacting you. Also, more is not better no need to list the Test Tech or Mac Repair since other jobs overlap with those years and makes it seem like you were only part time. Everyone fibs a little bit no one is going to ask if you were part time or full time on a job from 20 years ago. Also, if you have self-employed listed make sure you have the tax# and LLC cert from the state as they are going to want to see that as proof to count as relevant experience.
I know you did not ask for my advice, but after reading your reply got me curious about why so gloom. As programmers we need to market ourselves and fake it till, we make it.
You're right, and my best employment experience so far probably came from Adecco placing me at hp for a year in the early 2000s. I'm just not good at advocating for myself. And my AuDHD tendencies create a feeling of overwhelm, that I need to solve the world's problems, even though I'm the one affected. So I obsess over reforming the gig economy and startups and UBI instead of putting myself out there. Recruiters help a lot, although then I feel like I'm on call, never knowing when the next opportunity will hit me when I'm in the middle of work I've already invested so much time and effort into.
The gloom comes from knowing that had I just worked company jobs with 6 figure salaries, I'd be retired by now instead of still at square one. And I never bought Bitcoin when it was $10. And I never had money at the time to invest in Google when it opened at $85 and everyone knew it would go to $100, and it did, opening day if I recall correctly. Same with Apple, when it was $12 but I had no money to buy shares.
That's how capitalism works. As you get wins, they let you invest in further wins to eventually create a stream of unearned income large enough to more than cover living expenses.
But if you never have a single win - not in the beginning and not ongoing - then you watch on the sidelines as countless people with less experience and expertise, who haven't tried as hard, who don't even know what they're doing half the time, fly past you into financial security.
And why did I never have a win? Because the rules of the game that I started under changed. In high school, I didn't know anyone with a computer besides a handful of my friends. There was no internet or cell phones, just the BBS. Geeks weren't cool. We didn't know girls. We barely had cars, passed down to us from parents, if we were lucky. The only real jobs in my small hometown were flipping burgers and moving irrigation pipe.
The reasons I went into tech are largely irrelevant today. And if I knew then that our combined efforts were driving us towards a service economy, wealth inequality and tech dystopia, I might never have gone into it. I originally wanted to be a genetic engineer and cure all genetic disorders, eventually helping to cure senescence.
Which I'm not sure I even truly care about anymore, because at midlife there is a certain allure to starting over in the next life to lose one's memories. I understand Joker and Loki sentiments that I never expected or wanted. Or at least, I'm able to forgive those that scream "let me out!" like David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sang about. And have survivor guilt, that I'm still here after losing loved ones so close to me.
So the central challenge is how to get over myself, to forget the horrors I've seen, to somehow reintegrate with the 3D and reenter the matrix. I basically have startup PTSD from so many tries without a win. Basically a veteran like Rambo, I've seen too much, am highly capable, but can barely take care of myself and would be homeless if not for the help of family and friends.
I really appreciate your advice though. It's good to get honest feedback from someone able to see the situation impartially. Writing this out helps me see that the barriers before me are not so much societal, but self-imposed perhaps.
Apologies for replying to my own post, but this article written by an AI sums up much of what I was trying to (clumsily) say:
https://medium.com/@dualisticunity/ai-religion-and-the-uncom...
It says that it was written 3 days ago and that my post was 4, and I definitely read it after mine. But I've noticed that these similar attention/expression synchronicities are happening more and more often lately.
I try to follow a 'butterfly flaps its wings' mindset. In the alt universe where I had done the 'right' thing, other tragedies might have befallen me.
In the alt universe where I aced the interview and gotten my dream job, I might have died in a car crash.
In the alt universe where I didn't say something stupid and alienate a friend, my husband might have been stricken by cancer.
We just don't know and can't know. Every night, whatever happened, I try to feel a moment of gratitude. My family is here and secure and happy and that is not true of everyone and not to be taken for granted.
The actual study: Reeck, C., & LaBar, K. S. (2024). Reining in regret: emotion regulation modulates regret in decision making. Cognition and Emotion, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2024.2357847
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2024.2...
I realized in my late 30s that I have almost no sense of dread when I think back on all of the cringey or embarrassing things I've done.
I think this was a huge super power for me early in my career. I embarrassed myself over and over again and didn't care or even think about it. Right back at it the next day.
> They were paid $10 for the one hour of questioning as well as bonus money for points they’d racked up during the experiment. If they answered questions incorrectly, they lost real money and may have felt a pang of — you guessed it — regret.
But they didn't "lose real money". They lost theoretical money that they didn't actually have. This is a trap people fall into with gambling, the stock market, and other up-and-down financial systems. What matters is the money you're holding in your hand, not the money you could have been holding in your hand. If I go to Vegas and put $20 on roulette and watch it multiply over rounds to $20,000, do I have $20,000? Not until I cash out I don't. So if the next round wipes all of that out, how much did I lose? $20. Not $20,000 — $20.
I realize this is sort of tangential to the point, but it's also a valid strategy for avoiding regret.
One thing I tell myself: a lot of mistakes I made when I was younger - or things that I regret others having done to me - if they hadn’t happened, it is almost certain I would not have had the children I do. Sure, I might have still had children - but I wouldn’t have had these children. These kids, and those regrets, are a package deal. So in loving them and saying “Yes” to their existence, I have to say “Yes” to those regrets too, which are necessary to their existence.
I got this idea from reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, although it is my own personal spin on some of his ideas.
Read about the notion of “spiritual bypass”.
Yes, people turn to faith and religion. But this often amounts to a complete bypass of actually processing/reframing difficult feelings (like regret) and instead of learning to use those feelings to learn/grow and make your future less regretful, they’re offloaded onto some entity who is supposed to carry the load for you.
It works for some people for a period of time because they feel like they have permission to let go. Until it stops working because letting go isn’t enough. Actually processing these feelings is necessary but gets ignored, and eventually this build up and leads to burnout/breakdown.
(I was steeped in the church from a young age, and have watched countless people find the limits of this approach).
Better to confront things head-on.
It took me until I was 19 to understand this and accept it. The reason for my failure wasn't because some higher was displeased with my lack of piety or because of some deep mysterious plan the universe had.
I failed for a much more mundane reason - I didn't work hard enough, or I didn't have the right tactics/strategy or the dice roll simply didn't go my way. In the first two cases I know what I need to fix and I can fix that. In the third case, I simply must shrug my shoulders and move on.
But I was no longer sitting there unhappy about some extra terrestrial being not giving me the help I asked for. The religious mindset was making me unhappy because it made me think I had no control over my life, someone else did.
Once I accepted that I had control of my life I was much happier and also more successful.
I can speak about Christianity, because I'm a Christian.
> they’re offloaded onto some entity who is supposed to carry the load for you
This isn't supposed to happen, and in fact can be considered sinful. Christians are supposed to pick up their cross and carry it.
I was raised in a Christian church. Spiritual bypass was alive and well. The notion of "carrying one's cross" was more about finding virtue in suffering than it was about actually gaining practical tools to navigate life's difficulties or learning how to process them in a psychologically healthy way.
> This isn't supposed to happen, and in fact can be considered sinful
And this highlights the problem with turning to religion as a primary solution for dealing with life's major emotional challenges. If you don't happen to find the "true" Christians, you're out of luck. There's a wide variety of opinions and interpretations.
Unfortunately not a single one of the dozen or so churches my family bounced around while I was growing up had an enlightened view of this.
And I still have fundamental problems with "bearing one's cross" (the "correct" way) in terms of the actual psychological benefit. It personalizes things that happen in life that need not be personalized. Instead of establishing a rational reason for acceptance that can actually bring psychological freedom, it attaches the idea that it's your lot in life to suffer these specific things, which is a deeply harmful idea psychologically in the long run.
e.g. if I do something that I later regret deeply, the church says "you fucked up, and now you must feel bad about it". A more reasonable mindset is to use the regret as a signal that change is needed. To choose how to live differently in the future based on that regret. And then to leave that regret behind since the past can't be undone.
> The notion of "carrying one's cross" was more about finding virtue in suffering
Different denominations and even different churches within a denomination will have different views on this[1]. That being said it's obvious your opinion is based on that experience but please know that this isn't the only viewpoint.
So much of church is based in communal relationships. In Acts, Paul makes it very clear that members and even church leaders should live "life together". To not may not necessarily be considered sinful, but it certainly leaves a gap in one's soul - Paul saw this early and gave the warning.
> "bearing one's cross"...it attaches the idea that it's your lot in life to suffer these specific things
> if I do something that I later regret deeply, the church says "you fucked up, and now you must feel bad about it"
> A more reasonable mindset is to use the regret as a signal that change is needed.
Again, I think these are distinctions in opinion based on individual denominations and churches. In the SBC it's often taught the way you desire - acknowledge the mistake by admitting it to yourself and God, and fix it. Even mistakes for which there may be no real victim (other than you) - wipe the slate clean and try again (which is the whole point of Baptism).
[1] Christianity is often seen as one thing but few understand the wide range in opinions, doctrine, canonical interpretations that exists. There are churches that openly support gay marriage and even abortion while others consider it a sin, to pick two hot topics. Scoping things just to Christianity should come with the understanding that even that may not be crystal clear, so I do apologize for not being clear earlier.
I witnessed spiritual bypass many times in the context of people becoming "spiritual" as an emotional avoidance strategy. It's even more tragic in my experience because at least traditional religions have very strong and developed frameworks for addressing various types of grief - both individually and as a group.
Modern-day spiritualism is dominated by shallow inspiration masquerading as profound psychological and medical insight. Courses on "raising vibrational frequency", literal belief in astrology, crystal healing, etc.
Excellent satire on Hacker News participants.
That WAS what you intended, right?
> But lament not. These rationalists can be exploited for fun, profit, and votes.
Implying that religious people are not (have not) been exploited in this way for centuries?
Exploiting for profit -- That sounds exactly like what some religious structures are doing. Perhaps "fun" for them, but bad for the ones exploited.
I am an atheist but it's preposterous to dismiss the fact that a vast number of people find healing in organized or individualized religion. Or to suggest that the sole purpose of religion is exploitation for profit.
Curious. I think this applies less to me than I had hoped. I don’t feel regrets over these „you win some, you loose some“ coin toss decisions. Looking back, I clearly made avoidable mistakes but they where the obvious one (for me, back then, in that context) and I can clearly learn from them. But the ones I truly regret don’t fit in that scheme for me. They are just pure loss, no reasoning whatsoever, just stupid. Most of them socially. Not finishing my bachelor but instead canceling and going to work due to financial pressure I can deal with easily. I can „sell that“ to myself. Threading people poorly and loosing good friends that? No way I’m ever forgiving myself that. But these don’t fit in that „portfolio“ framework. They where just stupid decision. I still learn from that and know what to work on. But I cannot reason them away.
"For some, regret might be slow-brewing indecision that amounts to loss, like not having children."
Or ... having children!
Somewhat connected to the approach proposed in this article is something I've found that really helps when I've taken a hit:
Reframe the loss as a learning experience that will save you much more in the long term.
Example: You can read and listen to all the advice in the world, say, about being careful who you lend money to, but when you get stung for $100 by a "friend" that is going to register very, very much more strongly and will possibly save you $1000s in the future as your antenna will be much more effective.
It isn't something that can always be used but being able to see seemingly painful hits as cheap lessons can be quite empowering.
I just rewatched Drive My Car. The director has a new movie that's quite different, but if you want to watch a deep exploration of grief and regret, that's your movie.
Now I wish I knew Uncle Vanya better.
Haven't watched Drive My Car yet, but just from the trailer it looks like it's exploring loss and grief rather than the most poignant type of regret of losing something due to own action (or inaction). I.e. having agency and being directly responsible for loss.
This assumes people’s regret focus on things they did by applying sound logic which had undesirable outcomes. And in those situations it’s a no brainer to apply this framework
The ones that are harder are where you regret something that occurred as a result of not applying logic. There, you need to learn how to cut yourself slack, understand the context you existed in at the time, and acknowledge that you’re a better person who has learned from it.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
Regret comes from a sense of loss or embarrassment typically. You missed a job, a partner and opportunity. You flubbed a social event, you missed a signal or you messed up at work.
Each has a strategy to deal with specifically. Typical ways are gratitude, acceptance, understanding and more. You just need to change your perspective on the event and it should minimize its impact. Extreme events excluded.
tl;dr Focus forward. Backward is the direction of blame, forward is the direction of improvement.
“Boy that sucked, I’m sure gunna remember not to do that again” Read the SRE book on blameless postmortems for more blindingly obvious and wildly underused psychological and institutional hacks.
I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you could do that back then!) and would have basically won the lottery if I hadn't basically just given it away to a friend of mine who was trying to do something (Which ended up being getting scammed by that butterfly labs scheme)... That friend ended up probably one of the most anxious people I have ever seen, ended up threatening to hit me over some petty shit, doesn't talk to me nor a bunch of our old mutual friends because he dragged them into the scam, and all this drama that I probably would have been subject to in some way had I been the one to blow that cash. Hell - I likely would have been dead if I was in my early 20s with that much money. Reflecting on who I am now vs who I would have been if I had done the "less regrettable" thing and been way too rich way too fast is fine, I think I just paid for having everything in life put into perspective and that's invaluable. I'm doing fine these days which is good enough for me.