Comment by dilap

Comment by dilap 10 months ago

11 replies

View on Hacker News

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.

alexey-salmin 10 months ago

> 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

Reply View 2 replies
  • tomcam 10 months ago

    This was Mark Twain-level funny

    Reply View 1 reply
    • tough 10 months ago

      Attention is the real bottleneck

      Reply View 0 replies
rthnbgrredf 10 months ago

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.

Reply View 0 replies
unshavedyak 10 months ago

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.

Reply View 0 replies
adammarples 10 months ago

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.

Reply View 2 replies
  • anthonyrstevens 10 months ago

    I think I could make a good argument that our brains are machines for repeating past mistakes. Interesting to think about the opposite sides of the argument.

    Reply View 1 reply
layer8 10 months ago

The biological purpose of regretting past actions is to avoid them in the future, though.

Reply View 2 replies