Written by Asish Sridhar
Edited by Aaliya
Illustrated by Shresha Kumar
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Introduction
Regret is a past-future-based phenomenon. It is a feeling characteristically accompanied by failure, disappointment, and sadness. It bases itself on if-then scenarios and idealized narratives. When we come to the end of things, the end of stages of life, the end of the window to make choices, and maybe even the end of college, regrets appear to surface and bother us. Regrets may also be a sign of processing incidents we do not yet have an answer for.
I’m sure every Indian knows how a pressure cooker works. It builds up, starts churning and squeaking, and then all of sudden, with a burst of effort, it lets out huge steam and releases a lot of the hot air trapped inside it. It seems quite inefficient, doesn’t it? It spends so much time tossing and turning only for the action to be completed in a continuous instant. I’d say this phenomenon is quite similar to how many of us Christites scramble in the last few hours to submit our CIAs, when “Deadline Mode” gets activated and suddenly, somehow, weeks of uncertainty, resistance, and confusion are temporarily unveiled. It becomes clear what to do and how to go about it. If only I had done this last week, we may think, how good our work could have been?
Now, let us analyse regret from a philosophical perspective.
In “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People”, Covey talks about what it means to “Begin with the End in Mind”. He talks about how we can easily get caught in the activity trap and find ourselves becoming busier and working harder to accomplish empty victories. In an attempt to achieve these temporary fixations of increasing our marks, getting respect and recognition, and proving our competence, a lot of us lose our way and start to regret our decisions. We feel we missed out on the things that were truly important in pursuit of obtaining these fleeting, unclear goals, in which the goal is much clearer right after the opportunity has passed us, in retrospect. I feel that this constant cycle of downtime and activity resembles the CIA completion mood a lot of us Christites have.
The Dalai Lama has also in the past addressed this hollow cycle of constant activity and preoccupation. When asked what surprises him most about humanity, he had a few insightful lines to say. I’d like you guys to go through this Zen Pencil illustration on what he says, as I feel he does a good job communicating the sentiment through a comic.
This quote in the comic from Dalai Lama explores the theme of people being so preoccupied with living in the past and future that they fail to live in the present and be able to appreciate what they have.
If we analyse this from a psychological perspective, there are a few things that come up:
1. Unclear Expectations
During my internship in a drug rehabilitation centre, when taking a session discussing the aspirations of the patients, there was a particular phrase/sentiment that repeated amongst many of them. They told me that they wanted to be No.1 (E.g. No.1 Businessman). I found this thought particularly interesting, coming from people currently undergoing rehabilitation for alcohol addiction. It also got me thinking about the standards people have for themselves and the subjectivity of “being the best” that was expressed. For some people, it’s aspirational, something to strive for and measure yourself as a giant, but then again, what does No.1 even mean in the context?
2. Hindsight Bias
Popularly known as the “I knew it all along effect”, it is a psychological phenomenon in which one becomes convinced they accurately predicted an event before it occurred. Often, after the deadline has passed or we have lost the opportunity, there is a feeling of “I should have done it” or “Oh, if only I started before.” But would it have been that simple? In hindsight, things tend to look more obvious than they are.
3. Personal Narratives
For those of us currently in placements, we typically have to change our resume based on the company coming and highlight and omit details based on what the company requires. These resumes are representations of us. As we do for resumes, we also create multiple stories for ourselves, which determine our values and behaviour. Mood is also known to affect this. You may have noticed that when you are happy, it is easier to think of happy memories and when you're sad, accordingly. This leads to phenomena like feeling the whole world is against you or feeling like the universe is with you.
Conclusion
We all have limited time in this world- limited experiences, limited choices, and limited paths to choose in addition to not being able to go back and see what could’ve happened if we decided to choose the other option. In the words of Kanye West, surely we wonder what would happen if “he didn’t win…, guess we’ll never know.”
After exploring regret as a feeling, although regret is often expressed with the emotion of changing things, it may not be considered the full story. It may just be a way for us to cope with ourselves about an alternate version of ourselves we could have been proud of. Just the possibility of that potential seems to satisfy many of us, rather than evaluating the practicality.
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