The Surprising Upside of Regret | Dan Pink

Summary

Good Life Project Podcast: "The Surprising Upside of Regret | Dan Pink"

Episode Overview
In this enlightening episode of the Good Life Project, host Jonathan Fields engages in a profound discussion with bestselling author Dan Pink about the often-misunderstood emotion of regret. Drawing from Dan Pink's latest work, The Power of Regret, the conversation delves into how regret, rather than being solely a negative experience, can serve as a powerful tool for personal growth and leading a fulfilling life.

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1. Introduction to the Conversation

Jonathan Fields (Host): Introduces Dan Pink, highlighting his transition from a former White House speechwriter to a celebrated author known for books like Drive and When. Fields emphasizes Dan's extensive research on regret, including the World Regret Survey encompassing over 16,000 participants from 105 countries.

Notable Quote:
Dan Pink states early in the episode, "[Regret] points the way to the good life. That regret teaches us about the good life in ways that almost no other topic does." ([00:00])

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2. Reframing Regret as a Positive Force

Dan Pink: Challenges the conventional belief that living without regrets is ideal. He argues that regret can be an invaluable experience that guides individuals toward making better decisions and enhancing their lives.

Fields' Insight: Fields reflects on the cultural tendency to avoid negative emotions, suggesting that this avoidance may hinder personal growth.

Notable Quote:
Pink explains, "Positive emotions are great. They make life worth living. But if you have a portfolio with only positive emotions, it's not going to work out very well for you. You need negative emotions to survive and thrive and pursue." ([30:13])

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3. The Genesis of Dan Pink's Exploration into Regret

Dan Pink: Shares a personal anecdote from 2019 when his daughter graduated from college, prompting him to reflect on his own regrets during his college years. This reflection sparked his interest in researching regret more deeply.

Fields' Reflection: Recognizes the universal nature of regret, drawing parallels to previous podcast episodes featuring similar themes.

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4. Understanding Regret: Definitions and Distinctions

Dan Pink: Clarifies that regret is an emotion tied to personal agency—the feeling that one's actions (or inactions) directly affected an outcome. This distinguishes regret from disappointment, where the latter often involves external factors beyond one's control.

Notable Quote:
Pink articulates, "Regret teaches us that our lives are a story in which we are both the actor and the author." ([23:34])

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5. The Universality and Categories of Regret

Research Findings: Dan Pink's extensive surveys reveal that regret is a universal experience, transcending demographics like race, gender, and location. He identifies four core categories of regret:

1. Boldness Regrets: Regrets about not taking chances, leading to missed opportunities for growth.
2. Foundation Regrets: Concerns over not building a stable base, such as failing to save money or maintain health.
3. Moral Regrets: Feelings of having acted immorally or unethically, such as bullying or infidelity.
4. Connection Regrets: Regrets surrounding relationships and friendships, including failed connections or lost relationships.

Notable Quote:
Pink observes, "The universality of regrets is kind of amazing... there are four core regrets that keep coming up." ([35:20])

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6. The Impact of Regret on Personal and Societal Levels

Fields and Pink Debate: They discuss how external factors, such as the Great Resignation, intertwine with personal regrets. Pink remains optimistic, suggesting that increased autonomy and self-direction in work can lead to more meaningful lives, despite potential regrets.

Notable Quote:
Pink asserts, "Forging a good life depends on our ability to sort out what we can control and what we can't." ([25:49])

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7. Transforming Regret into Action: A Three-Step Process

Dan Pink Outlines a Method to Harness Regret:

1. Self-Disclosure: Encourages openly discussing or journaling regrets to make them concrete and less overwhelming.

   Example from Transcript:
   Pink recounts interviewing individuals who shared their regrets, illustrating the therapeutic effect of disclosure.

   Notable Quote:
   "Write about it for 15 minutes a day, for three days... it reduces the weight of it." ([58:38])

2. Self-Compassion: Advocates for treating oneself with the same kindness offered to others, moving away from self-criticism which Pink finds largely ineffective.

   Notable Quote:
   "Self-compassion is treating ourselves with the same kindness we treat somebody else." ([60:22])

3. Self-Distancing: Suggests viewing regrets from a third-person perspective to gain clarity and extract meaningful lessons for future behavior.

   Notable Quote:
   "Take your regret and imagine yourself in a clean room, examining it like a doctor of regret." ([61:33])

Fields' Addition: Emphasizes the role of practices like meditation in fostering self-compassion, noting personal experiences that align with Pink’s findings.

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8. Cultural and Religious Parallels in Processing Regret

Pink and Fields: Draw connections between their strategies and various cultural and religious practices, such as the Jewish tradition of Yom Kippur and Catholic confessionals, which provide structured ways to process and atone for regrets.

Notable Quote:
Pink mentions, "Yom Kippur says, okay, we are going to take this stab of negativity, reflect on it and use it as a path to go forward." ([68:13])

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9. Conclusion: Embracing Regret for a Fulfilling Life

Dan Pink: Summarizes his stance that regret, when properly addressed, is not only inevitable but also essential for personal development and living a meaningful life. He underscores the importance of balancing positive and negative emotions to achieve overall well-being.

Fields' Final Thoughts: Encourages listeners to adopt Pink's methods to turn regret into a catalyst for positive change, reinforcing the podcast's theme of exploring what it means to live a good life.

Notable Quote:
Pink concludes, "Negative emotions are instructions... in the hierarchy of negative emotions, regret sits there at the top." ([65:07])

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Key Takeaways

• Regret as a Guide: Far from being solely detrimental, regret can illuminate paths to improvement and deeper fulfillment.
• Universality of Regret: Regret is a common human experience, cutting across various demographic lines.
• Actionable Strategies: Through self-disclosure, self-compassion, and self-distancing, individuals can transform regret into meaningful life lessons.
• Cultural Resonance: Many cultural and religious practices inherently acknowledge and provide frameworks for dealing with regret, aligning with Pink’s recommendations.

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Final Thought

Embracing regret, rather than avoiding it, can unlock profound insights into what truly constitutes a good life. Dan Pink's research offers a compelling framework for leveraging this powerful emotion to foster personal growth, stronger relationships, and a deeper sense of purpose.

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This detailed summary encapsulates the core discussions and insights shared by Jonathan Fields and Dan Pink in their conversation about the transformative potential of regret in leading a fulfilling life.

Transcript

[A]

What I discovered to my surprise, is that regret points the way to the good life. That regret teaches us about the good life in ways that almost no other topic does. I think that's at the heart of why people are leaning in. If you look at people's regrets, the guts of people's regrets, and synthesize them, analyze them, they tell you what makes life worth living.

[B]

So we've all been told, try to live a life without regrets. But what if regret was actually a good thing? That is a highly provocative question that today's guest Dan Pink asks and then answers with a whole bunch of researched and validated ways that regret can actually be an incredibly valuable experience and even a power tool for a life well lived. In fact, a life entirely without regret, he argues, might even do more harm than good. I've known Dan for well over a decade now. He's been on the show a number of times over the years. A former White House speech writer, he left that world and shifted focus to writing books that really open our eyes to the human condition and plant seeds to do life better. These include New York Times bestsellers, A Whole New Mind, Drive to Sell as Human, and When. His books have sold millions of copies, been translated into 42 languages, and won many, many awards. And in Dan's new book, the Power of Regret, he takes on this topic we've all grappled with and gives it this surprising reframe. He draws on research in psychology and neuroscience, economics and biology to challenge widely held assumptions about emotions and behavior. And using the largest sampling of American attitudes about regret ever conducted, as well as his own World Regret Survey, which, by the way, has collected regrets from more than 16,000 people in 105 countries, some of which he shares. During our conversation, he identifies these four core regrets that most people have. And these four regrets, Dan argues, operated as a a kind of a photographic negative of the good life. And in it and through our conversation today, we find out how regret, our most misunderstood emotion, can be the pathway to our best life. So excited to share this best of conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. Banking with Capital One helps you keep.

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[B]

Dan Pink. It's good to be hanging out again after we have been jamming on and off in different ways on the mic, behind the mic for many years now.

[A]

A couple decades I think now.

[B]

I think so. I think so. Yeah. We're having this conversation at a really interesting moment in time and for so many different reasons. 21 plus 20 plus years ago, you read a book called Free Agent Nation, which basically predicts a future where people are going to be en masse, exiting mainstream corporate culture to do their own things, hanging out their own shingles, solopreneur, entrepreneur, freelancer, all sorts of different formats. And we're sitting here having this conversation right now and you are looking like somebody who has this wise oracle who knew exactly what was coming.

[A]

Yes. That's how I consider myself, the wise oracle of northwest Washington D.C. so my.

[B]

Recollection is when that book first came out, half the people were like, yeah, this is genius. And then there are a whole bunch of people who are like, this is insanity. No way. This is not the future. And here we are.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yep, that's, you know, you know, as a writer and you know this too, what you want, you're all, you always want a reaction. The, the only thing worse than people telling you you're an idiot is, is people not saying anything. And in that book, yeah, it was divided. People said, oh my God, you're totally right. And other people saying, what the hell are you talking about? But this is the case again, going back to my, as a longtime Washingtonian, this is what's known as in politics as being Ahead of the voters. I think I was a little ahead of the voters on this one. But a lot of that stuff ended up being. A lot of it ended up being more right than wrong. I missed a bunch of things, but it ended up being more right than wrong.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of when you look at the state of things today, given how much flux there is and how much change there is. I mean, you couldn't have predicted the circumstance of the last two and a half years, but.

[A]

Oh, no, no, no.

[B]

But even without that, like, the trend was definitely on point, and we've seen so much exodus and so much flux and so much, you know, and now we're sitting here and the phrase that's been repeated mercilessly over the last three and a half months has been the quote, great resignation. And then everyone's seems to be throwing money at a problem, which I think is just rooted in something very different. You can't throw money at a meaning problem and expect things to be fixed. And my sense is that that's really at the root of what's going on.

[A]

Curious what your take is on the Great Resignation. I mean, I think the great Resignation is mixed. If you look at the. Part of me looks at the data and says that some of the great resignation are people who are a little bit older saying, the hell with that. I don't want to work anymore. And part of it is people at the lower end of the labor market saying, wow, this job I had is really awful and I'm not going to take it anymore. Which I think is a. Which I think is a. Which I think is a good thing. And I think part of it is other people saying, you know, what's the point? I don't have any security. I'm not sure the system is actually configured that fairly. And here I am two years into a pandemic, reckoning with a sense of meaning and loss and what my life is about. Why would I want to stick around dealing with the nonsense at the Acme Widget Corporation, even if they're letting me work remotely? But I actually, I'm fairly. Believe it or not, I'm actually fairly optimistic about this. And I'll tell you why this is. You know, in that book that you. Nobody but you and my wife seem to remember, in that book I did talk about remote work and basically saying that this divide between working one place and living another place is a historical aberration. It makes no sense in some ways, and that there's a natural affinity between the two. And the only, the big barrier is technology. And even that people said I was, some people said I was nuts about, they said you can't trust people to work at home. You can't. You know, it's like if you have people working at home, we don't have the technology to do it. And you can't trust them. They're going to shirk, they're going to play around. Working at home is an excuse for slackery. And you know, In March of 2020 we did this kind of insane international experiment where 100 million people around plus around the world did it in four days and it was fine. And what I think is that that becomes a very hard egg to unscramble and that the degree of autonomy that you see in a free agent workforce and the degree of autonomy, the degree of autonomy that I think people need to live a healthy, meaningful life is I think deepening. And I think that's generally a good thing. And so I do think when we come out on the other side of this, whenever that may be, that we're going to come out of it, I think with a somewhat reconfigured view of work, that people should have some amount of self direction, that people should have greater dignity and control over their work and that it's actually intolerable in a society like ours to have jobs that are just horrible. And I really do think that we're going to head in that direction.

[B]

Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think the reexamining of the bargain we made that got us here is a really good thing. And I think the choices that people are making now, on the one hand I'm super excited about because I think people are making more choices in the name of purpose and possibility. On the other hand, I wonder if the metrics by which they're making those choices are fully informed at this particular moment in time.

[A]

What do you mean?

[B]

Meaning that I have. And this kind of leads into the topic of regret. I have a really big question mark over whether a significant percentage of the people who are opting into the great resignation are going to find themselves two years later in the great regret because they're going to be in a different office, different paint on the wall, different boss, different industry, different job, different company, and realizing that here am I in this all new place and I did this and I kind of blew up a lot of things because it was normalized and it felt like it was more okay to do it in a way that it hadn't felt before. And I went through the disruption of the change. And I'm not feeling any different than I did before. So I'm curious, I'm really curious what the longer, what the two to five year horizon is on when people reflect back, how's this all going to land?

[A]

I've given up on two or five year horizons because too short. If we had gone back in time. Think about having Jonathan think about having this conversation five years ago. The world that has unfolded in the last five years is like something out of a bad comic dystopian novel. And if I told you all the stuff that was going to go down, you would say, oh, come on, that's like a bad screenplay. And we've been living through a bad screenplay. So five years from now, who knows? That said, I do think that there is a reversion to the mean in general over time, in everything. And so maybe we have a period coming up of relative calmness and normality. Maybe, who knows?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I do feel like there's a window and it will at some point close. There's a normalization of taking big, bold action that is not going to be perpetually open. So it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out. All right, so Free Agent Nation. To sell as human. Drive. When you have spent a lot of time writing about the human condition. To sell as human. Tell me if I got this right, if I remember this correctly, was the first book where you decided it was time to actually start to be the writer who wasn't synthesizing other people's work and then overlaying my own input, but actually bringing your own data into it. You start actually doing a lot of your own research.

[A]

Yeah, and that one I did. Absolutely.

[B]

Yeah. Which has been something that's continued to this day and brings you in your. Your newest. To the topic of regret, which I was so curious about, because I'm curious what led you to the topic? Clearly it's super relevant in the moment, in time, in so many different ways that we're in. But like you're. I know you're working on this a long time before this moment, so why this?

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I started working on this pre pandemic and I think that the trigger, you know, again, I don't really have epiphanies, so I wish I did. I have kind of slow hunches, but there was, There was a moment on this one pre pandemic and. Yeah. And you might be able to relate to this because you and I are somewhat similarly situated in sort of where we are in Life. But in 2019, my elder daughter graduated from college. And I'm sitting in this college graduation, and it's long. There's, like, a lot of different things. And, you know, her last name starts with P, so you got to wait a while. And so I'm thinking, and I sort of have this weirdly distorted thought about how, wait a second, this kid was just born. Like, she can't be graduated from college. And then even worse than that, I'm thinking, wait a second, how can I have a kid who's graduated from college? I graduated from college. What is it, like, four years ago, six years ago? So I had that weird sort of time distortion. I started thinking about college, and I'm like, God. And I started thinking about the regrets that I had in college. I started thinking, God, you know what? I could have been a lot kinder. I could have worked harder. I could have taken more risks. And anyway, it just stuck with me. And I just happened to mention to a few people. And what was interesting about that is that people leaned in. And when I say leaned in, I actually mean that in some ways, physically. Like, I'm having a conversation with them, and they want to talk more about it. They want to share their own experience. I'm like, wow, that's interesting. That's a very interesting reaction for a writer. And I was actually working on another project, and I started looking at some of the research on regret, and I was like, wait a second. This is super interesting. I think we've totally gotten this wrong, me. And the other thing is that, you know, I was at a point in my life when this is something that I. That I actually wanted to contend with. I would not have written about regret. When I was in my 30s, I didn't have enough mileage on me. Now in my 50s, I have some mileage on me, but I also have, like, a. Plenty of the road ahead. And it's like, yeah, I want to learn from what I did in the past and apply it going forward. And so, like, so much of the stuff that I have worked on, like, you know, I only write books that I want to read myself, and this is something that I wanted to try to figure out and something that I wanted to learn from and figure out whether I was some oddball about the regrets that I had, Turns out I'm not and what I can do with them.

[B]

Yeah, and certainly you're not the only person. Like you said, when you bring up that term, people lean in. A chunk of years back, we Had Bronnie Ware on the podcast, who was the palliative care person who put. I guess it was the early days of social media, like the five regrets of the dying, and that went massively viral. That then leads to this book that goes massively viral. So there's something about the topic that makes people say, huh? Like, this is drawing me in. I want to know more. I want to understand this. And I wonder if it's because the experience of regret is so universal.

[A]

Part of it, but also part of the answer to your question is in the title of your mammoth enterprise, your empire, Good Life. That's the thing that surprised me here, is that regret. I was not. I didn't go looking for this, but I discovered in doing this research, particularly my own. My own research, not the research. I also, I looked at a whole bunch of academic research on this. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that regret points the way to the good life. That regret teaches us about the good life in ways that almost no other topic does. That to me is that I think that's at the heart of why people are leaning in. Now you figure that out. Good life is your free agent nation. People are, you know, you started this 20 years ago and you said, wait a second, people want to live a good life. And I think the phrase is brilliant because good means pleasurable, good means meaningful, Good means moral. Right? And so I think this is really at the heart of this, at least the research that I did on regret, when I collected regrets all over the world, those regrets, if you look at people's regrets, the guts of people's regrets, and synthesize them, analyze them, they tell you what makes life worth living.

[B]

Yeah, There's a lot of information embedded in them. Let's do a little bit of defining. When we use the word regret, what are we actually talking about?

[A]

It's an emotion. And we're talking about that horrible feeling that we have when we say, yeah, my life. Things would be better right now if only. That's the key phrase. If only I hadn't done that stupid thing, failed to take that action, committed that, that blunder. And it's, it's actually a remarkable thing that our brains can do. Because if you think about it, if I say, I regret not being kinder in my, in my, in, let's say, in college, all right, I regret not being kinder in college. So what I do, this, that very act is kind of amazing. What I do is I, I, I go back in time, I travel backward in time in my head. Which is incredible in itself. All right? Then I imagine what it would be like. Tell a story of the opposite of what really happened. Okay, so I'm telling stories. Then I get back in my time machine. I go forward in time and imagine how the present day would be reconfigured if I had done something differently. And we do it. So it's incredible. It's a negative emotion when where we feel crappy about something we did or didn't do in the past. That's what regret is. And it's a terrible feeling. It's a stomach churning feeling. It makes us feel bad. But here's the thing, that's the point. Because by making us feel bad, it helps us do better if we treat it right.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I'm paying particular attention to the language that you used because you said it's something that we did or didn't do rather than something that happened whether we had a wrong happen or not. Because I think of the concept of sliding doors. It's like, ooh, if this thing had happened or if that thing had happened, my life would be profoundly different. But that's. It's a different concept than when you have a sense of agency and control and power over that particular moment.

[A]

Agency is core to feeling regret. There's a difference between regret and disappointment. Disappointment isn't your fault. Regret, by definition is your fault. I'll give you the. One of the. I'll give you the best example that I've heard on this. It comes from Janet Landman, who's one of the early regret researchers at the University of Michigan. And she says, so imagine a scenario where there's a little kid and she loses a tooth. And at night she takes her lost tooth, she puts it underneath her pillow as kids are want to do. Then she wakes up in the morning and the tooth is still there. Okay? She's disappointed, but her parents regret not replacing the tooth with a prize. All right? The parents had agency, the girl didn't. I'll give you another example. Okay? So this is from my own life, all right? I don't know how this happened. I've been trying to shake it my whole life. I'm a sports fan, and for whatever weird reason I care, okay? And that's a whole other psychological issue about why people care about sports. And I am a fan, as a longtime Washingtonian, now fan of the Washington sports teams. And I pay attention to the Washington Nationals and the Washington Wizards. All right, if the Nationals. I'll give you the Wizards. They're more pathetic team. All right. If the Wizards lose, I'm disappointed, I really am. But I can't feel regret. It's not my fault. You know, I didn't play, I didn't pick the team, I didn't coach right. And so there's a big so agency is important. And that's partly why it hurts so much. Because in other circumstances, we can look around and try to point the blame, but oh my God, what are you doing benching Bradley Beal for half the game? What are you doing not playing closer defense on the Sixers, but in in regret. I have no other person to blame. It's my own fault, and that's why it hurts so much.

[B]

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NA Member FDIC so in order to experience regret, then you need to believe, even if it's actually not a true belief, that you had in some way shape or form some control or some ability to control an outcome or an experience or a moment. Bingo.

[A]

Exactly right. And you're on a very interesting point now. And I and I write about this toward the end of the book and it's and it's this. So I did a part of the research for this. I did two large pieces of research for this. One of them was a quantitative survey. One was a qualitative survey. The quantitative survey took a sample of 4,489Americans and asked them a bunch of questions about emotions and whatnot, including radio regret. One of the questions I asked people was, do you generally Think that you have some control over your life. Basically a question about free will and huge majorities or huge majorities of people said, yes, absolutely. All right. Then I asked people, do you think that everything in most things in life happened for a reason? All right. Basically the opposite question and huge majorities of people said everything in life happens for the for a reason. That is what we had was. Is that you. What we had is that people said, you know what, I believe that in fate and circumstance, and I believe in free will, those two things go together. And at some level leading a good life, going back to the phrase that pays, depends on our ability to sort those out, to recognize. And I think regret teaches us this too. Regret teaches us that our lives are a story in which we are both the actor and the author. We're not the actor sometimes we're the author other times. And understanding that is really important for our well being.

[B]

So then if you buy into more of an external determination ideal rather than self determination, does that in your experience, from what you've seen, does that actually allow you to opt out of a certain amount of regret?

[A]

I think it does. But the number of people who believe firmly in that more kind of purely fatalistic view, at least according to my numbers, is very small. Is very small. The number of people who believe that fake circumstance and things happening for a reason have nothing to do with their life is also relatively small. What I found is that most people believe in both. And at first as a hyper rational guy, that really irritated me.

[B]

I'm saying, how does that happen? Right?

[A]

But then I realized that that's actually, my view was actually not very sophisticated. That this view that our lives are a mix of self determination and circumstance, of things we can control and things that we can't control, is exactly right. And that our ability to tease those out is what leads to our sense of well being. And regret teaches us how to. Regret teaches us how to do that. But if you don't believe in any notion of free will, or I don't even say free will, it's too fraught of a comment. If you don't believe you have any ability to determine the fate of your life, then you're not going to have any regrets. And maybe in some ways you have exonerated yourself from that. But the number of people who actually hold that belief is quite small.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, because I'm thinking of folks who opt into some sort of very rule based dogma or tradition and that happens to exist in theology, in religion, in all these different Cultural sort of rules. If it is so rigid, where you're like, okay, I wake up every day and I have the comfort of knowing that for almost anything that comes my way, there's a rule that's going to tell me how to behave. What is the moral behavior here? What's the appropriate response? And you follow those rules and then something goes wrong, does that actually allow you to opt out of a certain amount of. Well, I did what I was supposed to do and it didn't end the way that I wanted it to end, but that's not on me.

[A]

Yeah, there is and there's, and there is a kind of, you know, from Voltaire, you know, Pangloss, who said, you know, when bad things happen, all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. There is that, that sort of delusional sense. But, but what I found is that, is that people once I said is that, is that there aren't a lot of people who believe that singularly. Most of us have a more sophisticated, at least from my reading of my data, most people have a more sophisticated nuance view of their, of their lives as a mix of fate and circumstance, as a combination of things they can control and things that they can't control. I think what's important there is to know what we can control. And regret, I think, gives us a window into that. What's more like as I've said, I say in the book, the very existence of regret, the fact that it is so prevalent, it's our most prevalent negative emotion. It's one of our most common emotions of any kind. It is ubiquitous that everybody has regrets. The only people without regrets are people whose brains like five year olds, whose brains haven't matured and people with Huntington's and Parkinson's and schizophrenia and brain lesions, people who have some kind of disorder. And so the fact that it exists suggests that it has to serve some function, just like anything else in evolution. And, and I'm convinced that it serves an urgent function that I think the evidence is overwhelming that a reason it's one of our most common emotions is that if we treat it right, it's one of our most useful emotions. What's happened though is that in this country especially, we have gone a little bonkers on positivity. And so anytime that we have a negative, we think, oh, negative emotion, banish them. Terrible, terrible. Think positive, Sunny, sunny, sunny. And, and one of my big points is that negative we should have. Positive emotions are great. They make life worth living. But if you have a portfolio with only positive emotions, it's not going to work out very well for you. You need negative emotions to survive and thrive and pursue. Here comes the phrase again. That good life, that you have to have negative emotions in order to understand what makes things positive. And when we look at the hierarchy of negative emotions, the most important and valuable one is regret. And if we learn how to reckon with it systematically, we can. It has a whole array of benefits. It helps improve our decision making, it increases our performance at school, it can help our careers, it deepens our sense of meaning, it brings us closer to other people.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, it is fascinating how it's been. We've always framed regret as something that is to be avoided at all costs.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Along with, like, everything that makes us feel bad. Every emotion that sort of is on the, quote, negative side of the spectrum. And yet the research is pretty clear now. A diverse range of emotion, emo diversity, is what actually leads to a life that feels best, not just this polynomistic look at, like, yay. All the time.

[A]

Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. And I feel like this country gets it a little bit off that we've been seduced into a kind of a cult of uniformly positive thinking. And again, positive emotions are really, really important. We need to have plenty of them. You need positive emotions in order to lead a good life. But again, but only positive emotions is actually dangerous because you're missing things, you're not learning, you're not growing, you're not advancing, you're not making progress.

[B]

So we take sort of like the traditional view of regret as this is negative, it's to be avoided. And rather than you saying, well, I feel differently, I'm raising my hand saying, no, there are these. There's this and this and this. There are all these reasons that actually it's positive. You go out and actually run your own studies. Two different studies. The American Regret Project, where you talked about the quantitative side of it, and then the World Regret survey. Something like 16,000 people in over 100 countries now sharing their regrets, which alone is kind of an astonishing thing to just be able to sit with. I mean, when you start to see those coming in and you're reading what people from all over the world are.

[A]

Sharing what's happening in your mind, I am astonished. I couldn't believe how many I had got. Almost, I did almost. No publicity, no spreading of the word. And all of a sudden I have all these things and I'm like, holy smokes. Like, I don't want to even. I'm not even going to talk about this anymore because it's going to be too overwhelming. I mean, reading through 16,000 regrets takes a freaking long time. And, you know, I didn't want to, you know, And I think one of the things that it. I think it told me a few things. Number one, people want to talk about this. And there's something about disclosure itself, and there's subsequently some evidence of this, that something about disclosure itself that helps us reckon with the regrets, that holding them too tightly, suppressing them, is actually really bad for us. Second is that there is a universality in these regrets that really astonished me. And in this case, doing my own research was very helpful because I felt like the existing research didn't quite get it right on what we regretted. The traditional research on regret on sort of what we regretted looks at the domains of life. It's an education regret. It's a career regret. It's a romance regret. And what I found when you read through these things, one after another after another after another, is this, that there's something else going on there. Let me give you an example of that. So if I. The best example, I think, is this. If. Okay, I got people who. Let's say people who went to college. Let's go back to. We were talking about college. Let's go back to. And both of us have kids in college. So college is front of mind. So I think about. I could literally, I'm not joking around. I think that one could start a travel agency or a travel business geared toward people who went to college and now who graduated from college and now regret not studying abroad. That the number of people like, okay, so that's like, oh, I wish I had, like, hadn't played it so safe and had studied abroad. Huge numbers of people like that. Okay, that's an education regret. Meanwhile, I have hundreds of regrets around the world, literally around the world that have essentially have the same format which goes like this. X years ago, I met a man, woman, slash woman, whom I really liked, and I wanted to ask him or her out, but I didn't, and I still regret it. That's a romance regret. Then I have people going back to free agent nation. All right. Oh, man, I always wanted to start my own business, but I never had the guts to do it. And now I'm in this lackluster job and I really regret not taking it. Okay, so that's a career regret. Now the traditional categorization would be like, oh, these are three different regrets. To me, they're the same regret. It's A regret about taking a chance. It's a regret about being bold. And what I found is that around the world all these regrets seem to come back to the same four things. And there are four core regrets. And the universality of them is astonishing. The universality of regrets is kind of amazing. I mean, in a way, the quantitative portion of the survey was slightly disappointing on this front because the reason I created a representative sample was so I could do cross tabs to say, oh, you know, white people regret this and black people regret that and you know, women regret this and men regret that and old people regret this and young people regret that and people in the eastern part of the United States regret this and people in the western part of the United States regret that. And in fact, there's not a huge amount of difference in that. So I did all this quantitative research commissioning this expensive and really kind of awesome survey, only to find that there wasn't a huge amount of difference based on things like gender and race and location.

[B]

So it's really just such a universal experience almost no matter where you are, no matter who you are. So your research shows that the old notion of domain based or role based regrets is maybe not really accurate and you identify these four different categories.

[A]

I think it's accurate. I don't think it's the big story.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And I did that. I did on my quantitative survey. I actually asked people to group it in domains. And what I found was something, what I found is that people regrets spread across whole number of different areas. It's when I got to those, when I, when I went to those 16,000 qualitative regrets and started looking through them, I said, okay, there's something bigger going on here. And I think that that is the, I think it's useful to see what the domains of life in which people have regrets. I think that's, I think that's super interesting. I think it's more revealing to know that around the world, whatever the domain of life, these four core regrets keep coming up.

[B]

So you mentioned one of them, a boldness regret. First I want to know a little bit more about that and then let's walk through all four of them because I think it's really fascinating. So the boldness regret, you say is basically built around looking back and saying I should have or I didn't do this thing.

[A]

If only I'd taken the chance. If only I'd taken that chance. All these regrets begin at a juncture. You can go this way, you can go that way, you can play it safe. Or take a chance. And overwhelmingly, far fewer people regret taking a chance than playing it safe. Overwhelmingly, even if things don't work out, there's something, and I think that tells us something about what a good life is. A good life is a life where we know that we're not here permanently. We want to do something, we want to learn, we want to grow, we want to test the limits. We want to do something psychologically rich. And I think that's a fundamental human need. There's a fundamental human need for growth. And the way we experience growth is that we try stuff, we do something bold, and when we don't, we regret it. So that's one of the four core regrets.

[B]

Yeah. Which is interesting that you focus on growth, not on having succeeded at the thing. Because when I think about a boldness regret, part of it is the assumption that had I taken this action, it would have ended up the way that I wanted it to end up, which would be in some way what I assume is better than the situation that I have currently, which may or may not be true. But what you're saying is, regardless of that, the deeper thing here is just having said yes to something, where I stand in a place of agency, I take an action and there's an opportunity for growth no matter how it ends up. There's something about that, regardless of the outcome.

[A]

Absolutely. Because you know, and you've done something. And I think that people. It's a great point, Jonathan. I think that people are pretty clear eyed about that. They even say, let's take the regret about not asking somebody out on a date in those regrets, in the written, you know, in the people say, oh yeah, there was this guy, Joe, and I was sort of in love with him and I think he was into me, but I was too chicken to ask him out. And then they say, like, I don't even know if Joe and I would have gone anywhere, but I want to know. I wish I had tried that kind of thing. And so I think people are surprisingly, at least I was surprised, clear eyed about that. It isn't about this. Some of it is about the imagined success, but it's not really about that. It's about, God, I just should have done something. It is about that idea. It's interesting because it goes to your other port. It's this idea, like I had agency. That's a privilege and I didn't use it. What a fool.

[B]

Hmm. It's almost like a sense of wasted agency. Like I wish I was the type of person who did X Because I had the opportunity to and maybe somebody didn't, interestingly. Okay, so that's boldness. Foundation regrets. Talk to me about this.

[A]

Foundation regrets are if only I'd done the work. And these span a lot of domains. So it's people who say, I wish I had saved more money. I wish I had taken care of my body and exercised more. If only I hadn't smoked, if only I'd worked harder in school, I might be. Have more skills, that kind of thing. It's choices we've made where because of our choice, our foundation is a little bit wobbly. And to me now, there's some interesting things about that. One of them is that that's one area where I don't think people, and I mentioned this, don't have full 100% agency because if you didn't, like, work hard in school or you dropped out of college, is that only on you, or is it because you went to a crappy secondary school or because you were way down with student loans or something like that? So that's one area where people don't have full, full agency. But to me, what it suggests is that a good life has some stability to it. And I use that word foundation intentionally. If your foundation is mushy or wobbly, that is not a good life. You need some degree of stolidity as a base for that life. And when people take action that erodes that, they really, really deeply regret it. Again. Things like around the world, things like smoking, which would traditionally call a health regret, but also financial regrets, largely about spending over saving, really was what it was. And again, and I use the, you know, the Aesop fable of the. The ant and the grasshopper. It's like people regret being the ant and wish they were the grasshopper.

[B]

Yeah, this is. It's interesting because I was thinking about this particular category, and this is the category where in my mind I was. I got really curious. I'm like, I wonder what the quantitative overlay of this is. Because this, like, you know, when you see what. Well, not everybody starts on equal footing. Not everyone in the evil plane.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

So this is the domain. This is the type of regret where I'm thinking to myself that it could show up really differently depending on circumstance.

[A]

I think that's right. And a big part of regret goes to opportunity. And so one of the things that you see, the one racial difference that I saw in the quantitative data is if you look at the surface domains, is that African Americans had more education regrets than white Americans. And I think it was largely because their opportunity, I think we can assume that is that African Americans are more likely to have that educational opportunity thwarted or have that not be available to them. And so opportunity is at the core. Opportunity is at the core of regret. And I think foundation regrets are. You know, I mean, I say this explicitly, I say this explicitly in the book, that that's one area where your circumstances play a role. But at the same point, there is still agency.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so that's one area where it's a little bit. Where it's a little bit murky.

[B]

Yeah. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

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[B]

Moral regrets. Tell me about this.

[A]

You're at a juncture. You can do the right thing or you can do the wrong thing. You do the wrong thing and you regret it. And the two biggest types of offenses that I detected were bullying. Amazing. The number of people who regret bullying kids in school. They're in their 60s and 70s and they look back. It's bullying. It's marital infidelity is a big regret that people have. You know, at some level, when I was. You asked how I. What was. What it was like when I realized all these people were offering regrets. I was thinking, holy moly, I'm doing like an online confessional here. You know, I feel like a priest and people are coming to me and just people are confessing. Moral regrets are tricky, though. It's a relatively small category. But our notion of what is moral, we don't have a full understanding of it. Full consensus of. Most of us agree that harming other people, swindling other people is bad. But when it comes to other kinds of things, how much should we respect authority? How much should we value the sacred? There are some divides. The thing about moral regrets is that it's one of those areas where I think we do have a lot of agency. At least people say that they have a lot of agency on these things. The other thing about moral regrets is that I find them heartening. I find it actually heartening that people are bugged by things they. Unethical, immoral, things they did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. It suggests that we want to be good and that the need that these moral regrets are surfacing is our need to be good. And I find that in some ways, affirming.

[B]

Yeah. Which goes back to what you were saying in the earlier part of our conversation about there being real value in acknowledging regret and then sort of like diving into it. What's this actually telling us? What's the data beneath the emotion?

[A]

Right, right. And it's also, you know, and again, moral regrets give us, like, all these regrets give us guidance for the future. But if you reflect on this, if you say, wow, wait a second, I really mistreated someone, I feel awful about that. I think that then people have said in the interview, said explicitly, and because of that, because I felt so bad about that, it's like, I actually make a more affirmative effort to treat people better later on. But it's amazing how long these stick with me. I just remember one woman who I interviewed who was relating the story of. I had to do all these interviews on Zoom, which is suboptimal. And I got these interviews because in the World Regret Survey, the qualitative portion of there was a field. I said, you know, if you're interested in being interviewed, please leave your email address. And again, to your earlier point, we had something like 30% of people opted in to be interviewed.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Which was like, I know, I couldn't believe it. And I was expecting it to be like 6, 7%. And so I got so, you know, So I interviewed. I was able to interview a lot of people, but there's one woman I'm remembering, her first name is Kim, who told the story about bullying a kid. I think she was like 8 or 9 years old. And even in relating the story, she's in her 50s. So it's like 40 something years later to me via Zoom. She's tearing up because she feels so bad about what she did. And what she did was actually not even the most egregious form of bullying that people reveal. But there is something. I do think there's something affirming to that. We want to be good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

This is why a good life involves goodness. It doesn't involve only pleasure. It involves morality, goodness, fulfilling your obligations, treating people well, and anything else that is a part of one's moral code.

[B]

Yeah. In the early days of social media, which was not all that long ago, I got a direct message. So I would have been in my 40s. I got a direct message from a kid who I grew up with, who I want to say I was probably 8 or 9 years old, where I got bullied by this person. And 40 years later, you know, like, 35, 40 years later, I get a message from this person out of the blue, apologizing, wow. Because this had been weighing on this person. And, I mean, I'm long over this, you know, like, this is like way, way, way in my passage, you know, and. And. But this, like, this moment had been weighing on that individual's mind for decades of their lives. There was this moral regret that, like you said, it just never went away to the point where they literally felt like they needed to reach out to me in any way that they could. And this was the one way they found where I could be reached out to. To make amends. And it was this moment for me where I'm like, wow, this is like. I actually. My heart went out to this person because I was like, I've been over this for a really long time.

[A]

How did you respond?

[B]

Basically, like, look, you know, like, we were kids. I mean, we all do stupid things, you know, and we all do things that with. With outcomes that were not intended. And of course, you know, like, we move on and everything's good. But it was a real moment for me to realize how long people carry things that in their minds are, you know, like, are really big and.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

They're just constantly there. Like, they never quite leave them.

[A]

And I think what's interesting about that is that what advice does that guy give to his own kids? If he has kids, right? And I think that's the other thing about our regrets, is that they offer guidance for ourselves, but we can deploy them to instruct others. And that's certainly something that's really important when people get, get older. Like there's, you know, if you're in your, if you're in your 80s, you can still apply, you still have, you know, some of your life ahead of you obviously, and you can apply lessons going forward. But another thing that people do in that stage of life is take their regrets, extract lessons from them and try to share them with the next generation.

[B]

Right? And if you didn't feel regret, then you don't have the lesson to share. Not saying you want to actually go do something just so you can have a regret, so you can have a lesson that you can have the behavior.

[A]

This is the paradox. Regret makes us feel bad. That's the point, right? By making us feel bad, it helps us do better. That's the point. And this goes back to earlier, what we were talking about. It's like, it's why. So therefore avoiding negative emotions is like avoiding ways to do better.

[B]

All right, the fourth one, connection regrets.

[A]

Connection regrets. This is the biggest category. These are relationships. And what's interesting about this is that it doesn't matter what the relationship is really. Could be spouse or partner, could be toward your parents, could be toward your extended family, siblings, friends. Oh my gosh, the number of regrets revolving around friendship were incredible to me. Friendship, one of the things that I learned from this is just how deeply important friends are in people's lives and how bad they feel when friendships come apart. And they usually come apart in slow, non dramatic ways. And what happens is that people want to reach out, but they say, ah, I don't know, it's going to be really awkward if I reach out and they're not going to care anyway. And of course we're totally wrong on both of those fronts. When people reach out, it's not awkward and people do appreciate it. And one of the interesting things you might appreciate this as a writer is that in writing this book I'm interviewing people and I'm trying to tell their story. And because of the nature of what we're talking about, they say I'm going to do something about this. And they changed the frickin story on me. So you know, and so, you know, so I ended up thinking that I had this, this, this like hermetically sealed lockdown, really tight little narrative. And they say, guess what? I get an email, guess What I did yesterday, that thing that I regretted not doing for 40 years, I decided to do something about it. I'm like, oh, man, okay, we got to get back on the phone because I got to write. I got to like, you know, I got to tell this full story. But connection regrets suggest that. I don't think it's a surprise, but what gives our life meaning are other people. And when those relationships come apart, it hurts. And to me, the lesson for that, it's actually important to me, pink personally, is the lesson I've derived from this is always reach out. I've changed my view on that from all these regrets. My lesson is always reach out. If you are wondering whether you should reach out, reach out. The very act of wondering suggests that you should reach out. Always reach out. 99 times out of 100, it's going to be well received. Always, always reach out.

[B]

So you use the word awkward as sort of like the basis for why a lot of people shared with you that they didn't do that. And this is a word that I've seen pop up in the younger generation, like, hashtag awkward. It stops so many of us. There's something about the feeling of awkwardness that is so powerful and that we experience as being so negative that it literally stops us from a simple reach out, from repairing stuff. We would prefer to endure years and maybe decades of regret rather than five minutes of awkwardness while we stumble through the conversation. But that power, powerful that it stops us, I mean, that's kind of mind boggling.

[A]

Yep. And awkwardness. At least my reading of the. Melissa Dahl has a good book on this that I encourage your listeners to take a look at where she looked at some of the research on and just some of the circumstances of people feeling awkward. But my read of the research on awkwardness is that it's like a. You ever see those cartoons where there's a mouse, but because of the nature of where the light is coming from, the shadow on the wall, it makes it seem like this giant beast. That's what we completely overstate our fears about awkwardness. And to the point where, as you say, very, very well. I wish I had said something like this in the book. It's like we're willing to endure years of regret instead of moments of awkwardness, which is absurd, but that has to do with sometimes. One reason people have foundational regrets is something called temporal discounting, where we are so concerned about pain in the short term that we are willing to avoid pain in the short term. We actually create pain in the long.

[B]

Term, yeah, we are weird that way. Well, we're weird a lot of ways, but that way in particular we've got these four regrets. We all experience them to some level. Like you shared. The research shows some of them are much lesser. They don't endure nearly as long and they don't happen nearly as frequently. But we all have our own, you know, like special sauce flavor. We have our own stew of some variety of all four of them. How do we, how do we look at these different moments, these different experiences, regrets that we have and understand an intelligent process to then say how do I extract the value in these? And then what do I, what do I do about this in order to actually take this and not just make it a negative experience that endures in my life? How do we turn it into value? And then how do we turn value into behavior?

[A]

Great way to put the question. The way I look at this is there's a three step process, relatively straightforward. One of them is self disclosure. It's very important that we talk about our regrets, that we disclose our regrets. And once again it's another awkwardness overstated. We fear that when we disclose vulnerabilities about ourselves, people will like us less, they like us more, they actually relate to us, they feel a greater sense of empathy, they admire our courage. So self disclosure is the first step. Even writing about them privately, there's some good research from James Pennebaker at Texas showing that even private writing can relieve the burden of regret. So get it out there. And one of the things that, one of the things that is important, important, I think it's pretty interesting is that with negative emotions they're sort of abstract in a way and by putting them in words we make them concrete. And that in some ways I'm using mixing metaphors here, it sort of defangs them a little bit that we, that it's a sense making function. Whereas when we try to explain positive experiences, we shouldn't try to explain and make sense of positive experiences, we should just enjoy them. Because when we have positive experience and try to explain them, we actually drain some of the positivity from it. So disclose them. Second step. I was blown away by the research on self compassion. We should show ourselves compassionate about these regrets. And self compassion is a triangulation between two extremes. One is self esteem, not terrible, has some benefits, but also has some big, big downsides. It corrodes empathy, it reduces persistence, it can increase narcissism. The other side of that, and I was also just blown away by this is self criticism. And I was amazed. There's very little self evidence that self criticism is effective. I mean it's kind of a waste of time. I mean it seems virtuous. I certainly think it's virtuous. I've become expert in it over 50 years. But it doesn't have that much of an effect. What self compassion does is kind of steers between the complacency of self esteem and the contempt of self criticism and allows us basically treat ourselves with the same kindness we treat somebody else. Recognize that our mistakes, our flaws, our setbacks are part of the human condition, that we're not that unique in that regard. And what it does is that it relieves the burden of it. It sort of, it reduces the weight of it if we treat ourselves like we would treat somebody else. And one of the things about self criticism is anybody when you and I are talking, I happen to be wearing a T shirt from a race that I ran a few years ago. And so, you know, when I run, I swear at myself, I insult. I would never talk that way to anybody else. And it turns out it's totally useless. And so what we should do is we treat ourselves with kindness rather than contempt and recognize treat ourselves with self compassion. The final step is self distancing. We are terrible at solving our own problems. And what you need to do is you need to distance yourself in time, in space, even with language. So some well known research about talking to yourself in the third person is a better way to extract a lesson going forward in time 10 years from now and looking back and saying what do I want? What will I have wanted? What do I want to have done 10 years from now? Asking yourself, what would you tell your best friend to do in this circumstance? Taking your regret and imagining yourself like in a clean room, examining it as like a doctor of regret and saying okay, what is this telling me? And that three step process disclose self compassion and self distancing allows us to extract that lesson. Now getting the lesson doesn't necessarily guarantee the behavior, but it's the necessary first step. And for me I think the best way to, the best way to promote the behavior is to be pretty stingy about which regrets you focus on. Only focus on the important regrets. Don't try to fix everything. Take one regret, extract a lesson from it and begin with simple steps to get small wins to apply that lesson in the future.

[B]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And those three different things. It's interesting. So self disclosure, really interesting that simply even journaling it. Writing only for yourself.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Can have an effect that's really powerful because I think a lot of resistance for people would be like, I don't want anyone else to know. I feel a sense of shame around it. But knowing that you can literally sit down and just write it out in detail only for you to see and that alone can have a powerful effect is very free.

[A]

You could write about it for 15 minutes a day, for three days. I can do it. And if you don't even like writing, you can talk about it in a voice recorder. What it is is it's partly the disclosure in some ways disclosing it to yourself, but it's also the sense making function that language has. That language takes these blobby mental abstractions and turns them into something more concrete. And that in some ways reduces the negative power of these, of these emotions. That sense making function of language is really important. That's what disclosure does. But the other thing, again, I'll give you another example from this. For a few people who I write about in the book, their regrets were pretty significant and they were like reflected pretty badly on them. And I gave. Because I'm not an investigative journalist. I'm not trying to like get anybody. I'm like, okay, listen, like if I really want to talk to you, I love your story, you know, if you want to me just to use your first name. If you want me to, you know, you know, use a different name or something like that. You know, they have to be fact checked and everything. But I don't have, we don't have to reveal it. I had only two people who. I had one person, that's it. One person didn't want me to use his last name. The other person, we came up with a made up name for her. But I have people talking about bullying, talking about infidelity, talking about not saving money for themselves, talking about mistreating other people, talking about doing really stupid things, totally fine. Using their first and last names. And I think that says something. I mean I think that self disclosure is a relief. And the thing is like having taught truly, it's like just to give you, I don't think less of people for revealing this. I actually can totally empathize with them and I admire the courage of doing that. I don't think. And that's the thing. It's like we're totally, we're. Our predictions about how people are going to react are totally wrong. But if you're skittish, that's cool. 15 minutes a day of writing about it. 15 minutes a day of talking about it into a voice recorder.

[B]

Yeah. So powerful. And the notion of self compassion also I find really interesting. I'm somebody who, who's at a long standing meditation practice and it's a daily practice and at least once a week, and oftentimes more than that, I swap in what we call the meta meditation or loving kindness meditation. And it's an interesting meditation from the standpoint of self compassion because you go through a series of variations. You repeat the same phrase over and over, but over time you change who it applies to. And the first wave is always you apply to yourself.

[A]

Right?

[B]

So may I be safe, may I be healthy, may I be at peace, may I live with ease. And you repeat that a number of times. And then you move on to someone you love, and then you move on to somebody you don't know very well. And then you move on to someone who's done you wrong. And then you move on to all beings. And what's interesting is you would think that in a meditation like that, which is effectively also kind of a form of prayer, the way you look at it, it should be other focused. And yet it always starts with you, you know, because you're offering that same lens of loving kindness and self compassion to yourself. And that's no matter every variation I've ever seen, no matter how the language changes, it always starts there. And yet so many of us feel uncomfortable starting there.

[A]

It's a great, great point. I mean, that's a great point. In some ways we do it the wrong order that we, you know, we show compassion. You know, we show compassion to others who we don't even know. We give to charity, we feel bad for people who've been devastated by things. We show compassion to friends of ours who've been sick. We show compassion to people who've made mistakes. All of us have had friends or relatives come to us and say, oh my God, I just did something really stupid. I really screwed up. And we don't, you know, we offer them compassion, but we don't do it to ourselves. And I have to say I was, I didn't know much about this research on self compassion. A lot of it was pioneered by Kristin Neff at the University of Texas. And I found it incredibly powerful that it really changed my view of both. I was always skeptical of self esteem, but I was a true believer in self criticism. And I think neither one of those are that great. What it really is is self compassion. Treat yourself with the same kind as you extend to Somebody else. And don't. I mean, at some level, not to be too harsh, but you know, if I'll give you an example, you know, I have some moral regrets. I don't love talking about them, but I have some moral regrets in my, in my previous life. And at some level I'm such an idiot. I thought I was the only one and now I got these, like everybody has these moral regrets. And I'm like, oh, okay. You know, I'm not that special. Like, part of having, you know, part of doing things, doing the wrong thing is the human condition. And I don't want to become complacent about that. But I don't want to say I'm the only one in humanity who's ever done the wrong thing and therefore I should be excoriated by myself. No, you want to show the same compassion to yourself that you would go to those other. That we maybe more easily go to these other outer circles.

[B]

Yeah. And I think that's got to be so much of the power of the database that you put together the study. Also when you start to see the numbers and there's no way for you to look at that database and say 16,000 people from 100 plus countries, we've all experienced the same thing. We've all had the same foundational failures or regrets or missteps or decisions I would have done differently and moral ones and this and that. And all of a sudden you're like, so I'm actually not the freak here. I'm just like everybody else. This is actually normalized behavior. So if we're all in this together, then maybe if I actually own this and do something about it, then it's not going to make me cast out. But maybe it's the thing that allows me to stay in.

[A]

Amen, brother. I mean, that's what self compassion does. It normalizes, to use your word. And then by normalizing, it neutralizes.

[B]

Yeah. So powerful. When looking at the book and looking at the work you've been doing for a chunk of years now, it's a really big reframe. The net effect here is, let's say, let's all own the fact that regret shows up in all of our lives. It is as you've identified such a powerful, powerful emotion. And rather than saying, how do we live a life where we never have to experience it and how do we pretend that whatever we have doesn't exist? How do we actually tap it? How do we not, using your language, not minimize it, but optimize around it?

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I think that's. I think that's it because, I mean, I'm, you know, I'm a true believer now, obviously, having done the work. But the. But it is a powerful emotion and it's an incredibly useful emotion. But it's tricky. I mean, you can't, you know, listen, I don't want to go. I'm not. I don't want to go overboard here. Like. Like, if you spend too much time wallowing your regrets, you're going to be miserable. I mean, you know, you have to. It's basically like we. I don't. I don't feel like in our culture we have been taught how to deal with negative feelings. And I think that really goes to the heart of it. Like. Like, at some level, I think that in, like, we've been. Some of us have been taught feelings of any kind, ignore them, they don't make any difference. They don't reveal anything. I think, on the other hand, you have people who've gone the other way. It's like, oh, feelings are the only truth. And so if you do the first one, you ignore your negative emotions, you're going to be deluded. If you wallow in your negative emotions, bathe in them, luxuriate in them, you're going to be miserable. But if you say negative emotions are instructions, negative emotions are like emails or telegrams from the universe telling us things that negative emotions are things that we should think about, that we should confront and think about, then they are incredibly instructive. They are much more instructive than positive emotions. There's no doubt about that. And once again, in the hierarchy of negative emotions, our old friend regret sits there at the top. It is the most instructive negative emotion we have.

[B]

I'm thinking as you're sharing, that kind of an interesting reference popped into my head. I'm thinking about the Jewish tradition, sitting shiva after somebody dies. And there's this structure around, effectively feeling it, fully and utterly feeling it, surrounding yourself where it's disclosed. You're sharing your feelings, you're being fully supported by everyone around you, and there's a process built around it. And then saying, you don't never feel that again. But now it's sort of like, then you move into the next stage, and it's interesting to sort of say, okay, so regret. How do you sit shiva for regret? What's the process by which? And that's so much of what you've actually laid out in this book. It's not just fascinating research. It's like here's process, here's how to deal with this moving forward so that we can actually, as you keep sort of circling back to that phrase that we have both been pursuing in different ways for so many years, live a good life.

[A]

Yeah, but I mean, listen, I don't want to turn this into a Talmudic debate, but let me say, see your Shiva and raise you Yom Kippur, that in the Jewish faith, right. In the Jewish faith, there is a day where now it's seeped in religion in that. And it uses words like sin and atonement, which are stronger words and religiously drenched words, obviously. But that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, says, okay, we are going to, we're going to reckon with these things that we've done that are wrong. We are going to reflect on them. But remember, Yom Kippur lasts only a day. So it's not like, you know, if Yom Kippur was six months, you'd be miserable. Right. It's like we're going to take this stab of negativity, reflect on it and use it as a path to go forward.

[B]

Yeah. I would venture to guess that we'll probably find similar structures across so many different traditions.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, certainly in the Catholic religion, the idea of confessionals and then the expiation for these kinds of things, again, I have a very secular, very secular view of this. I think that there are echoes of this and that there's a. And what I think is true in certain, that there are echoes of this. So certainly in the Catholic confessional, there is a sense making function that comes by putting these feelings of that you've done something wrong into words. And the ritual of disclosure and expiation is itself, I think, a useful ritual in the Jewish tradition, you know, Yom Kippur, where you reflect on your sins and you actually harm yourself by not eating. Again, there are echoes of this. And I think what it suggests, and we see this, we see this in a lot of work on religion and how certain religious practices conform with what we know about psychological well being. Not all, but many of them do. And we also know that the evidence is overwhelming that people who have some kind of religious faith are happier and live longer in general than people who don't. And those of us who are much more secular might not like that. But I think the evidence there is overwhelming because it gives us a sense of purpose. It allows us to take these negative emotions and do something with them. We're part of a community. And so again, I mean, I'm not just saying this just to be funny or because it's you, but I think all of it goes back to this pursuit that we have, this innate need we have to lead a good life in all of the dimensions of that word, good.

[B]

Yeah. And when it comes down to it, right, and this is what you write and speak specifically about, you know, like, so regret may be a retroactive or a retrospective emotion. Emotion. But we can, by not ignoring it, but by actually stepping into it, by addressing it, by using the three tools you suggested, and there are others that you write about within the book as well, we can understand what it's telling us so that we can look to our future and it can inform how we step into our future differently.

[A]

I'll give you your second amen of the broadcast. Amen.

[B]

Yeah, feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. I've asked this question of you before. Years have passed since then, so I'm going to circle back and ask it again. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

[A]

Yeah. To lead a good life is to love and be loved. I'm absolutely convinced of that. I'm absolutely convinced of that. I think that again, like as I say in the Jewish tradition, all the rest is commentary.

[B]

Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you'll also love the earlier conversation that we had with Dan about the powerful role of timing in life. You'll find a link to Dan's earlier episode in the show. Notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a seven second favor. Share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too. But just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.

[A]

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