Our contemporary received wisdom is that regret is for losers. Everyone makes mistakes, but you can’t change the past and in any case, everything that happened to you, good and bad, made you what you are now. So to embrace who you are, you have to embrace everything you have done.
Most of us would still accept there is some place for regret. Only an amoral monster would take the injunction ne regrette rien as an absolute. It would seem wrong not to regret having caused severe harm to others, for example. But even if we agree that regret is almost always useless, few are able fully to escape thoughts about what might have been, along with the many emotions that might accompany them, from gentle sadness to raging bitterness.
One philosophical response is to question whether such thoughts even make sense. For example, I recently met members of three generations of the same family. They were all not only lovely people but smart, well-read and accomplished. I could not help wonder what would have happened if I had been born into a family in which philosophy and literature were topics of daily conversation, and learning how to play a musical instrument and speak another language were as normal as learning how to ride a bike.
These idle thoughts didn’t have much bite because I believe that had I actually been raised in such a family, “I” would not be “me”. Of course we can imagine that the biological animal that I am was swapped at birth and given a completely different upbringing. But I think most of us accept that from the raw clay of our DNA our identities are created by our experiences, and if that genetic material is shaped very differently, we become very different people. As close to a proof we have of this is that identical twins raised separately may well have lots of things in common, but they end up being very different people.
This is of course a huge topic, which I delve into at much greater length and breadth in my book The Ego Trick. My experience is that people’s intuitions can be pulled in different ways on this. At times it seems obvious that the same baby given very different life experiences would be a different person. But at others, the conviction that we could have had a very different life and yet still been the individuals we now are also seems strong. At the end of the day, I think we can persuade ourselves that the latter feeling is just wrong and simply reveals the limits of our imaginations. So any kind of regret, sadness or bitterness about not having had a radically different past would be incoherent.
But what if the “what if” we are thinking about came later in life? Take an old friend of a friend, a classical music conductor who had reason to believe they were quite talented. As you can imagine, very few reach the top in this field and this conductor went to their grave somewhat embittered by the fact that others who they believed to be less talented achieved much more.
Here, the difference between the path they hoped their life would follow and the one it did is much smaller than it is between the me who has raised by my parents and the other possible me who was raised completely differently. Most of us would be inclined to say that success would not have made the conductor a completely different person. In a sense he would have been “a different person” but that would mean “a different version of the fundamentally same person” not “a different individual”.
Perhaps this intuition is wrong. Experiences change us more than we might think, success especially so. For example, last year, I watched the fictional TV Drama The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, about a female comic trying to make it big in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The last episode showed her in her old age, and it was quite clear – and totally plausible – that she would only have become that person had she become a star. The character was made up, but real life reveals many examples. Take David Coverdale, who now has a swagger, arrogance and even an accent that a young man working in a clothes chop in 1970s Redcar would never have acquired had they not got the job of lead singer with one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
Still, I’m pretty sure that most people with painful thoughts of what might have been don’t believe that the alternative path would have changed them so much. We may think conductor’s bitterness was unwise, but it is hard to persuade people that it is incoherent. The thought “it could have been me” seems to make sense more than certain philosophers of personal identity believe it does. Given that we would all agree that such feelings serve no positive benefit, do we have any helpful and truthful ways to think about the better life would could plausibly have lived, so as to accept its failure to have come to pass more happily?
One ploy is to watch Chekhov’s The Seagull, in which the character of Trigorin exemplifies how we will always be dissatisfied if we compare ourselves to people who are one or two rungs further up the ladder of success than we are. Trigorin has become a successful writer, but not in the league of Tolstoy or Turgenieff, and that bothers him. Nina reprimands him for his self-pity, saying “The fact is, you have been spoilt by your success.”
And so are many of us. The vast majority of people living in a developed country today are the winners in life’s lottery, even if others have done better on the housing ladder, in their careers or in their romantic or family lives. There is a kind of ingratitude in feeling deprived of the better life we could very easily have had when the one we do have is better than most human beings could ever have dreamed of. We are spoiled by a success we do not even recognise as such because we are too busy looking at people who had even more.
Although I buy that entirely, I think many people do not respond to its moralistic hectoring. Being told you should be grateful doesn’t seem to make many people feel much. better. Is there any other comfort we can offer?
If you are on balance happy with how your life turned out, then it’s easy enough to remind yourself that there is no way to know for sure that a seemingly luckier turn would have worked out as well. Once you realise that a different path before you met your partner or had your children, for example, would have meant you probably would not have met the partner after all and certainly would not have had those children, it becomes hard to sincerely wish that the turn in question had been taken.
If, on the other hand, you are disappointed with your life path, such thoughts lose their power. It’s true that as long as you’re not positively miserable, you can never know whether you’d have been happier had other things happened. But if you’re not that happy, the most honest and realistic assessment is that you would probably have been more fulfilled if you had been able to do the better things that seemed at one time to be realistic possibilities.
These are the toughest cases. A person believes with some justification that their life could have gone better when the way it has gone is not that great. What comfort could we possibly offer them?
It seems we are left only with the tough love option: get over it! Sure, the dice didn’t roll kindly for you, but others have done even worse. Be grateful for what you have, even if it is less than you could have reasonably expected when you were still young and full of hope. The universe does not owe you anything. Many a talent is unrewarded and many a scoundrel thrives. Life isn’t fair! Whatever might have been, now “it is what it is” as my favourite colloquial mantra has it.
This might sound identical to the “you should be grateful” line that I said wasn’t very effective a little earlier. But there is a subtle and important difference. Rather than trying to convince yourself that your life is better than you think it is, the tough love option accepts that it may well be as bad as you think, and it could have conceivably been better. In place of the intolerant “you should be grateful” we have the slightly more understanding “you should still be grateful, despite everything.” To put it another way, rather than try to persuade people their life is better than they think it is, you try to make them accept that it’s still good enough despite being as bad as it is.
But why should anyone accept this? I think there is a good answer in Samantha Harvey’s extraordinary novel Orbital. In it, she captures the sense that many astronauts have of the beauty of the world and of life, a sense which is not necessarily accompanied by happiness, joy or even by a belief that the world is a good place. “You didn’t ask if progress is good, and a person is not beautiful because they’re good, they’re beautiful because they’re alive, like a child. Alive and curious and restless.”
From space, the astronauts can grasp more easily that what makes us grateful to be alive is not happiness or achievement. “Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once,” Harvey writes. “We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.”
If you didn’t have the better life you could have lived, that’s ok because ultimately that life would not have mattered a jot more or had any more value than the one you had. Merely being alive at all is the biggest miracle of all. Anything else is a bonus. Cold comfort, perhaps, but comfort nonetheless.
News
Lots of people are enthusiastic about supporting local businesses. But what does “local” actually mean and why does it matter. Answers in my piece for the FT Weekend.
I reviewed Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide by Samir Chopra in the Wall Street Journal. Supporters can access a version of it on my website. My review of The Price of Life: In Search of What We’re Worth and Who Decides by Jenny Kleeman appears not to be behind the Literary Review’s paywall.
A reminder that the paperback of How to Think Like a Philosopher has come out as well as a new and expanded edition of The Pig that Wants to be Eaten, which now has ten new thought experiments.
My next online discussion with supporters will be Sunday 14 April, 8pm UK Time.
On my radar
I hosted a philosophy salon on philosophy and fiction this week and as a result was lucky to read two very good and very philosophical novels. I’ve already mentioned Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. It’s a poetic work which is less about plot (six astronauts orbit the world 16 times in one day) and more about evoking moods, emotions and ways of seeing. Joanna Kavenna’s Zed is a very timely near-future portrayal of a world in which the kind of ubiquitous tracking and AI we already have has gone that bit further. It’s dark, funny and left me much less sanguine about the ways in which technology is taking us that I was. It also says a lot about free will and how it relates to political freedom.
Jamie Bartlett’s podcast series The Gatekeepers also lifts the lid on the social media giants. Even the very informed will find it insightful. In Three Million, Kavita Puri tells the story go the 1940s Bengal famine, making the case that its historical significance has been too often overlooked. In contrast to these multi-episode series, you need just 28 minutes to listen to A Reckoning with Drugs in Oregon, a very sober and balanced account of how drug deregulation can go wrong and why.
That’s all for now. If you’d like to receive future posts like this direct to your inbox, at no charge ever, sign up below.
Until next time, if nothing prevents.