Nobody sits you down as a child and warns you about regret. They warn you about strangers, about running with scissors, about the tide coming in quicker than you’d think. Regret is left for you to discover on your own, usually at about two in the morning, replaying a conversation from 1994 in which you said the wrong thing to the right person.
I’m fifty-four, so I have had ample time to build a decent back catalogue of the regrets. Bar one of two major mistakes, most of mine are small and daft: a haircut in 1991 I will not be describing here, and a car I once bought because of the impressive stereo. Alas, the frequent sound of the engine trying, and failing, to start was less impressive. The bigger ones I keep in a locked drawer at the back of my head, and only open when I’m feeling either brave or self-destructive. What I have never once managed to do is not feel it at all.
The second most common thing we feel
Back in the 1980s, a linguist named Susan Shimanoff studied the emotions people actually named out loud in everyday conversation. Love came top, which is the sort of finding that makes you feel warm about the species. Second, ahead of joy, ahead of anger, ahead of every hot and cold feeling we like to imagine runs our lives, sat regret. Not the villain of the piece. The runner-up to love itself.
Decades later the writer Daniel Pink went looking on a much bigger canvas. He surveyed thousands of Americans and found that ninety-nine per cent of them owned up to feeling regret at least now and then. He then built a World Regret Survey and gathered more than sixteen thousand regrets from over a hundred countries. The conclusion is oddly comforting: if you feel it, you are not broken. You are simply awake, human, and paying attention.
We don’t all regret the same things
Pink reckons almost everything we carry falls into one of four buckets:
- Foundation regrets, the “if only I’d done the work” ones: the pension you didn’t start, the teeth you didn’t floss, the slow-motion cost of a hundred small skipped chores.
- Boldness regrets, the “if only I’d taken the chance” ones: the business, the trip, the person you never quite worked up the nerve to ask.
- Moral regrets, the “if only I’d done the right thing” ones, which tend to age the worst of the lot.
- Connection regrets, the “if only I’d reached out” ones: the friend you meant to ring, the rift you assumed there’d always be time to mend.
Read that list, and I’d wager one of them lands harder than the others. Mine’s probably the first one, but I have contenders for all four categories. Yours might be sitting quietly at the top.
The ones that come back for you
Here is the part that ambushed me. Pink’s research finds that when we’re young, we regret our actions and our inactions in roughly equal measure: the stupid thing we did, and the brave thing we didn’t. But as the years stack up, the balance tips, and by your thirties, forties, and well beyond, the things you didn’t do outnumber the things you did by around two to one.
It makes a grim sort of sense. A thing you did has edges. It happened, it stung, it ended, and you carry a specific scar you can point to. A thing you didn’t do has no edges at all. It simply keeps expanding in the dark, quietly ballooning into every glorious life you might have led if only you’d sent the email, booked the flight, or said the words. The chance you turned down never has to deal with roadworks, a leaking boiler, or the reality of who you actually are on a wet Tuesday. If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s too late to change course, I’ve had a proper go at that question in Can You Ever Really Start Over?
What people wish they’d done at the very end
An Australian nurse called Bronnie Ware spent years in palliative care, sitting with people in the final weeks of their lives, and she began noticing the same handful of regrets surfacing again and again. Eventually she wrote them down. Top of her list: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Then, mostly from the men: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” After those came wishing they’d had the courage to express their feelings, wishing they’d stayed in touch with old friends, and wishing they’d simply let themselves be happier.
Not one of them, she noted, wished they’d spent more hours at the office. Nobody lay there yearning for a tidier inbox or a marginally nicer car. It’s the sort of thing you read, nod along to sagely, and then promptly forget the moment an email pings.
So what are you actually meant to do with it?
The instinctive British response to regret is to bury it under a patio, drop a planter on top, and never speak of it again. This turns out to be exactly wrong. Pink lays out three unglamorous steps, and mercifully none of them involves a motivational poster of a man climbing a mountain:
- Say it out loud, or write it down. Regret feeds on secrecy. The moment you tell a trusted mate, or scribble it in a notebook nobody will ever read, it shrinks from a haunting into a mere fact.
- Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend. You would never tell your best pal he’s a hopeless idiot who ruined his one shot at life. So extend yourself the same basic decency you’d extend the bloke next to you at the barber’s.
- Zoom out. Step back and look at the whole thing as a detached observer, the way a director pulls the camera back from a scene. From ground level it’s a catastrophe. From up there it’s a lesson, and lessons you can actually use.
The point of all this isn’t to feel worse. It’s the opposite. Regret is only useful if it tells you something; a signpost is no good if you stand there weeping at it instead of reading where it’s pointing. Handled well, it stops being a stick to beat yourself with and turns into information about what you actually value, and what you might still do about it while there’s road left.
Regret is the quiet engine under a good deal of what I write, mostly because I find it the most honest thing about being a person. In A Page in Your Diary, a middle-aged man returns to his home town, discovers what became of the girlfriend he dumped over the phone in 1987, and finds himself handed the chance to travel back and undo the damage he caused; it’s a novel about the edged, moral kind of regret, and what you’d give to unpick it. In In Lieu of You, Gary and Clare Kirk have run clean out of things to say to each other and are heading for an ugly divorce, until a stranger offers Gary a trip back to the day they met so his teenage self can swerve the whole marriage; it’s about the things we stop noticing until we’ve already thrown them away. And The ’86 Fix hands Craig Pelling a weekend back in 1986 to fix the choices he’s spent decades regretting; proof, if nothing else, that I’ve been circling this particular feeling for a very long time. The good news the research keeps landing on is this: regret only rules you while it stays a secret. Drag it into the daylight, treat yourself with a bit of kindness, and it stops being a ghost and starts being a map.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is regret really the second most common human emotion?
According to research by the linguist Susan Shimanoff in the 1980s, regret came second only to love among the emotions people named in everyday conversation, ahead of joy, anger, and fear. Daniel Pink’s later surveys found that around ninety-nine per cent of people admit to feeling it at least occasionally, which makes it just about universal.
Do people regret the things they did or the things they didn’t do?
Both, when we’re young. But Daniel Pink’s research shows the balance shifts with age: by our thirties, forties, and beyond, regrets of inaction outnumber regrets of action by roughly two to one. The chances we didn’t take tend to haunt us far longer than the mistakes we actually made.
What do people regret most at the end of their lives?
Palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware recorded the five that came up most often: wishing they’d lived a life true to themselves rather than the one others expected, wishing they hadn’t worked so hard, wishing they’d expressed their feelings, wishing they’d stayed in touch with friends, and wishing they’d let themselves be happier. None involved wanting more time at work.
What’s the healthiest way to deal with regret?
Daniel Pink suggests three steps: self-disclosure (say it aloud or write it down), self-compassion (treat yourself as kindly as you’d treat a friend), and self-distancing (step back and view the situation as a detached observer). Together they turn regret from a private torment into something you can actually learn from.
Is it better to live with “no regrets”?
It sounds heroic on a tattoo, but the research suggests otherwise. A life with genuinely zero regret would mean never having risked, loved, or cared enough for anything to sting. Regret, felt and processed properly, sharpens our decisions and deepens our sense of what matters. The goal isn’t to feel nothing; it’s to feel it usefully.