I write novels about ordinary people who reach back and change their lives, so this question trails me about like a faithful Labrador. People assume I keep an answer ready… a tidy anecdote about the one decision I’d undo given the chance. The truth lands closer to home and pleases nobody: I don’t actually know, and the more I chew it over, the less certain I become.
Everyone has a version of this question rattling around the loft space. Most of us answer it privately, usually around three in the morning, then fold it away and never mention it to a living soul.
The list you’d never read aloud
Ask anyone what they’d change and watch their face. There’s a flicker first… a quick scroll through a private archive we all pretend we never keep. The job we should have left two years sooner. The person we let walk off without saying the one thing. The house we didn’t buy in 2009 because the kitchen was dated, but is now on the market for the price of a small Greek island. That cheap haircut. Everyone owns the list.
What strikes me, the more people I talk to, is how rarely the items on these lists involve money. Nobody lies awake regretting a slightly smaller car. The entries skew towards the things we felt and never said, and the people we meant to ring back.
What people actually wish they’d changed
A few years ago, an Australian palliative carer named Bronnie Ware wrote down the regrets she most often heard from people in their final weeks. Her blog post reached eight million readers and grew into a book translated into twenty-seven languages, which gives you some idea of the nerve she’d pressed on. The five she recorded, in order:
- “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
- “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
- “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
- “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
- “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”
Read that list back and notice what’s missing. Nobody, at the very end, wishes for a slightly bigger telly or a few more Saturdays spent answering email. Not one person reaches for the remote and a spreadsheet. The regrets cluster around courage, honesty, and the people we allowed to drift… the friend request from an old school friend that you keep meaning to accept but somehow never do.
The science of the road not taken
There’s hard research underneath all this, not just deathbed wisdom. In 1994 two psychologists, Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec, published a study with an oddly consistent finding: over the long run, people regret the things they didn’t do far more than the things they did, by roughly two to one. A daft action stings sharply and then fades. A road never taken stays open, idling, forever unfinished. They phrased it more elegantly than I can: “the story of our regrettable actions tends to be closed; the story of our failures to act, open.”
Gilovich returned to the theme in 2018, this time with Shai Davidai, and sharpened the point. The regrets that haunt us longest aren’t the practical ones about mortgages or careers. They centre on the person we always meant to become and never quite did… the better self we filed under “one day” and then quietly mislaid.
The catch nobody mentions
Here’s where my day job makes me insufferable. Every time someone tells me the single thing they’d change, I start picturing everything else bolted to it.
Pull one thread and the whole jumper rearranges. Change the job, and you never meet the colleague who introduced you to the love of your life. Undo the heartbreak, and you erase the person who only exists because of it. The thing we’d most like to delete usually props up something we’d never hand back. We want the edit without the consequences, like asking the barber to take a bit off the sides while leaving the exact same haircut.
This happens to be the precise territory my books live in. In The ’86 Fix, a middle-aged bloke called Craig Pelling, stuck in a loveless marriage and a dead-end job managing an electrical store, is handed a brief trip back to 1986 to fix the lot. (Picture the year accurately: Texan bars, Space Invaders, the faint hum of a portable telly warming up.) He does fix things. He simply doesn’t reckon on what the fixing costs him.
I circled back to the same idea years later in In Lieu of You. Gary Kirk, married almost twenty-five years to a woman he no longer has much in common with, is offered a trip to 1996 so his younger self can dodge the very meeting that started it all. No meeting, no marriage, no bitter divorce. Tidy. Except the life you swerve might not be the one you’d have chosen over the one you already have.
And yet
And yet I’d be lying if I claimed the question holds no pull on me. Of course it does. Some nights I think about the sixteen-year-old who left Heath End in 1988 with a fistful of GCSEs and no plan beyond earning a wage, and I want to lean back through the years and tell him a few things. Not to change his course. Just to mention that it works out, more or less, and that the jumble-sale clothes and the cheese sandwiches leave nothing like the mark he fears they will. (I’ve poked further down that rabbit hole on the question of which age I’d actually return to, if you fancy it.)
But I wouldn’t reroute him, because the route is the entire point. Every wrong turn and every skint Christmas… the BMX from Woolworths that arrived courtesy of a Provident doorstep loan my parents then spent a year quietly repaying… funnelled into the bloke who eventually sat down and wrote the books. Edit the hardship and you edit the writer. I rather like the writer. I’d hate to lose him over a nicer childhood.
So that, in the end, is my honest answer. Make the list if you must. Write down every road not taken, and every word swallowed. Then hold the whole thing loosely, because the version of you reading it back exists only because none of it went any other way.
If you fancy watching three other blokes wrestle with the same temptation, I’ve written rather a lot of them. The ’86 Fix hands Craig his weekend in 1986 and lets him discover the price of a clean slate. In Lieu of You sends Gary back to unpick his marriage, then asks whether he should. And Terms May Apply follows Kyle Hammond, who is handed exactly what he wished for and rather wishes he hadn’t. Three second chances, and not one of those men entirely sure it improved a single thing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do people most often say they’d change about their lives?
According to palliative carer Bronnie Ware, the most common regret of the dying is wishing they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves rather than the life others expected of them. Working too hard, not expressing their feelings, losing touch with friends and not letting themselves be happier round out her five. Notably, none of them concern money or possessions.
Do people regret the things they did or the things they didn’t do?
Over a lifetime, the things they didn’t do. A 1994 study by psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec found that regrets of inaction outweigh regrets of action by around two to one in the long run. A regrettable action feels closed once it’s behind you, while a road not taken stays open and keeps nagging.
Why might changing your past be a bad idea?
Because lives are interconnected. The single decision you’d most like to undo is usually tangled up with people, places and outcomes you’d never want to lose. Remove the painful job and you might remove the friend it led you to. This tangle is the engine of most time travel fiction, including several of my own novels.
Which Keith A Pearson novels deal with changing your life?
Several. The ’86 Fix sends Craig Pelling back to 1986 to repair his adult life. In Lieu of You offers Gary Kirk the chance to prevent his own marriage. Terms May Apply grants Kyle Hammond his deepest wish, with strings attached. Each one pokes at the same idea: would changing the past actually make us happier?
What’s the healthiest way to handle regret?
Psychologists often frame regret as useful information rather than punishment. It points at what you value, so you can act on it now instead of brooding on a version of the past you can’t reach. The road not taken stays open precisely so you can still choose to walk a little way down it.