I have many, many regrets. Some regrets deal with the bad decisions I’ve made in my life; decisions that have hurt other people. Other regrets deal with the decisions I’ve failed to make for me personally, mostly because I didn’t want to further hurt the people I had already hurt. Some of the decisions that I never made and regret not making may not have been the best for me financially or socially, but nevertheless they would have been true to my feelings. Yet I was too much of a coward to make them for fear of failure or criticism.
What makes life interesting and at the same time cruel is that there is no going back. Bad decisions or decisions never made at all cannot be changed; with bad ones it’s too late and with those never taken life often times doesn’t give us another opportunity. Again, time is the culprit.
Unfortunately, I’ve learned that we’ve been so conditioned by our parents (at least I was) that it almost seems as if I couldn’t play out my own life because I was programmed to follow a certain protocol. I realize that sounds like sour grapes, as if I want to blame my parents for those things I never got to accomplish, or more to the point, experience. But that’s not the case. Parents, well-intentioned parents, do the best they know how, and they often bring up their children the way they were brought up. However, times change, and if children are at the cusp of a new era, and parents fail to recognize that or are too afraid to let go, their kids are affected – more often than not in a negative fashion.
Anyway, all we can do is make the best of our lives in spite of all the factors working against us. Just remember, our biggest enemy is TIME! We can never make up for lost time. TGO
Refer to story below. Source: BestLife
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We focus so much on the decisions we make in the moment, but a new study published in the journal Emotion indicates that the old adage still rings true: it’s not the things you do in life that you regret, it’s the things you don’t do.
In a paper entitled “The Ideal Road Not Taken,” Cornell psychologists identified three elements that make up a person’s sense of self. Your actual self consists of qualities that you believe you possess. Your ideal self is made up of the qualities you want to have. Your ought self is the person you feel you should have been, according to your obligations and responsibilities.
In surveying the responses of hundreds of participants in six studies, the researchers found that, when asked to name their single biggest regret in life, 76 percent of participants said it was not fulfilling their ideal self.
This indicates that we might have a flawed attitude toward how to avoid regret. We live in a world in which we are told that we’ll have a great life if we follow the rules. So you figure that if you do all of the things that society expects of you—act like a good citizen, get married at the appropriate time, make enough money to pay the bills—that you’ll feel happy and fulfilled with your life. But those are all qualities associated with your ought self, which the study found people have limited regrets about (in part because they actually act on decisions associated with it). But when it comes to your dreams and aspirations, people are more likely to let them just drift by unrealized, and that’s what really stings later in life.
“People are quicker to take steps to cope with failures to live up to their duties and responsibilities (ought-related regrets) than their failures to live up to their goals and aspirations (ideal-related regrets),” the study reads.
“When we evaluate our lives, we think about whether we’re heading toward our ideal selves, becoming the person we’d like to be. Those are the regrets that are going to stick with you, because they are what you look at through the windshield of life,” Tom Gilovich, the the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell and lead author of the paper, said. “The ‘ought’ regrets are potholes on the road. Those were problems, but now they’re behind you. To be sure, there are certain failures to live up to our ‘ought’ selves that are extremely painful and can haunt a person forever; so many great works of fiction draw upon precisely that fact. But for most people those types of regrets are far outnumbered by the ways in which they fall short of their ideal selves.”
The results of the study indicate that it’s not enough to encourage people to just “do the right thing.” We need to establish that it’s vital for people to act on their hopes and dreams, and that it isn’t normal to just keep putting them off indefinitely.
“In the short term, people regret their actions more than inactions,” Gilovich said. “But in the long term, the inaction regrets stick around longer.”
It also implies that we need to stop making excuses for our own inaction. So learn that language you’ve always wanted to study. Take that backpacking trip through Asia you’ve been talking about for ages. Write that book that’s been tinkering around in your head for years. Don’t leave it for tomorrow. There’s only today.
