Je Regrette Beaucoup

I do not want to begin by contradicting Édith Piaf but here we go: je regrette beaucoup. Oh Édith, forgive me. You were, after all, a woman who lost her great love in a plane crash, who survived hunger, poverty, and addiction and the kind of grief that reshapes a person, and if you regrette rien (rien de rien), good for you. I wish I could say the same, but as it happens, I regret quite a lot, and I have the receipts. Regret has terrible PR. We are told, endlessly, not to have it. »No regrets« is tattooed on forearms across the Western world, printed on motivational posters, embedded in commencement speeches delivered by people whose lives have worked out well enough to make the advice feel earned, sung convincingly by Robbie Williams:

No regrets / they don’t work / no regrets / they only hurt.

Live fully, we are told. Take the leap. You’ll only regret the things you don’t do. That sounds optimistic and upbeat and is at least partially true. But not quite. To not regret anything sounds cool and is easily said when you’re young. After all, if we don’t regret anything, how do we learn from our mistakes? How do we hold ourselves accountable? How do we radically accept what is?

The reality is that regret—real regret, the kind that wakes with you at four o’clock in the morning and then sits with you until dawn—is an uncomfortable, yet very useful emotion, provided we are willing to do something with it other than suffer. It is information. It is experience. It is also wisdom: because you now know better. It is the psyche’s audit function, running a check on the gap between who we said we were, what our values are, who we want to be, and what we actually did. The pain is the signal. The question is whether we are willing to read it. I suspect it has to do with age: the older you are, the more decisions you have made, the more turns you have taken, and the higher the probability of them being wrong in retrospect. With each passing week, more unlived lives stretch out in your imagination, more shoulda-woulda-couldas arise. 

I once attended a wedding—my own, as it happens—with a pit in my stomach and a premonition that I was making a mistake. I thought I had cold feet, but in retrospect I had actual, valid concerns. The reason I decided to go through with it is that I could not fathom making such a fuss, as per my inner dialogue: »What are you, the runaway bride? You’re not in a movie. You can’t run away from your own wedding!« But of course, I could have.

Not only did I have cold feet, but I ignored all the signs in the days leading up to the wedding that told me: Don’t do it. RUN. The signs were there, but I did not trust myself to read them. That is actually my biggest regret, that I ignored my brilliant intuition by being too rational. I made the wrong choice. But that’s what divorce is for, and four months later I filed for it. I had a night cream at that time that lasted longer than the marriage. I made the wrong choice and correcting it took me exactly to where I am today. 

The problem with choice is what the Germans have coined a very punchy rhyme for: die Qual der Wahl, the torture of choice. We have been sold a story that more choice is good, that more choice equals more freedom. It is the foundational myth of consumer capitalism, self-help culture, and the kind of lifestyle journalism that tells you the right morning routine will finally make you into the »best version of yourself«. »All« you have to do is choose wisely. But every choice you make means you forsake other choices.

We all begin with endless possibilities, with the raw material for a thousand possible lives. Slowly, the field narrows. Every choice rules out others; every commitment closes a door. Plural possibilities simmer down, year by year, into the singular life we end up calling ours. »There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep« according to the English literary critic and poet William Empson. What he is referring to is something he calls the »tragedy of growth and aging«, which is inevitably a process of diminishment. To »grow up« and successfully integrate into the adult world means making hard choices, specializing, and letting go of the vast, pluralistic possibilities of youth. 

By the time a person reaches adulthood, the sheer complexity of life and the weight of responsibilities force them to narrow their focus. No matter how much they try, no man nor woman is able to retain the expansive, uninhibited wonder and potential he or she possessed as a child.

And what happens to the rest of the lives? They don’t vanish. C. G. Jung called it the unlived life: not merely the roads not taken,* but the whole unexpressed interior, the capacities and desires and ways of being that got ruled out early, by circumstance or choice. These unlived lives do not simply disappear. They exert pressure. They have opinions. They sometimes wake you up in the middle of the night and pose as regret. This is exactly the stuff quarter-life and midlife crises are made of: Was that it? Is this my life? Is this how it is going to continue? Did I make the wrong turn? When? In »The Diary of a Man of Fifty« by Henry James, the midlife-crisis-ridden hero writes: »…there would always remain a certain element of regret; a certain sense of loss lurking in the sense of gain; a tendency to wonder, rather wishfully, what might have been«. What might have been had I taken the other road?

* Oh, the road not taken! In one of the most famous poems of our time, »The Road Not Taken«, Robert Frost ponders on the possibility of what might have :

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
…
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It is of course telling that the road he chose, the one less traveled by, has made all the difference and yet the poem is named after the other road, the one not taken. 

Some other roads I have not taken I ponder upon: Should I have invested in Bitcoin? Should I have moved to New York City? Should I have gone into journalism? Should I have given up journalism earlier? We are our choices, Jean-Paul Sartre claimed. We are, simply, what we do. A person is not to be judged by what she dreamed of doing, or might have done, or once came close to doing, but only by what she actually did. Reality alone counts. »The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think, and what you do is who you become«, Heraclitus wrote a few thousand years before Sartre. So our choices make us, and while that sounds frightening given what I have written about regret and making the wrong choice, it is actually quite soothing. For we make thousands of choices each day. And it is the steadiness of the minor choices, the making of good decisions every day, that is more important than big life decisions that arise rarely.

In his book »Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life«, psychologist and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips notes that once there is no afterlife, once the better, fuller version of existence has to happen in this life, the pressure becomes almost unbridgeable. We have one shot. We must not merely survive. We must thrive. We are encouraged to have more unlived lives than ever before, to feel their absence more keenly, and then sold products to fill the resulting void. This is exhausting. And also, it is not necessary.

In Virginia Woolf’s »To the Lighthouse«, Mrs. Ramsay sits at dinner surrounded by her children and her guests, when lines of poetry surface in her: And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be / Are full of trees and changing leaves. She isn’t sure if she invented them or remembered them. It doesn’t matter. They are spoken, Woolf writes, by her own voice, outside herself. The lives we are. The lives we are not. The leaves, always changing.

I suspect that is the hopeful thing about choice: that change is still possible. That the regrets you have (or don’t have) form a human being who can make another choice tomorrow. And only the future will tell if it was the right one. But it is the one that will form your life, the life you’re living. The lived life.