[HN Gopher] Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to...
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Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them
Author : lxm
Score : 108 points
Date : 2024-09-19 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Faith and religion also work well.
| Shawnecy wrote:
| [Citation needed.]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Excellent satire on Hacker News participants.
|
| That WAS what you intended, right?
| haswell wrote:
| Read about the notion of "spiritual bypass".
|
| Yes, people turn to faith and religion. But this often amounts
| to a complete bypass of actually processing/reframing difficult
| feelings (like regret) and instead of learning to use those
| feelings to learn/grow and make your future less regretful,
| they're offloaded onto some entity who is supposed to carry the
| load for you.
|
| It works for some people for a period of time because they feel
| like they have permission to let go. Until it stops working
| because letting go isn't enough. Actually _processing_ these
| feelings is necessary but gets ignored, and eventually this
| build up and leads to burnout /breakdown.
|
| (I was steeped in the church from a young age, and have watched
| countless people find the limits of this approach).
|
| Better to confront things head-on.
| nindalf wrote:
| It took me until I was 19 to understand this and accept it.
| The reason for my failure wasn't because some higher was
| displeased with my lack of piety or because of some deep
| mysterious plan the universe had.
|
| I failed for a much more mundane reason - I didn't work hard
| enough, or I didn't have the right tactics/strategy or the
| dice roll simply didn't go my way. In the first two cases I
| know what I need to fix and I can fix that. In the third
| case, I simply must shrug my shoulders and move on.
|
| But I was no longer sitting there unhappy about some extra
| terrestrial being not giving me the help I asked for. The
| religious mindset was making me unhappy because it made me
| think I had no control over my life, someone else did.
|
| Once I accepted that I had control of my life I was much
| happier and also more successful.
| roninorder wrote:
| I witnessed spiritual bypass many times in the context of
| people becoming "spiritual" as an emotional avoidance
| strategy. It's even more tragic in my experience because at
| least traditional religions have very strong and developed
| frameworks for addressing various types of grief - both
| individually and as a group.
|
| Modern-day spiritualism is dominated by shallow inspiration
| masquerading as profound psychological and medical insight.
| Courses on "raising vibrational frequency", literal belief in
| astrology, crystal healing, etc.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| I can speak about Christianity, because I'm a Christian.
|
| > they're offloaded onto some entity who is supposed to carry
| the load for you
|
| This isn't supposed to happen, and in fact can be considered
| sinful. Christians are supposed to pick up their cross and
| carry it.
| haswell wrote:
| I was raised in a Christian church. Spiritual bypass was
| alive and well. The notion of "carrying one's cross" was
| more about finding virtue in suffering than it was about
| actually gaining practical tools to navigate life's
| difficulties or learning how to process them in a
| psychologically healthy way.
|
| > _This isn 't supposed to happen, and in fact can be
| considered sinful_
|
| And this highlights the problem with turning to religion as
| a primary solution for dealing with life's major emotional
| challenges. If you don't happen to find the " _true_ "
| Christians, you're out of luck. There's a wide variety of
| opinions and interpretations.
|
| Unfortunately not a single one of the dozen or so churches
| my family bounced around while I was growing up had an
| enlightened view of this.
|
| And I still have fundamental problems with "bearing one's
| cross" (the "correct" way) in terms of the actual
| psychological benefit. It personalizes things that happen
| in life that need not be personalized. Instead of
| establishing a rational reason for acceptance that can
| actually bring psychological freedom, it attaches the idea
| that it's your lot in life to suffer these specific things,
| which is a deeply harmful idea psychologically in the long
| run.
|
| e.g. if I do something that I later regret deeply, the
| church says "you fucked up, and now you must feel bad about
| it". A more reasonable mindset is to use the regret as a
| signal that change is needed. To choose how to live
| differently in the future based on that regret. And then to
| leave that regret behind since the past can't be undone.
| croes wrote:
| Does it? Or is it just shifting responsibility?
|
| It's a kind of narcissistic wound to accept that we make bad
| decisions.
|
| To learn to let go such regret is a big achievement for our
| further life.
| dilap wrote:
| A related mental trick I use to move on from some mistake I'm
| stuck on is to think the following:
|
| In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be
| regretting that instead of this. So I should focus on the present
| and the future, and try to identify and avoid that mistake (pick
| a different future!), rather than obsessing over the past.
|
| It's incredibly obvious, of course, but going through the
| exercise of thinking it out explicitly really helps.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be
| regretting that instead of this.
|
| Why not regret all of them? I'm yet to see my capacity for
| regrets get saturated
| tomcam wrote:
| This was Mark Twain-level funny
| tough wrote:
| Attention is the real bottleneck
| adammarples wrote:
| Our brains are machines for trying to avoid future mistakes,
| and doubling down on focusing on them isn't ideal. It's good
| that at least you're not also tying them to the past, which is
| doomed, but that's not what the future has to be. It's better
| not to focus on fears and let the possibility of the future
| open up instead.
| anthonyrstevens wrote:
| I think I could make a good argument that our brains are
| machines for _repeating_ past mistakes. Interesting to think
| about the opposite sides of the argument.
| kevindamm wrote:
| I've got a pretty solid case that it's both
| layer8 wrote:
| The biological purpose of regretting past actions is to avoid
| them in the future, though.
| anthonyrstevens wrote:
| Are we sure about that?
| layer8 wrote:
| Do you have an alternative explanation to offer?
| unshavedyak wrote:
| My issue is i regret rather non-issues. Which makes it
| difficult to avoid because A. they're often small, stupid
| things that are difficult to avoid imo. And B. i'm sure i'd
| just find something else. The small things are objectively not
| reasons to be obsessing and regretting.. yet i do. So i think
| it's a problem in my frame of mind, not the action in focus.
| Fin_Code wrote:
| Regret comes from a sense of loss or embarrassment typically. You
| missed a job, a partner and opportunity. You flubbed a social
| event, you missed a signal or you messed up at work.
|
| Each has a strategy to deal with specifically. Typical ways are
| gratitude, acceptance, understanding and more. You just need to
| change your perspective on the event and it should minimize its
| impact. Extreme events excluded.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I just rewatched _Drive My Car_. The director has a new movie
| that 's quite different, but if you want to watch a deep
| exploration of grief and regret, that's your movie.
|
| Now I wish I knew _Uncle Vanya_ better.
| roninorder wrote:
| Haven't watched Drive My Car yet, but just from the trailer it
| looks like it's exploring loss and grief rather than the most
| poignant type of regret of losing something due to own action
| (or inaction). I.e. having agency and being directly
| responsible for loss.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'd say watch it and then decide. No spoilers.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a
| huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you
| could do that back then!) and would have basically won the
| lottery if I hadn't basically just given it away to a friend of
| mine who was trying to do something (Which ended up being getting
| scammed by that butterfly labs scheme)... That friend ended up
| probably one of the most anxious people I have ever seen, ended
| up threatening to hit me over some petty shit, doesn't talk to me
| nor a bunch of our old mutual friends because he dragged them
| into the scam, and all this drama that I probably would have been
| subject to in some way had I been the one to blow that cash. Hell
| - I likely would have been dead if I was in my early 20s with
| that much money. Reflecting on who I am now vs who I would have
| been if I had done the "less regrettable" thing and been way too
| rich way too fast is fine, I think I just paid for having
| everything in life put into perspective and that's invaluable.
| I'm doing fine these days which is good enough for me.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Me and a friend also mined a ton of bitcoin around the same
| time on his PC. We forgot about the whole thing when it turned
| out that you couldn't do anything useful with it. I wonder if
| the keys are still somewhere on a disk on landfill.
| paulpauper wrote:
| this is why I never thrown out old computers or wipe out
| disks. They just sit around. Never know when you might need
| something on there
| geor9e wrote:
| That's what I used to say, until I ran out of spare
| bedrooms, and the tunnel of carefully stacked old computers
| collapsed on me. Luckily I escaped and was able to buy a 32
| TB NAS which is now 1% full of early 2000s disk images. Now
| it's just me, a NAS, and a mattress on the floor. I'm never
| going back.
| i_am_a_squirrel wrote:
| lol
| gosub100 wrote:
| /r/neckbeardNests
| kevindamm wrote:
| but what do you do for heating now?
| paulpauper wrote:
| how much is huge? thousands? I know it was easy back then to
| generate btc. You probably would have sold them at $10 or
| something ,congratulated yourself, and then felt massive regret
| anyway
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| This was my experience with litecoin. I bought some back in
| the day when it was < $1 from my minimum wage job and sold it
| all when it "skyrocketed" to somewhere above $1. In the end I
| made a few thousand dollars and thought pretty good about it.
| Only a couple years later when it touched (if I recall
| correctly) close to $300 did I have regrets. Oh well.
| milesvp wrote:
| This is partly why I don't feel bad about not buying
| bitcoin at $12. I did the math, and given my general
| investing strategies, where I rebalance periodically, I
| doubt I'd have made more than couple hundred thousand. It's
| real money, but not the millions I once imagined I'd have
| made. Also, it felt risky at the time, so the money I might
| have lost would have been real to me at the time.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I never even saw it as a speculative investment. I had my
| eye on it at the same $12/coin price and thought "this is
| great, it will be the ultimate PayPal killer for online
| shopping". This was at the height of PayPals evil ages
| where they were enabling scammers and shutting down and
| blocking legitimate businesses. 12 years later PayPal has
| gotten a lot better, less relevant, and almost no one
| uses BTC for online retail shopping.
| digging wrote:
| There's almost no way to make really good decisions with
| crypto anyway. The people who held on to early gains often
| think themselves geniuses but they were acting entirely on
| unfounded faith, like everyone else.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _easy back then to generate btc_
|
| Was it? I ran a mining program for weeks with no results and
| finally deleted it because a) it was trashing my CPU the
| whole time and b) I was worried that Ihad been fooled and it
| was using my machine as a node for distributing CSAM or
| something.
| petercooper wrote:
| That's how I rationalize it. I had an early Bitcoin
| opportunity I missed out on but realized I'd have cashed out
| the second I could make a quick $1000 or something. Now my
| strategy with stuff like that is to keep a tiny "FOMO" amount
| even after selling the majority.
| kristianp wrote:
| I'm guessing the reward was 50btc per block back then, so
| they might have mined a single or double digit number of
| blocks, so somewhere between 50 and 4999 btc.
| jajko wrote:
| A _very_ healthy life perspective, one you can 't just get
| without walking the proverbial line and looking back. At the
| end, probably the best path for you, but greed can be a
| powerful emotion even for strongest personalities.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| I don't mean to pry but I often see people make statements
| along the lines of 'if Id been rich when I was younger I
| wouldve died' and I never quite get it. Just drugs stuff?
| paulpauper wrote:
| money leading to drugs, riskier behavior, suicide, etc.
| retrac wrote:
| The story of lottery winners is sometimes an unhappy one. A
| windfall can ruin relationships, lead to a loss of normalcy,
| make one a target for crime, and as you say, enable vices.
| akira2501 wrote:
| If you win the lottery put it in a living trust. If you
| don't have experience managing large sums of cash the
| likelihood of you navigating that challenge correctly is
| basically zero.
| johnrob wrote:
| Living a healthy life requires discipline and a certain
| amount of humility. Both of those traits are hard to maintain
| after a financial windfall IMO.
| copperx wrote:
| Elon Musk is living proof of this.
| getlawgdon wrote:
| I feel compelled to ask: what side of that outcome do you
| think Musk exemplifies?
| matwood wrote:
| Early 20s is when people peak at risk taking behavior. Add a
| large amount of money into the mix and the types of risks can
| go way up. Think go from sitting around playing beer pong, to
| doing coke and speeding around in a Ferrari.
|
| Even later in life, large amounts of money can cause people
| to do stupid things (see many famous people), but maturity
| has a chance then.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| I dunno you can always drink beer and speed around in a
| Ford Fiesta. Irresponsibly is free.
| fordfastlane wrote:
| Sure but that's has a somewhat less consistent feedback
| loop..
|
| When I was new to driving I tended to drive around the
| ex-highways in the outer burbs and end up in little drag
| races at each light in the beater I could afford.. One
| time I looked over at the guy with the aggressively
| gunning the engine in his VW rabbit(?) and realized how
| utterly sad that was.
|
| Plenty of Ferrari drivers, when they get negative
| feedback, probably get feedback that seems cool to rebel
| against instead of people exhibiting utter shame of
| association.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| You can drink a lot more beer if you don't have to show
| up for work.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| I think that's what it is. Unemployment, and especially a
| lack of opportunities, can be dangerous whether it's
| because there are no available jobs where you are or it's
| because you made 20m in bitcoin when you were 22 and
| don't know what to do with it.
| freestyle24147 wrote:
| I have no idea. Likely just a combination of complete
| hyperbole and extrapolating a few poor decisions when young.
| juliangoldsmith wrote:
| The BFL scam was where they were mining on equipment before
| sending it out, right? It's too bad they went that way. I
| bought two BFL Jalapenos with BTC I'd mined, and the hardware
| was pretty nice.
| paulpauper wrote:
| dusty circuit boards, broken hardware, delayed shipments,
| taking money and delivering nothing. The equipment would be
| pre-used and then delivered late, when it was much less
| useful due to the BTC difficulty increase.
| teekert wrote:
| Reminds me of _" Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom"_ by Ted
| Chiang. It's part of his 2019 collection _Exhalation: Stories_.
|
| In this story, people use a device called a *Prism*, which
| allows them to communicate with alternate versions of
| themselves in different quantum realities. The Prisms create a
| split in reality when activated, connecting two timelines that
| diverge from the moment the device is used. People can talk to
| their alternate selves in these parallel universes, and this
| communication brings up complex philosophical questions about
| free will, decision-making, and identity.
|
| Chiang explores the emotional and ethical implications of
| interacting with alternate versions of one's life, focusing on
| how people cope with the knowledge of the different paths their
| lives might have taken.
|
| -> thanx Chat.
| namaria wrote:
| Has the overbearing tone of painfully detailed world building
| with very little narrative power I've come to expect from
| Chiang. Guy has cool ideas but really likes to describe how
| cool his ideas are in detriment of telling a compelling
| story.
| boogieknite wrote:
| Study was a bit silly. Losing $10 in a game of chance is one type
| of regret but real regret is normally several shades darker, or
| at least more embarrassing. Could make an anecdotal argument that
| losing a small stakes game of chance is one of the easiest levels
| of regret to move on from. Anyone whos seen a casino on tv could
| tell you this. (EMPHASIS: SMALL STAKES. Yes, gambling at advanced
| levels is as dark as anything i can conjure.)
|
| The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable
| depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the
| intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to
| myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with
| regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of
| it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move
| on without a mental breakdown.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable
| depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the
| intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to
| myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with
| regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of
| it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move
| on without a mental breakdown.
|
| Thanks, I didn't want to watch that movie because even though I
| was interested by the setting I was not interested in the drama
| (and headlines I read in my feeds made it clear it was about
| drama). But your comment makes me reconsider.
|
| Yeah, regrets like not telling "I love you" or telling it or
| "let's wait a bit before becoming parents" or "let's go for
| this career" or "don't call that friend back", etc. Those
| regrets.
|
| Try not to make up too many regrets, people.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Totally agree. For the 'Portfolio' strategy to be effective you
| need all the bets to be of a comparable size. If I place 20 $1
| bets and 1 $10,000 bet, winning the $1 ones is going to be cold
| comfort to losing the $10,000 one.
|
| Similarly if I regret a 10 year relationship that ends in
| divorce, something like finding a great new restaurant isn't
| going to even that out.
| jl6 wrote:
| It's not obvious to me why this experiment induced regret
| specifically. Are we sure the participants didn't feel some other
| emotion like annoyance at losing?
| zackmorris wrote:
| My whole life is regret and I found the article very insightful.
| I heard a religious quote that I wish I could remember: it's
| better to earn gold along the way by investing in relationships
| than to bet it all on a gold mine.
|
| As a hacker trying to win the internet lottery since.. 1992-ish,
| I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've
| been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's like
| flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which feels
| like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent. My best years
| were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore,
| and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage. I
| only have the smallest bandwidth now to get anything at all done,
| and 90% of that is a waste of time due to conceptual flaws in
| languages, frameworks, operating systems, hardware, etc. In a
| very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning,
| but I chose poorly or lost, so now it's too expensive to get back
| the sunk cost that I've invested. Making it ever-harder to keep
| going. Sometimes it feels like regret is all I have.
|
| Unfortunately the winners usually don't have this experience.
| They don't have the gumption to lose for a lifetime. So they
| don't go through the same healing and growth process. Vanishingly
| few wealthy people can step back and use their money for social
| wellness altruistically.
|
| Meanwhile some of us stumble onto concepts like duality and see
| through the matrix. We grok that there's no way to opt out of
| reincarnation. Then we look around and wonder why everyone is
| acting so strangely, having strong attachments to materialism in
| the 3D. The more we have, the more we cling to our ego and
| accomplishments, eventually living in fear of losing it all.
| While the people with nothing are more likely to lose their risk
| aversion and live in service to others.
|
| Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-
| based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality.
| Which works out well for the rich, while the poor suffer under
| systems of control they have little say in.
|
| Zen Buddhism and Taoism touch on the idea that life is suffering,
| and suffering comes from attachments. So something that helps me
| is to go into situations knowing that I'll likely fail, but
| trying anyway, without expectation of outcome or regret.
|
| So that one day if/when the win comes, I don't waste it like so
| many others. And maybe, just maybe, we can change the world.
| roninorder wrote:
| I am just a stranger on the Internet, so I apologize in advance
| if my comments/questions are irrelevant.
|
| > In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the
| beginning, but I chose poorly or lost
|
| Specifically in relation to picking up technologies. Unless you
| are working on something highly specialized, I am not sure your
| situation calls for such desperation. Learning new languages is
| not hard (as you are aware, as far as I can tell), and
| switching to a more agile stack like e.g. React/JavaScript
| could unlock new opportunities, considering how in demand it is
| across the industry.
|
| > We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation.
|
| Hm. That's a personal belief, right? It seems like you are
| convinced in it as a fact of life, and that might not be the
| most change encouraging strategy. Similar to fatalism in a
| sense.
|
| > Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a
| fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based
| reality.
|
| You are romanticizing the poor. Certain societies have more
| family and community oriented lifestyles. Not because they are
| poor but because they have a cultural predisposition and a
| tradition. Poverty is not full of love, financial abundance is
| not full of fear.
| golly_ned wrote:
| > My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody
| even uses anymore
|
| Strange -- I'm actively considering learning C++ to help with
| CUDA programming for ML.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've
| been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's
| like flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which
| feels like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent.
|
| But it's not. It's more like playing the lottery over and over.
| The chance of succeeding even once is pretty low.
|
| > My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody
| even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't
| provide enough leverage.
|
| Bit of an odd choice. Not only is C++ still being used, as far
| as I know, but even if it weren't: If you know C++, you know C,
| and that is definitely very relevant. If you know C, you have
| vastly more low-level knowledge than the average programmer
| nowadays. C is not my favorite language by far (I like rust, or
| Haskell, depending), but just being proficient in it means I
| can program a _lot_ of different things.
|
| Anyway, to the rest of your point: I never wanted to get rich
| or anything like that, I always just did what interested me on
| a technical level. I fared very well with that.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Somewhat connected to the approach proposed in this article is
| something I've found that really helps when I've taken a hit:
|
| Reframe the loss as a learning experience that will save you much
| more in the long term.
|
| Example: You can read and listen to all the advice in the world,
| say, about being careful who you lend money to, but when you get
| stung for $100 by a "friend" that is going to register very, very
| much more strongly and will possibly save you $1000s in the
| future as your antenna will be much more effective.
|
| It isn't something that can always be used but being able to see
| seemingly painful hits as cheap lessons can be quite empowering.
| jere wrote:
| What people experienced during a trivial, 1 hour study doesn't
| really compare to regret over decades of someones life.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| The best advice I've read about avoiding regrets was in "A Guide
| to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" by William B.
| Irvine. William B. Irvine has an entire chapter dedicated to it
| titled; Fatalism. The basic approach of the Stoics was that the
| past (and present) should be viewed fatalistically; fate would
| have it so, and therefore there is no rational (again a key word
| for the Stoics) reason to regret this or that. Have you spent
| years coming to one realization or another? Lived too long in one
| place? Worked too long in the same workplace? It was fated to
| take so long. The same goes for the present; enjoy it because you
| can't change it. The future, on the other hand, you must
| influence to the extent you can.
|
| William B. Irvine starts chapter six with:
|
| > "ONE WAY TO PRESERVE our tranquility, the Stoics thought, is to
| take a fatalistic attitude toward the things that happen to us.
| According to Seneca, we should offer ourselves to fate, inasmuch
| as "it is a great consolation that it is together with the
| universe we are swept along."
| tomcam wrote:
| My wife grew up in the Cultural Revolution. I grew up in an
| unsafe and disordered environment. When I made peak money we
| spent a lot on awesome experiences, then saved a good chunk.
| Instead of making payments on a house in the kind of enclave
| where pro athletes lived, we paid cash in a FAANG neighborhood.
| Both of us have zero expectations about the future. We have no
| debt and I retired comfortably but not too lavishly. Our
| farmhouse is not beautiful but we can afford a good health
| plan.
|
| We both understood sunk costs from the beginning. We know
| governments love to take things. Of course we could have saved
| more. But the people I grew up with are dead or homeless
| addicts. Many of the people she grew up with were destroyed or
| disappeared by the government. If catastrophe strikes, and we
| have to move to a shoebox outside of Cleveland, that's what
| we'll do.
|
| Fatalism has worked out well for us. We are exceptionally
| fortunate to think congruently on those matters.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Fatalism has worked out well for us.
|
| Why didn't she stay in China ? Why did you leave that unsafe
| and disordered environment ?
| tomcam wrote:
| She had no choice. She and many of her peers were sent here
| to work. At least half of them, wife included, defected. I
| left home young because I would have killed myself
| otherwise.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I almost wrote this:
|
| > I disagree. The best thing to do to avoid regrets is to act,
| to take the step forward. Not to resign ourselves and diminish
| ourselves hoping to soften the nastiness the world is sending
| us.
|
| > Stoicism is good when you are being tortured (hello John
| McCain), when you are in the final stage of incurable illness,
| when you are a slave (hello Epictetus edit: oops, I meant
| Epictus) and have no agency.
|
| But upon re-reading the advice is about the past, not the
| future and it's not an endorsement of the whole of stoicism and
| I think I could agree with it. I just don't follow through with
| the whole Stoic ethos.
|
| Especially in these days and age where it's being promoted by
| ex-marketing executives feeding off of people who are lost.
| It's Tony Robbins's exploitation of people in bad places all
| over again. It's mindfulness meditation training for employees
| instead of raising wages and getting rid of monthly quotas.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > when you are a slave (hello Seneca) and have no agency.
|
| It seemed to serve Marcus Aurelius (hello Emperor) quite
| well. Stoicism is strongly tied to duty, to ones self, to
| ones family, and to ones nation.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| (oops, I meant Epictetus)
| locallost wrote:
| It sounds to me like you convince yourself there was no other
| way. It's an interesting dilemma - lie to yourself that it was
| fate and live a happy life, or torture yourself with the
| consequences of the truth.
|
| I like the advice of the article better - approach every
| decision knowing not all of them will work out. It's what I
| ended up in the last couple years and it has worked ot out for
| me. Fear of failure can paralyze you and this will cause even
| more regrets. The advice doesn't help with old regrets though -
| for this it boils down to, for me: dwell and die slowly or
| forgive yourself for making a mistake and move on with your
| life. Can't change the past, but you can change the future.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I realized in my late 30s that I have almost no sense of dread
| when I think back on all of the cringey or embarrassing things
| I've done.
|
| I think this was a huge super power for me early in my career. I
| embarrassed myself over and over again and didn't care or even
| think about it. Right back at it the next day.
| tonymet wrote:
| can you explain the part about your success?
| nineplay wrote:
| I try to follow a 'butterfly flaps its wings' mindset. In the alt
| universe where I had done the 'right' thing, other tragedies
| might have befallen me.
|
| In the alt universe where I aced the interview and gotten my
| dream job, I might have died in a car crash.
|
| In the alt universe where I didn't say something stupid and
| alienate a friend, my husband might have been stricken by cancer.
|
| We just don't know and can't know. Every night, whatever
| happened, I try to feel a moment of gratitude. My family is here
| and secure and happy and that is not true of everyone and not to
| be taken for granted.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Regret, by definition, comes too late; Say what you mean.
| Bear witness. Iterate.
|
| https://reactormag.com/sonnet-against-entropy/
| dsizzle wrote:
| https://archive.is/GazXf
| more_corn wrote:
| tl;dr Focus forward. Backward is the direction of blame, forward
| is the direction of improvement.
|
| "Boy that sucked, I'm sure gunna remember not to do that again"
| Read the SRE book on blameless postmortems for more blindingly
| obvious and wildly underused psychological and institutional
| hacks.
| maverwa wrote:
| Curious. I think this applies less to me than I had hoped. I
| don't feel regrets over these ,,you win some, you loose some"
| coin toss decisions. Looking back, I clearly made avoidable
| mistakes but they where the obvious one (for me, back then, in
| that context) and I can clearly learn from them. But the ones I
| truly regret don't fit in that scheme for me. They are just pure
| loss, no reasoning whatsoever, just stupid. Most of them
| socially. Not finishing my bachelor but instead canceling and
| going to work due to financial pressure I can deal with easily. I
| can ,,sell that" to myself. Threading people poorly and loosing
| good friends that? No way I'm ever forgiving myself that. But
| these don't fit in that ,,portfolio" framework. They where just
| stupid decision. I still learn from that and know what to work
| on. But I cannot reason them away.
| lionelholt wrote:
| "For some, regret might be slow-brewing indecision that amounts
| to loss, like not having children."
|
| Or ... having children!
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