More Than Living

Life with no regretsRegrets in life

Do you have any regrets in life? Are your regrets about the things you have done – or the things that you haven’t?

This week, Living’s spon­sor MORE TH>N insur­ance released details of some research they’d car­ried out with people over-​​65. This appar­ently reveals that the 60s gen­er­a­tion – the Flower Power gen­er­a­tion if you will – have lots and lots of regrets. And most of them are about things that they didn’t do when they were young – any­thing from not seeing The Beatles live when they had the chance, to not having had enough lovers or run away to travel the world.

I found this an intriguing find­ing. My own par­ents have both just turned 60 and as far as I can tell, if they have any regrets at all, it’s not about the stuff they got up to in the 60s. They appar­ently had a ball! Mean­while, I spend a fair pro­por­tion of my own life navel-​​gazing about what-​​ifs, and ima­gin­ing the altern­at­ive lives that I could be living if I’d taken a dif­fer­ent path at any number of points during my 37 years on the planet so far. This isn’t in a morbid “oh no my life is so rub­bish” way – it’s more about a need to under­stand every pos­sible con­sequence of every action I’ve ever taken. But hey, that’s just me.

I decided to do a very unscientific poll amongst family, friends, col­leagues and random acquaint­ances to see if I could spot any pat­terns in their regrets. I emailed them all (and Twittered, of course) asking them to share their regrets – or, if that was too per­sonal, to answer the ques­tion: is your biggest regret about some­thing that you did do, or some­thing that you didn’t?

Not sur­pris­ingly, most of them took the wise decision to ignore me – so I can’t provide you with any quant­it­at­ive data on this. But some of the indi­vidual responses I got back are well worth shar­ing I think. (I prom­ised not to quote anyone dir­ectly, so I’ve reduced everything to demo­graphic details to pro­tect the innocent.)

Je né regrette rien

There was a clear group of people who just don’t do regrets. This was expressed by a woman in her 20s very simply: “My biggest regret is spend­ing time wor­ry­ing about regret­ting things.”

A man in his late 30s was more elo­quent: “I could regret taking Law and Polit­ics at uni­ver­sity instead of a more excit­ing sub­ject – Vol­can­o­logy per­haps – but at the time I didn’t know any better and at the time Polit­ics was what?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​02-​​19 17:41:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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