Episode 82 - Regret Transcript
David: 0:16
Hello and welcome to Overthink.I'm Philosophy Professor David Peña-Guzmán.
Ellie: 0:21
And I'm philosophy Professor Ellie Anderson.Today we're doing an episode I've been wanting to do for an entire year: regret.
David: 0:30
One might say that you 'regret' not having done the episode earlier, Ellie.
Ellie: 0:35
Already starting with the bad jokes.Okay.Yeah let's talk about a common perspective on regret, which is that regret is a useless sentiment.The idea here is that what's done is done.There's no use crying over spillt milk.This is the view of regret that I was raised with.I don't know about you, David,but according to this perspective,regret is nothing more than a nostalgic hand ringing over the past.Maybe it's distracting us from living in the present moment, or it's serving as some kind of masochistic activity that is weirdly self-absorbed.But I actually hear this view pretty regularly from people in my life.If something goes wrong, I have a tendency to really focus on how and why it went wrong.Like I'm obsessed with figuring out who is to blame.Is it me?Is it someone else?Is it no one?Is it both of us?And if I did something wrong, I find it useful to just rest in that feeling for a little bit.And my loved ones often tell me to just move on because it's not worth litigating the past.
David: 1:31
So I, I think I'm much more like your loved ones in this regard because I
Ellie: 1:35
Maybe you are one of them in this case.
David: 1:37
I, I am one of your loved ones.Thank you, Ali.That's actually really nice to hear.
Ellie: 1:42
I don't know why I said in this case, weird.
David: 1:44
I know.I, yeah, actually, yeah.What the hell was that?I didn't even notice.No, but in, in connection to regret, I do tend to give my past self a lot of leeway in the sense that I assumed that even if things turned out terribly on account of a decision that I made in the past, I probably acted at that time according to the best judgment that I had available to me, and also there is just no guarantee that things would've been better had I made a different decision.Who knows?Maybe things would've been randomly worse had I acted otherwise.And so it does mean that I don't really, I don't lose myself in regret very regularly.
Ellie: 2:25
Even if it's like yourself of yesterday and you just made a little mistake and you know that your life probably would've gone better if you hadn't made that little mistake.
David: 2:33
Yeah, who knows what catastrophe could have happened if I had made a different decision than what I made yesterday.Although I recognize that now I'm starting to sound like a weird sociopath that just rationalizes everything that they do at every point in time, merely by appealing to the incertitude of not knowing what would've happened.
Ellie: 2:53
I, so that reminds me of this nineties movie with Gwyneth Paltrow called Sliding Doors, which follows the alternate course that her life takes, depending on whether she misses the subway or gets on it on a particular, I think it's like a morning on her way to work, right?Or her random, this random day.And the point of the movie is to show how we never know how much one tiny action will alter the course of events in a life because the two courses end up veering in completely different directions, and it's all based on whether or not she got on the subway.
David: 3:26
Yeah.Or that series what is it called?Russian Doll with the redheaded actress.What's her name from Orange is the New Black?
Ellie: 3:33
Yeah.Natasha Lyonne.Oh, is that what that's about?I never watched it far enough to know what it was about.
David: 3:39
Yeah, no, it's like whether little decisions, whether you go to the right or to the left at a party, has very different effects.And it's basically the butterfly effect, right?That's coming to the rescue here.And I would say that would be something like a metaphysical reason not to regret because you cannot really have access.Maybe it's an epistemological reason more than metaphysical.You cannot have access to what would've happened, and in thinking about the epistemology of regret, how knowledge gets baked into this equation.I wanna talk about the philosopher Paddy McQueen, who wrote an article in2017 entitled, When Should We Regret?And in this piece McQueen argues that regret most of the time is irrational because if we made a decision in the past, It's probably because we had our reasons, and from the standpoint of my present self, it's actually incoherent,he says, to evaluate my decision in the past based on information that I have now that I didn't have then.And so for McQueen, we should never regret a past action or a past behavior
if two conditions are met: 4:51
one.Was the decision rooted or grounded in who I was at that time?Did it somehow reflect my personality in the grand scheme of things?If it did, then I'm good.And the second one is, did my past self have sensible reasons that my past self could articulate at the time to justify?The course of action taken, and if the answer to this second question is a yes, then in general you should not regret the action in question.
Ellie: 5:25
So my first year in college self's dating choices, I shouldn't regret because they were definitely rooted in who I was then.I may or may not have had sensible reasons that I could articulate around them.I certainly thought I did at the time.
David: 5:39
Insensible reasons doesn't mean absolutely rational, like reasons that are beyond reproach.It just means that they had some sense and you could articulate that
Ellie: 5:49
You had your reasons.Yeah, this is a pretty stoic view and you also find a version of it in the existentialists.However, I'm looking forward to discussing today how many philosophers actually suggest that.Regret can be a very appropriate response in many contexts, cuz that's certainly where I tend to fall.Today we're talking about regret.
David: 6:12
When is regret an appropriate response to a decision from your past?
Ellie: 6:17
What is the difference between regret, remorse, and repentance?
David: 6:20
And what should we do about regret?Embrace it or minimize it?
Ellie: 6:33
So here's my first pass on regret.I think that we should regret small things that we can have a relative degree of confidence would have made our lives go better.So I'm not on board with your sliding doors butterfly effect idea, David.For instance, a few months ago, I accidentally locked my keys in the trunk of my car when I was about to drive from campus to the airport to catch a red eye for a conference.Now, the fact that I locked my keys in my car meant that I had to call AAA,wait an hour for them to arrive, let me into my car, and then I had to speed to get to the airport, which is 60miles away in order to make my red eye.I feel pretty confident that it would've been better if I had not locked my keys in my trunk and I would have been able to get to the airport in a leisurely fashion and not have to speed.Or I might regret not returning a library book on time because I now have to pay the fine.But I don't think we should regret big decisions simply because we can't confidently say that our lives would have gone better if we had made different decisions.I might not regret the kind of college essay that I wrote, which was like a terrible college essay.I'm pretty sure it's why I got waitlisted at some of the schools that I, based on my SAT scores and other metrics should have gotten into, because even though it might have been better to write a better college essay, if I had gotten into the colleges that I had been waitlisted at,I wouldn't have ended up at the college where I was, which ended up completely setting me up for the kind of career and life that I have now, even though it was technically not as prestigious a college.So my take, let's regret the small things because we can learn from them and we can accept that things would've gone better if they hadn't happened.But let's not regret the big things because we actually don't know how things would've gone if they hadn't happened.
David: 8:25
Interesting because my position is literally the inverse of that.I wanna say don't sweat the little things and spend time reflecting on regrets tied to bigger life events and life decisions.So I see things literally from the exact opposite angle.And for me, the, let's say, the wisdom of regret, especially retrospective regret, that's backwards looking, is that it actually can help us reflect upon our values and our moral priorities,and it can also help us develop a sense of humility about our decisions.Like we're not almighty gods who know everything.And yes, in the past we have messed up and we have made decisions that maybe should have gone a different way.And this is what the philosopher Justin White.Refers to as the self revelatory power of regret.He says that when we spend time reflecting on the past, especially big decisions, that mental exercise can help us clarify in the present what truly matters to us, because it gives us an opportunity to basically do an accounting of our losses and of our disappointments basically along the way.And when we do that kind of accounting, we learn something about who we were, who we are now, and who we want to be moving forward.And so for me, it's only big life decisions that are conducive to that autobiographical reflection on who I am and who I wanna be.I'm talking here about marriages,breakups, I don't know, career choices, things like that.And the reason why I think it's the big things that we should think about from the standpoint of regret is not because,oh, I know exactly what would've happened if my life had gone in a different way.But rather it's because it's in those big life decisions, in those life determining and life defining choices that we enter into the realm of moral tragedy and moral distress.Small things like forgetting your keys in your car.I don't think they, they lend themselves to that kind of moral reflection about loss and tragedy and disappointment.
Ellie: 10:40
but who wants to stay in the realm of moral tragedy and moral distress?
David: 10:44
Well, I never say stay you, you enter into the space in order to then develop some kind of hope that moving forward you will make better decisions.So I, I don't believe that you should stay in regret.
Ellie: 10:55
I guess I would see a difference,however, between actions that you have done that reveal a moral failing and for which you need to be accountable,and those that you actually regret.Because I think some of the actions of mine that have revealed moral feelings are precisely ones that I wouldn't regret.A, because I don't know how things would've gone differently, but B, because I wouldn't have learned the lessons that I needed to learn if I hadn't gone through that experience, whereas,Like me locking my keys in the trunk.That's not actually telling me anything new about myself.I already knew that I was the kind of person who's a little bit flaky about where my keys go.It's more just signaling to me, your life would've gone better if you hadn't locked your keys in the trunk.And so don't do that again.
David: 11:41
Yeah, but what's the value of that?Of just saying it would've been better not to waste time.
Ellie: 11:45
Because then I'm more likely to be vigilant in the future about not locking my keys in the trunk,whereas I can't be more vigilant in the future about what kind of college essay I write because I did that.Or when it comes to the moral failings, I do think I can be more vigilant in the future about not doing the same kinds of things that I did that revealed a moral failing.But I'm not gonna have the opportunity to make or not make that same decision again.Whereas I am gonna have the opportunity to forget, or not forget my keys...
David: 12:24
yeah.But for,
Ellie: 12:25
Anyway, go ahead.
David: 12:27
Okay, two things.One is that I think the little things yeah, you can remember, not to forget your keys, but if you forget your keys, it's often because of a small accident that you know, like you just didn't think about it.And no amount of regret will change that in relation to particular decisions or to particular events.But the kind of reflection that I have in mind is, If I reflect on, let's say I regret the way I broke up with my ex,which I do with my first partner, I don't think I, I approached that breakup in the best way, reflecting on the reasons why I feel that way and what I could have done.To make that breakup go maybe more smoothly and better and not so negative.That's the kind of moral reflection that I do think can help me move forward and change my behavior in other situations that are never going to be identical,because yeah, I'm never gonna break up with that same person again in the same way that you're never gonna write a college essay again, but we might be in situations of not necessarily of moral failing, but of moral distress where I have to make a difficult decision where I might have to hurt somebody by breaking up with them, and maybe I will approach the second time in a more ethical fashion if I have spent some serious time doing that accounting about the previous time.
Ellie: 13:50
Okay.And I think what you're saying brings up some questions around how we are defining regret relative to other similar things.That's something we're gonna talk about a little bit later, but I wanna mention for now an example of what you are talking about, or maybe it's an example of what you're talking about, maybe it's not, but I think it's relevant here.I posted on Twitter asking for people's favorite theories of regret, and somebody referred me to a scene from the film Magnolia, the Paul Thomas Anderson film, which I'd actually been meaning to watch for a really long time.And so I ended up watching it in preparation for this episode because it turns out that this scene on regret is really fascinating, and so I wanna share this with you and get your thoughts on it.There's a character in the film who is on his deathbed, and on his deathbed,he shares his biggest regret in life.In a beautiful monologue.He cheated on his first wife and as a result of cheating on his first wife they got a divorce and the son that they had together ended up having to take care of his mother,because she was diagnosed with cancer.And because she and her former husband were divorced because he cheated on her, not only did the son have to take care of the mother when he was a teenager, but also the former husband wasn't able to help take care of her.And he says that his greatest regret in life is cheating on his wife.He lost his love as a result of his actions.And this especially interesting,not only because it reveals his own loss of his love, but also the effects on the teenage son who.After the experience of caring for his mother on her deathbed, she then went on to die, becomes this awful toxically masculine guy who becomes a celebrity in the pickup artist world and says constantly really sexist things about women.He's an Andrew Tate of that period.And so you could argue that the husband's cheating on his wife had an effect on the son who then went on to become this really awful figure who has negative effects on a lot of people.
David: 16:05
Yeah and so this is what I was mentioning earlier.I cannot imagine that scene having that same effect if the guy on his deathbed was like, I regret not closing the fridge fully and letting the food rot.I know.And, but I think it is interesting,and this is something worth talking about, the fact that he is on his deathbed, because that introduces a new factor here, which is age and death.And in fact, we had at least one Overthink listener tell us when they found out that we were going to do an episode on regret that we, being you and I, Ellie, in our thirties, will only truly understand regret when we are older, because for this person there is a way in which you have a much more meaningful relationship to regret precisely when you are closer to death on account of having lived a full life with a lot of decisions under your belt.And it made me think about that.And I don't know that I entirely agree that you need to be older in order to understand regrets.
Ellie: 17:15
This is a claim I actually take pretty seriously, which is a big part of the reason that I wanted to bring up the monologue from the film Magnolia,because I feel like my perception that I should regret small things,but not large ones, is very possibly.Due to my relatively young age, in scheme of an average human lifespan, because it could just be that I don't have the requisite distance to know how certain large decisions affected my life now.And so maybe what I said about small things does apply to big things as your life gets longer.I think it's fine to say that old people understand regret better than the young.And in fact, that comment from the listener catalyzed me to ask some older people about regret as research for the episode, and all of them said that they have regrets.They, in fact, seem to take it as obvious that people have regrets as they age.And my dad said, if you don't have regrets, you haven't lived.
David: 18:14
Well, Yes.Maybe that's true.And I also take the claim very seriously.It's just that I don't think it holds true of you and I, not just you and I individually, but of people in our age bracket.So I think that you and I are old enough to understand regret because I think by the time people hit mid thirties,the majority of people have had a taste of what it means to make a life.Changing decision.That can be a decision about romance.That can be a decision about children, about career versus family.In some cases, it might even be the experience of the death of a loved one that prompts a kind of reflection about your relationship to that person when they were alive, and Of course, it's not always the case that everybody in their thirties will have had those life-changing experiences or choices, but I don't think that people at 35 are too young to know regret.That's the point that I disagree with.
Ellie: 19:15
Okay, so you're like, if you're 15,you're not old enough, but 35 you're good.There's like a threshold.
David: 19:23
There's a magic number.Yes.I think 24 and a half,24 and three quarters.And we do have a special celebration for like you're entering.You know how people used to have all these debates about the age of reason when children become rational and the agreed upon age was like seven and we need to have the age of regret.24.24.No, I actually would put it closer to 28.I would put it in the late twenties as the time when you begin to experience those larger life decisions.So,
Ellie: 19:54
was That was a dark period for me actually, and I think was probably the time, yeah.When I was struggling with that the most.So maybe, I don't know.I don't know if I buy this though.I'm not sure if we're old enough to really have the requisite distance from certain of our, life choices.We certainly don't have the same kind of distance at the old guy in Magnolia has.
David: 20:15
No, that's true.But I think what this discussion is getting at is the conditions under which regret is a reasonable reaction.I.To something lost.First of all, what sorts of things does it make sense to regret?The big ones versus the small ones, et cetera, but also at what age do you truly have a meaningful feeling of regret?Now, another question that I would add to this is how recent does the thing have to be?In order for it to make sense for me to regret it.Does that make sense?If it happened a very long time ago versus whether it happened just yesterday.
Ellie: 20:55
Yeah.Yeah I think that's precisely the question.Is that, do you have to have a certain distance in order to be able to regret something?Or is it actually better to regret things that are more recent?
David: 21:05
Earlier we were talking about distance in the sense of maturity.Are you mature enough to reflect upon it?Whereas here, I really mean temporal distance in a more literal sense.And the reason that I'm talking about this is because the philosopher John Danaher talks about this issue in an essay entitled The Wisdom of Regret and the Fallacy of Regret Minimization,where he basically says that it makes more sense to regret recent events.Rather than events that happened a long time ago, and the argument here is not really about memory.It's not, oh I can't really remember the older episode as well as I can remember the more recent one.But rather because the further back we try to reach into our own past, the more we become strangers to ourselves.So for example, it might make sense for me to regret not taking a particular job that was offered to me, let's say five years ago.And the reason that it makes sense to regret it is because I can easily relate now to who I was five years ago.I can mentally project myself, into the shoes of my past self from five years ago.And imagine how he would've felt if things had gone otherwise.But according to Danaher, it does not make sense for me to regret something that I did when I was 15 years old And the reason for that is because the David of that far back in my past,It's actually almost unintelligible,illegible to me that David is very opaque.So it's a much more speculative terrain that we are entering when we move further into the past.If I really think about it,who was I when I was 15?What did I want, what did I believe?It's so far back that I can't really make a fair guess about that.
Ellie: 23:03
This, I think speaks precisely to what I was thinking about in terms of at what point we know that our life would've gone differently and better had an action changed had we done one action over another.And I was talking about that in terms of big versus small things.But I think we could also talk about it in terms of this temporal distance.But I maybe have the opposite view following the way that our conversation has been going, which is that.If we're thinking about the big things, if it makes sense to say that we should regret those.I think it makes the most sense to say that we should regret things that we do have a certain amount of distance from.Like I'm old enough now not to regret my college application process, although like maybe I should, I have no idea.But lately I've been wondering whether I should regret my choice of dissertation topic 10 years ago because I ended up working in different directions since.But it, I think it's too early to tell whether that dissertation topic actually set me up in a good way for future work.So I'm in a position now where I'm like,maybe I'm regretting this decision,but I think time will have to tell whether I should regret that decision that I made 10 years ago or not.
David: 24:24
Yeah, and I think the difference for me is not just thinking about whether the event itself is inherently regrettable.Oh, should I not have written that college essay?Should I not have written that dissertation?And it's more about an assessment of that event in the context of who I was.At that time.And so regret is always a reflection on the self and not just on the object.And so to the extent that you're, on you're 15, like whatever, how old were you when you wrote that college essay?Like 17, 17, 18, 17 and 18year old Ellie, whom we have.Gotten to know in our podcast through the diaries that have been, that have passed through time is a very different Ellie than the one that we have before us today.And in order for you to regret it, Danaher says you would have to say that that action didn't make sense for that Ellie,but Ellie is so far back in the past, it's harder to make that claim.
Ellie: 25:43
It seems obvious to me that regret requires freedom and freedom that is conscious.Of itself as such.For instance, it doesn't make sense for me to regret being born in California because I had no control over that fact of my experience.It's only decisions that I make that I may or may not regret.And so to this extent, we're talking about freedom as being the self-conscious author of an action.It's an action that you did.That gets a particular chain of events going.It's like a, you're the author of a causal chain and in fact, we first got the idea for this episode last year because in our first Patreon event last summer, which we did in person in France, that was
David: 26:27
Yes, exactly a year ago.Yes.
Ellie: 26:30
But Trevor asked a question about our animal consciousness episode, which was like our current episode at the time, and his question was, do dogs feel regrets?David, as an animal consciousness expert,what do you think if regret requires this kind of freedom, do dogs have it?Do dogs feel regret?
David: 26:48
Yeah I do remember this question because he put me on the spot then.And now by bringing this back up,you're putting me on the spot now.
Ellie: 26:56
I gave you a year, my friend.
David: 26:58
I didn't know I had to prep for it.But I do remember saying that,that's a really tricky question because regret as an emotion or as a mental state, let's say, requires a.What is known as counterfactual thinking.In other words it requires imagining an a real scenario that stands in contrast to reality.But there is some interesting research on dogs' possible experience of guilt, for example, which is about.Feeling bad about a past action that you have taken?I feel guilty for things that I've done,and so if we are open, although the research on dog guilt is controversial,if we are open to the possibility that animals can experience guilt and they give you that guilty look,then maybe we could say that's an ex.Expression of regret because they regret having done that thing.Now, obviously, I don't think that dogs necessarily think to themselves, I hereby regret something that I freely chose to do as an autonomous free agent who sets in motion causal chains of events.Like I, I actually don't think that, but maybe there is a kind of feeling bad for the past.I don't know.
Ellie: 28:11
Yeah, I Yeah this Association of Regret with freely made decisions is one that philosopher Carolyn Price has a pretty helpful take on in her essay, the Many Flavors of Regret,great title and price notes in this piece, that there are a number of different types of regret, but what holds them all together is as follows.Regrets are responses in which the subject has acted in such a way that has deprived them of something they care about, even though they could have acted otherwise.So you acted in such a way that you were deprived of something you care about,but you could have acted differently.And the guy from Magnolia is an example, right?He could have not cheated on his wife.The key here is that you could have done differently.
David: 28:55
Yeah, and Price says that what regret allows you to do is to ultimately either remedy the wrong that came from your decision or to change your behavior moving forward.And so the guy from Magnolia obviously can't remedy the wrong because he already cheated and his wife passed away, I assume, from cancer.He may have apologized to his wife, but that, that doesn't quite prepare the situation.However, cheating on your wife and having your life fall apart should hopefully, at least help you change your behavior in the future.And we don't know if that happened in this case since this is a claim that he makes from his deathbed, right?So there presumably there is no more future there.
Ellie: 29:40
but this is super interesting to me because I really take for granted that we associate regret with these freely made decisions in which we could have acted otherwise.But to put my etymology hat on, you know I love wearing this little hat.
David: 29:56
Which you love!Yes.
Ellie: 29:59
regret actually does not intrinsically have this tie to freely made decisions.I discovered as we were looking into this topic for the episode, it actually is associated with mourning or sorrow,generally speaking, and we aren't completely sure of its origin, but Merriam Webster notes that the gret part of regret might be akin to the old Norse word grata, which means to weep.
David: 30:21
And so regret is not about freely chosen acts, it's just about weeping or grieving.That's bad.
Ellie: 30:29
Anything you would mourn or be sorrowful about?Yeah.
David: 30:33
Yeah, and I like that notion because I do think that we can express regret over the state of the world.Or over events that happened to us that we did not author.But I think this also leads us to think about the difference between regret, remorse, and repentance,which are very closely related,but not actually interchangeable.When I think about this, like R Trilogy or this, the Trinity of the, yeah.
Ellie: 31:00
The triad.
David: 31:02
Yes.regret, remorse, and repentance.I think regret, as your etymology lesson teaches us, is really a kind of feeling of sorrow in relation to something that is lost and that is currently missed.Remorse by contrast is, About feeling guilty about our own culpability based on something that we did that was wrong.So when I do something to harm somebody else, I feel remorse.I don't necessarily feel regret.It's a more intense form of regret that involves guilt.And in fact, the root for the term remorse is the Latin mordere, which means to bite.And so we use the term remorse to talk about those situations where you did something wrong and you know it, and now your conscience is biting you.Literally, it's eating you up inside.
Ellie: 31:54
Nom.nom, nom,
David: 31:55
nom.Yeah no.Getting eaten alive by your own conscience is something that doesn't quite happen in the case of regret.But it does in the case of remorse.And now finally, the third R repentance.It's a little trickier because it has a religious connotation of sinning, but I think what is essential about it is that repentance is about a public display of regret that tries to restore and to ameliorate the harm that has been done.And so it's much more tied to practice and to ritual and to trying to fix things.And I think that's why repentance is linked to penance.
Ellie: 32:35
It sounds like then we could say that at least in contemporary English,regret gets used in place of, or at the very least, as a synonym for remorse and oftentimes for repentance too, right?Because according to this taxonomy,what the guy in Magnolia is experiencing is remorse, not regret, right?
David: 32:58
That's right.
Ellie: 32:59
I don't know that I'm experiencing remorse over locking my keys in the car unless I did harm myself by doing that, but that, but I think you defined it as harming someone else.
David: 33:09
Yeah, harming others, and that's the moral quality of it.
Ellie: 33:12
Yeah, and you're absolutely right that remorse and repentance have a clearer link to moral culpability than regret does.Although I do think we've maybe changed the way that regret gets used in recent centuries and tied it more to freely authored actions.But there's this great line from Michel De Montaigne's essay on Repentance, also a recommendation from Twitter from a wonderful Montaigne scholar named Katie Chenoweth.Where Montaine says that repentance is reason's response to engaging in vice.This is fascinating to me because Montaigne says that usually the whole point of reason is to get rid of grief and sorrow, right reason, makes us more stoic in the face of suffering, makes us more peaceful and makes us more equanimous.But the weird thing about repentance is that it's actually engendered by reason.Repentance is a rational response to our engagement and vice.
David: 34:07
That, that, that's really interesting.And the key term here for Monta really is vice.It is how our reason tells us to respond when there has been a moral failure on our part.And I think that this conception of regret slash repentance is very different than how regret is conceptualized by, for example, early Confucian writers such as Confucius and Mencius,who think about regret largely in connection to circumstances which are, as we just discussed a minute ago, precisely beyond our control.And that cannot possibly fall under the concept of vice or guilt.And I'm drawing this from the work of the philosopher Michael ing, who wrote a book called The Vulnerability of Integrity in Early Confucian Thought.
Ellie: 34:59
Wait, wasn't this one recommended on Twitter too?
David: 35:01
Yes, it was.Yeah.This is the episode of David and Ellie get all of their citations from social media.
Ellie: 35:09
honestly really helpful.So thank you to all of those who helped us do our research for this episode by posting on Twitter.
David: 35:16
Yeah.And somebody recommended this book, and I found it, and I read several chapters from it.And Michael Ing says that generally regret and resentment are seen as negatives in the literature on Confucianism.They're seen as something that you have to overcome as you start your journey to actualize the Dao.But there are some key passages in Confucian texts like the Analects of Confucius, and also some writings by Mencius indicating that regret is not actually always negative,or at least there might be cases where it is a reasonable reaction.Especially in cases of moral tragedy and moral distress.So again, situations that I did not bring about by personal choice, for example,according to Confucius, achieving the Dao is something that depends on a combination of internal and external circumstances.You need to be a good person and you need to develop the right dispositions in order for you to achieve the Dao.But you also need to live in the right kind of society and you need to occupy the right position in the social order.And for Confucius, this just happens to be a position of authority, but if you accept that, that you need internal and external circumstances to cohere, you can see where things can go wrong without you being personally responsible for that.Why?Because there are many circumstances where you can be a good person and do everything in your power to develop the right dispositions that will achieve the Dao.But you cannot control the external circumstances, right?Maybe for reasons that are completely outside of your control, you just can't land the right social position.And here Confucius says that it's actually okay to express regret about those circumstances even though they have nothing to do with you.You can express regret simply about the way the world is, even though you cannot be held individually responsible for that failure.
Ellie: 37:28
And so what is the purpose of regret then?Because wouldn't it be just a waste of time?Energy if we're ringing our hands over something that's out of our control.
David: 37:36
So the question is whether there really has to be a purpose of regret necessarily, but in these cases, what happens is that independently of your choices and of your responsibility, the bottom line is that you didn't achieve the Dao.And that is inherently regrettable.It is worthy of that.What was the term weeping or deep mourning that you alluded to with the etymology.And so in his book, Ing says that in Confucianism we actually find a really fruitful notion of sorrowful regret,a kind of regret that applies whenever we fail in our search for the Dao,independently of our guilt or vice.This is something that Confucius himself expresses about his own failure to land positions of power throughout his life.So Confucius himself didn't get powerful positions and therefore didn't achieve the dowel and said that he regretted that failure.
Ellie: 38:35
He did, however, get the last laugh because he is still being talked about thousands of years later.But this sounds very different from the views of regret that we've been discussing because the modern take on regret is we've been talking about is that regret is appropriate if it serves some other purpose, such as teaching us how to behave better in the future or helping us remedy a wrong, or even the self-revelation that you mentioned earlier.Should we say maybe then that what Confucius and Mencius are giving us is a non-instrumental view of regret?Regret is not for the purpose of something else, but has its own intrinsic value.
David: 39:12
So that's a tricky question.I'm gonna say it's partly a yes and partly a no.So it is non-instrumental in the sense that some things are just inherently regrettable.And so regret is just what makes sense as a reaction to that independently of whether or not it has an instrumental value added onto it.And actually, this is what in says,allows us to understand the tragic sensibility of Confucianism, which is that it, it's a way of coming to terms with failure and tragedy at the end of life.But at the same time, there is a kind of purpose here too, because Ing says that according to Confucius, that's why he started writing philosophy.It's because he failed in finding the Dao, And so he turned to philosophy and he turned to poetry to give an account of his failure.And his goal was that maybe other people would learn.From his failure.But the tricky thing is that obviously his failure in achieving the Dao was completely ruled by external circumstances.And so what can you learn about things that are outside of your control?So it's yes and no instrumental and no non-instrumental I would say.
Ellie: 40:30
Enjoying Overthink.Please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon.We are an independent,self-supporting show.As a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs,gain access to extended episodes.And other bonus content as well as joining our community of listeners on Discord.For more, check out Overthink on patreon.com.We've established that a lot of us feel regret and that it isn't necessarily a bad thing.But you might be wondering now, what should we do when we feel regret?
David: 41:02
I read some material suggesting that we might minimize regret by drawing attention to how regret involves three different senses of the self.
Ellie: 41:11
I love a multiple self theory, so I'm really excited to hear about this.
David: 41:17
Yeah, so this one comes from psychologist Shi Davidai and Thomas Gilovich, and they basically argue that we have three different selves at work.In our everyday experience, there is our actual self who we happen to be,as a matter of fact, an ideal self,which is the one that we aspire to be.And then there is what they call an ought self.The self that other people tell me that I should become, and they say that regret is essentially an imbalance between these three different selves, but the most intense form of regret is the one that happens when there is a discrepancy between.the actual self, who I am and the ideal self, who I want to be.So when I realize that I am not the person that I want to be, that's when I'm most likely to lose myself in a pit of regret.And so the question there is what should we do when we are confronted by these gaps or these discrepancies between our actual and our ideal selves?And they argue that the way to minimize regret is by minimizing the distance between those two selves.And what does that mean?Basically it means that you either take very serious steps to become more like your ideal self.In other words, really try to become the person that you aspire to be.Put your money where your mouth is.Or you take a more realistic route and you start actually lowering the ideal so that it's more in line with what is possible for your actual self, so that you don't always feel like you're failing in connection to this aspirational self.And so it's a way of being less vulnerable to regret.
Ellie: 43:11
Okay.I like this because fear of regret is a motivating force for me in many deliberative processes.I actually had like a really cringe thing from my journal a decade ago where I was like, I try and live by the maxim: live in such a way that you will not regret the paths not taken,or just like something like that.I don't know, whatever.I said it in an overblown way,but I do think that's true.I am often thinking about I don't wanna go to the party, but I know I wouldn't regret it if I did, and I might regret it if I didn't go to the party just because like I'm missing out on fun stuff or whatever.I might have had an experience at the party that I'm pretty guaranteed not to have if I'm just like sitting on my couch.So I usually favor when I'm thinking about what to do, I usually favor action over inaction when there is like a relevant distinction between those two.And largely because fear of regret is motivating me and I, you might think too about the genre of poems that are carpe diem poems most often written in the voice of a man trying to convince a woman to sleep with him.So maybe that's more of the odd self than the actual versus ideal self.But I think that genre of poems is also saying, Yolo!Do this thing because you don't know how long you're gonna live.
David: 44:33
Yeah.And it's funny that you mentioned this action over in action distinction because one of the essays that I mentioned earlier, the one by John Danaher on regret, mentions this dynamic noting that there is a lot of psychological evidence that people regret in action much more than they do action.But he also goes in a slightly different direction because he doesn't believe that we should be trying to minimize.Our regrets at all.In fact, he takes the opposite position.He thinks that it's a fallacy to constantly try to live according to that maxim that you said, Ellie, live so as to not have any regrets whatsoever.Which is a weirdly Kantian formulation, right?
Ellie: 45:14
I was for sure reading Kant at the time.
David: 45:17
Which goes to my earlier point, that our past selves are largely inaccessible to us.They don't make sense to us.
Ellie: 45:22
Yeah.
David: 45:22
And we don't know them.They're strangers.
Ellie: 45:24
Oh, it does make sense to me.I just think it's cringe.
David: 45:28
But he actually takes the opposite view and he says that there is some existentially invaluableexperience that we get from moments of regret that we should not try to flee from.And if we minimize regret, we essentially miss out on its wisdom where what we should really be trying to do is learn to live with it and understand when it makes sense to regret something and the reason that he thinks we should learn to live with regret.Is first and foremost,because it is unavoidable.There will always be, and this is what we learned from Confucius, external factors that get in the way of our desires, in the way of our goals, and inevitably we're going to have regrets.Secondarily, he says,There is no ideal life.Every human life involves a ton of missed possibilities, missed opportunities, a ton of errors,in fact, an infinity we would say.And so regret, he says, is overdetermined by the facticity of human life.As soon as human existence is in place, regret will enter the scene.And so the problem is that if you have a negative conception of regret as something that you should never do, you can always get lost in an even worse form of regret,what he calls a nihilistic form of regret.Because if you're so afraid of regretting things, when it finally.Puts its claws into you.You're not gonna be able to know how to manage it, how to deal with it, and how to incorporate it into your emotional life moving forward.
Ellie: 47:10
Let alone to honor the regrets that others experience.Cause I have definitely felt that way.This goes back to something we mentioned earlier in the episode where I feel like sometimes loved ones will tell me not to regret things and just to move on.And I'm like no, I need to sit with this for a minute.Please allow me to do so.
David: 47:28
Yeah, and I think what's really good about the Danaher position is that he says then let's have a discussion about how you should regret, rather than whether or not you should be experiencing regret in the first place.
Ellie: 47:41
Okay, so how should I regret
David: 47:42
So here's what he says.He says, first and foremost,you should regret big things rather than small things.So forget about your keys, Ellie, about your keys, and start thinking about that dissertation and why you wrote it.Secondarily, he says, minimize the time that you spend regretting rather than trying to minimize regret itself.Spend little time, but make it meaningful and make it about meaningful things.And finally he says, focus on things that are more recent rather than distant because of that problem of the inherent strangeness of our past selves.So focus on your breakup from three years ago rather than on the breakup that you screwed up when you were like 14 years old.That's just spilled milk.
Ellie: 48:32
I should hope I wouldn't be,I didn't have any boyfriends when I was 14 years old, but I should hope that if I had, I wouldn't be focused on regretting that experience.So,
David: 48:42
And I should add just one little point here, which is that Danaher says that.His main worry about people who try to minimize regret is that they actually become stubborn about their choices, and they essentially develop this habit of thinking that they can never be wrong.And so there's a sense in which regret also teaches you a kind of humility about your own fallibility slash infallibility that is good for moral development.Good people spend time thinking about what they regret.
Ellie: 49:18
Okay.I love that point.I think that's so right It's like I need to let myself feel regret because I can't harbor this illusion that everything I did was right.This also relates to the just horrible trope of everything happens for a reason, which I think also licenses a rejection of regret altogether, right?And this resonates with something that comes up in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, where he says that, A self-indulgent person has no regrets because they just stand by their choice.But an incontinent person is subject to regrets, and the incontinent person is somebody who knows the good, but is unable to live up to it, whereas the self-indulgent person just like,doesn't even give a crap about the good.And so it's better.It's not ideal to be incontinent, but it's better than being self-indulgent on Aristotle's ethics, right?You're not living up to the good if you're incontinent, but you're at least recognizing that it's there.And so it's better to have regrets over ways that you've fallen short of the good than not to, because if you don't have those regrets, then that's a signal that you're probably just like,standing by a choice that was immoral.
David: 50:33
Yeah, immoral or just maybe not ideal, but the idea that you can become stubborn or self-indulgent is something that I take very seriously.At the same time, I do think that there is a risk in losing oneself in that kind of nihilistic regret, where you just start regretting everything at all times and you get lost in the past and unable to really use that to propel action in the present.And I think it's really important that we extend a little bit of grace to our past selves about decisions even when they were mistaken.So it's one thing to regret decisions that we have made, but it's another one to cuplabilize our past selves for not being, again, infinitely wise individuals.And one way of extending that grace is what, for lack of a better term, I'm gonna call counterfactual regretting.
Ellie: 51:25
Okay.An hour into recording and you're coining a philosophical term.We love to see it.
David: 51:31
Yeah.good things always come at the end in my podcast and in my articles.It's last in conclusion,here is my actual innovation.
Ellie: 51:38
I do love the ends of our podcast episodes for the most part.Anyway, go ahead.
David: 51:42
Yeah.When we think about regret, we regret choices that we actually made, right?For example, I turned down a job five years ago.If I regretted it, I'm basically regretting a choice that I really made.But I think one way of being kind to our past selves is to imagine the regrets that we would've had.If we had made the decision that we didn't make, because imagining those speculative regrets that would've happened is a way of reminding us that every decision has its pros and its cons, and it's not as if.The other decision that I didn't take would've, suddenly put me in paradise in an edenic situation without any limitations.And so for me, counterfactual regretting is reminding myself I didn't make that choice.But who knows?Maybe if I had made that other choice, I also would've had a different set of regrets.And in that other reality, I would be wishing that I had made the decision that I actually did make.And that's, I think, possible.
Ellie: 52:52
I think that's beautiful.It helps me think about my current.Ambiguity over whether or not I should regret my old dissertation topic because who knows if I had written on phenomenology, which is like what I'm working on mostly now, rather than on post-structuralism, perhaps I would lack a knowledge of post-structuralism.That was the condition for the possibility of me turning to phenomenology in the first place.
David: 53:18
Yeah, or maybe you would've ran out of energy because your dissertation burnt you in connection to this topic.Or maybe you wouldn't have applied for the same jobs and you would've had other regrets, or you would've regretted not having made a choice based on passion, but maybe.Based on pure considerations about future career advancement.So it's always possible that the world that didn't come into being would've had regrets that were avoided by the world that did come into existence.
Ellie: 53:50
And with that, we will leave you unless you are one of our Patreon subscribers.We have just changed our format from mini videos, which were usually 10 to12 minutes to now mini bonus episodes of 20 to 30 minutes that are audio only.So you can take us with you on the go and keep listening to Overthink in your car or on your walks, rather than having to be tied to a visual medium.So yeah.We'll see the patrons over there.Thank you everyone.
Outro: 54:22
We hope you enjoyed today's episode.Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify.Or wherever you listen to your podcasts.Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live Q&As and more.And thanks to those of you who already do.To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthink podcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink underscore pod.We'd like to thank our audio editor,Aaron Morgan, our production assistant,Emilio Esquivel Marquez and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.