3 reasons why the “regrets of the dying” are misleading you + how to avoid that
Have you heard about the top X regrets of the dying? Very motivational right? Spend more time with close ones, take care of your self, don’t work so much etc. Makes sense, because we humans know what we want and have no biases or fallacies. Especially when on the death bed and very old… But that’s not my point. My point is that by focusing too much on the positive notion of what the regrets of the dying show us, we forget about the fact, that every human will always have some regrets.
Has anyone stopped and asked themselves:
What if the people, who have been asked about their regrets just before dying, actually managed to achieve what they regret? What if they got a second chance and then someone would ask them again?
It’s not too far fetched to say that they would have some other regrets, that someone could write a book about. And we could think – “aaaah, so if I do THIS, THEN I’ll be happy on my deathbed“.
The problems with “the regrets of the dying”
1. The grass is greener syndrome
It’s human nature to always look for more – more meaning, more experiences, more love, more sex, more money, more friends, more social approval. So no matter what these people did during their life, at the end they will always have something they regret.
One very common regret is “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
If all the people whose top dying regret was this one had a second chance and they would really live “a life true to themselves”, do you think they wouldn’t have any regrets at the end?
Yep – they would probably just say one of the other top regrets instead. I really doubt that they would say “Oh, regrets? I don’t have any, because I lived a life true to myself”. They would probably say “I wish I spent more time with my close ones” – because they lived a life true to themselves and it was too much about themselves.
The one about work? “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.“
Well, if they didn’t they would probably have much more time for other things, but not enough money. They would probably regret not being more productive. Or they would wish that they worked harder on achieving something in this world.
Key takeaway – don’t dwell too much on what the popular posts and books on this topic tell you – even if you achieve that, you will have other regrets. Do whatever makes you happy today, but know that you just can’t get to the finish line with no regrets. Our brain isn’t wired that way.
You will replace one regret with another – no matter what you end up pursuing in your life. If you focus on one thing more (like all of them wished they did), you have to take that time from somewhere else. And that something else will likely end up being one of your regrets later. We don’t have unlimited time, but nowadays, we have almost unlimited things to try, focus on.
2. Vague and “one fits all” statements
Let’s examine the first statement above. What does it actually mean? Is it measurable? When does “a life true to myself” start and “life others expect of me” end? Are we going too close towards the hedonic treadmill perhaps? Because “life true to myself” sounds inspirational, but it could also translate into “I wanted to keep eating pizza and watch movies all the time” or “I wanted to try every drug possible, whilst trying all kinds of orgies with whatever possible”. Freud would probably agree here.
From another perspective – this statement is too vague. Everyone understands it in his/her own way (which is the marketing genius of the statement) – it’s like a horoscope – everyone finds something they relate to in it.
What do others expect of us? A plethora of things – some are good for us, some are not. But a good life is a balance of these, not an absence of others expectations. Every relationship requires some sacrifice on our side – doing something the other person expects of us. You won’t have a happy relationship if you just do what you want and disregard what the other person needs. Our families expect some things from us. Most of them we can live without, some we can’t, if we want to enjoy family support another time.
3. Anchoring
All the subjects of this research were nicely anchored with the question: “What do you regret?” or “Do you regret anything?”. This means they were subconsciously influenced to think about regrets.
It’s the “Don’t think about a pink elephant” fallacy. What do you think about now? There you go. Even if they didn’t feel they had regrets, asking the question begs an answer – so they fished around and gave some answer. It might not have been as important to them, but they felt like giving one.
A close relative to anchoring is the availability heuristic – where you make quick decisions based on the information that you can think of the easiest, not on the basis of carefully selected, gathered and analysed information that might be available to you (on a second, third, fourth etc. thought). Imagine people lying on their deathbed, anchored on their regrets – what’s the easiest that comes to mind? Family, living more true to yourself, making a better world, being a better human certainly comes to mind faster, than “I wish I smoked more and enjoyed drugs and alcohol to the full”, “I wish I watched more Netflix”, “I wish I was more selfish and just did whatever the hell I wanted”. Why? Because the first ones are the typical aspirations we hear and read about everywhere. Be a better human being, contribute, family is most important…
But living a life with all its ups and downs is very different to thinking about it briefly when you’re asked a question. It’s similar to the concept of the experiencing self (I should go to the gym, but I feel like watching Netflix now) and the future self (Next week, I’ll exercise more). What you wish / think you should be doing vs what you feel like doing right now are two very different things. Remember that – you’re always ever only going to be the experiencing self, which is an average human with all our inherited fallacies and biases – so don’t make life harder on yourself by punishing your experiencing self for not being your imaginary future self (or past self in the context of this post).
Conclusion
The last two problems aren’t as important, they are just interesting to discuss, but the first one is a big one. Realising that we are wired to always seek more and hence have some regrets (because we always raise the bar and never reach the final good place). That today’s world offers too many options to choose from and we can’t try them all – there will always be some regrets.
And that’s ok – regrets of the dying are as common as farts of the dying. Whatever you do with your life, they will be there, they might not be pleasant, but everyone will have them, just like you. Learn to live with them. The ocassional regrets (and the farts unfortunately!) – and you’ll live a happier and more balanced life.
Try to eliminate any regrets and you’ll probably wish you worked less, or that you lived a life more true to yourself – because you wasted it too much on trying to eliminate some future regrets ;).
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
” we humans know what we want (sarcasm implied)” Wow, look, another anti-libertarian “true happiness” misanthrope who thinks they can run other people’s lives better than they can. How original.
Types like you should try applying that “wisdom” to yourselves as much as you do to others – and no, you clearly don’t, as evidenced by you clearly doing something you don’t really want (being a judgmental busybody and likely hypocrite), clearly being biased without a shred of self-awareness, and clearly engaging in the “greener grass” fallacy yourself – that some endorphins are better than others.
What is wrong with a pothead filling the gap of their loneliness with pot, or promiscuous sex or masturbation and fantasy for lack of a committed relationship that closeted eugenicists (who routinely and asininely project on anarcho-capitalists like myself as nazis) like you reserve for Jeff Bezos, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Kanye West? Nothing. The only reason that these activities don’t provide “true happiness” is because types like you torture people with laws and shame and isolation for it. You are the quintessential “rat park” experiment adherent; they never upgraded that one, did they? Oh wait, they did! You know what they found? When the rats had company, they didn’t feel as lonely as they did before and therefore they drank the drugged water and regular water in equal measure.
So you are sitting here lecturing about “Platonic happiness” like a typical gnostic death cultist that TIKhistory spoke about at length on his channel. If you watched that “ancap propaganda”, you might realize that your notions of “true happiness” are what led to slogans like “Arbeit Macht Frei”. He made a great video recently that will go really well in responding to your easily-anticipated response of “seek mental help” – that’s what those camps were supposed to be for types like me, so its no wonder that types like you already treated me to the modern version as a child.
I wonder if you realize just how much closer you are to Nixon than to Woodstock, the latter of which I wish I was a part of instead of the supermajority that is just like you, dragging us back to colonial Salem, New Hampshire just as “benevolently” as they burned those suspected of witchcraft. What a pawn you are of the drug war, of Agenda 21, and of countless other attempts to control and abuse humanity “for its own good”.
Now having said all of that, the cliches you railed against certainly drive me towards misanthropy with their TikTok/Facebook-quality conventional “wisdom” that you are just as guilty of espousing. But types like you – and the innocent life you don’t recognize as such in your hate and systemic violence that you mask with this facade of “happiness, peace, and love” that Orwell touched on with his Ministry names in 1984 – are what ensure I will never reach that personal asymptote.
You seem to think that just because perfection is an asymptote that by reaching the asymptote of misanthropy you’ve “evolved” to a state of perfection. Its the cliche mentality of every villain, both historic and ficticious, from Aizen to Zedong, and the one you will claim I am violating Godwin’s Law for comparing you to, as well as the old testament God himself, and all the tyrants and most of the prophets that “wrote his holy word”. And yes, you’re a misanthrope. If you don’t realize that then the tragedy of your self-righteous, just-as-vain-as-you-consider-“hedonists” perspective that you routinely force on other people while acting like you don’t as you vote and enjoy a supermajority left and right paying verbal and legal homage to you more than muslims do to Mecca each year is even further beyond hope and reason than I consider it to be already, which is why I haven’t even tried to make a polite response because I’ve heard your pedantic BS a trillion times before.
I’m a virgin, have only done CBD oil as far as illicit drugs go because the little seed of weed I ate last year could hardly count, and I help neighbors every week with food deliveries from a local church charity. Despite being an atheist, they tolerate my existence and don’t try to (overtly or self-aware-ly, at least) force their worldview on me. You should try it. Not that this fly is going to be caught with honey instead of vinegar – especially when the fly is smart enough to know what a moral trap it is.
Worshiping a child butchering demon that is equivocated with an innocent martyr is pretty tragic, but thinking that the “Eat Less Bread” posters that modern Oceania put up have any wisdom to them is even worse. I know you may call me a cliche American for this, but no matter how few favors it does me with the opposite sex, even those of the same obesity level as me or higher who I would be more than happy to flubber against(ironically when, if the genders were reversed, I could call myself a victim of “fat shaming” and have the fittest members of the opposite sex crawling all over me – a fact I can see first-hand just by walking down the street even in this small town), I’d prefer to be either fat as I am now or starving involuntarily than holding up any degree of anorexia as a virtue as is so popular these days in this MIC-brainwashed totalitarian dystopia.
Boy do I wish I didn’t click on your article when I went to look up “greener grass fallacy” to make sure I got the name right. The last thing I needed was to be exposed to your emotionally-manipulative bs that you made me even more vulnerable to with forced drugging as a child. Ironic considering I picked it as a title for a screen of my comment that I’m sharing because I don’t have the “white cis male/born-American-‘in a free country’ privilege” of a platform as prolific as your own because types like you repeatedly censored mine. Here’s the comment:
Article: “Mexico intercepts over 500 migrants in two days, some forcibly drugged”. (Yes, its the NY Post. I know, I should read CNN or Fox News, not “tabloids” that let the truth slip more often than self-awareness-devoid cultists dedicated to the “true happiness” of “Arbeit Macht Frei” like you.)
Comment: “Forcibly drugged? Sounds like the human traffickers were just giving them a taste of their destination in this “free” country.”
Yes, I know that from personal experience. Personal experience you wanton monsters would happily force on me again, which I’ve experienced isolation, unemployment, “inceldom”, and homelessness complete with forced(thanks to your glorious “true happiness-guiding” laws making sitting in one place for too long or sleeping there a crime – loitering) walking with a heavy backpack and rotting in the street that led to maggots in my feet by the time I was able to get into a shelter. All while thinking that you’re nothing like “Arbeit Macht Frei” and that I am.
And no, I’m not a fan of what “liberal cities” are doing with the homeless any more than “red states”. Each is a strawman for the other, meant to coerce them towards your cult of “true happiness”, because they can’t have good relations with their families, or get a job, a car, housing, or make love (which I’m sure you don’t think is genuine love, of course – unless its Jeff Bezos sleeping with his girlfriend on the beach or Joe Biden or Donald Trump rubbing against their wives in the White House) unless they think like you do, act like you do, and speak like you do. I’ve seen it all the time. The black homeless devout christian in and near the homeless shelters – because you sickos are the actual racists who want them to be your “token loud Baptists” in your choir, ideally without actually rewarding them “in this life” for it.
You haven’t changed a day since the chain and whip of the Antebellum South. You’ve just developed better technology – like spewing manipulative sophistry on your internet echo chamber here.
You should watch “Escape From LA”. The rant at the end of that movie about what isn’t allowed in the United States sums up your attitude quite nicely. And no, I didn’t read the rest of the article, because I can just close my eyes and have intrusive thoughts from my OCD read it for me. Types like you already drugged me into having a free psychic audiobook forced on me of all your BS! I’d be a lot happier if I could return it, which no, your “mental help” wouldn’t do the trick considering it caused it. so I’ll take a hard pass on that.
I think I’ve covered most of the “clever” thought terminating responses you could possibly send me in response to this, so I’ll focus on seeking pleasure for the rest of my day through porn, video games, and Star Trek Voyager (I get enough asinine moral grandstanding from that, thank you) instead of trying to seek “true happiness” from a bunch of hypocritical sociopaths and their lemmings caught up in cliff-seeking adventures in Ukraine and Taiwan and in trying to “be one with” omnicidal megalomania-afflicted demons they call Gods.
Oh, one more – I may have a lot of regrets thanks to your bipartisanly-as-cancerous-as-you culture war that has given us “current f***ing year”, but there’s one great thing about death that you almost assuredly failed to touch on: According to various beliefs, you either cease to exist, simply pass on to the next life, go to Heaven, or go to Hell. As in, you either you don’t remember any of them, you get a second chance to fulfill them, you are too busy being a mindless psyslave kneeling to God for eternity to remember (or more likely nonexistent as digested consciousness in his form – perfect being; you’ll be perfect when you’re one with me; remember Cell from DBZ?), or you spend an eternity in a consistent Hell instead of one that leads you on with hope while being coyly tortured by a bunch of vacuous goose-stepping hypocrites that get to live their lives at your expense while denying you a platform and having theirs show up on every news site, internet forum, and search engine.
Hey, glad you got to vent on my post, hope it served it’s purpose. I have no idea what you are talking about, but no need to explain, you didn’t get the point of what this website is about or what this article is about at all.
Have a good life 🙂
Lol you removed page breaks from comments. Way to prove you’re just an emotionally manipulative hack with no interest in actual truth.
yeah… ok. I have nothing better to do with my life than to spend time on removing page breaks from comments, whatever that means. Not sure what got your back up, as this website is intended to alleviate pressure and help people stress less about things in life, but perhaps venting through comments is what you needed. Hope it helped!