If you were organising a dinner party in 19th-century Copenhagen, and wanted to be sure of having someone in the mix who'd keep the conversation upbeat, you probably wouldn't have invited Søren Kierkegaard. "Marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, and you will also regret it," wrote the Danish theologian, philosopher and notorious grumbler. In life, he observed, there are always "two possible situations: one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it. You will regret both." And you'd certainly regret having invited Kierkegaard round for dinner: what a buzz-kill.
But he had a point - not so much about regret as the anticipation of it. We approach decisions, big or small, burdened by the fear that whatever choice we make, we'll come to regret it. Sometimes this paralyses us, other times it makes us do irrational things. People who buy lottery tickets know the chance of winning is infinitesimal, but a recent study by Northumbria University shows that many keep playing out of anticipatory regret. If you use a regular set of numbers, it's intolerable to imagine how you'd feel if you missed a week and those numbers came up.
Worse, we seem predisposed to anticipate regret wrongly. Faced with some fear-inducing opportunity (should you leave your job? Ask that person out?), we habitually believe we'll regret acting more than not acting, when the opposite is true. A classic study in decision theory, a branch of economics, asks people to predict the regret felt by two investors: one who misses out on a large sum because he fails to switch his shares from company A to company B, and another who misses out on the same amount because she moves her shares away from company B to company A. Most people assume the switcher, the proactive one, will feel worse. But the psychologist Neal Roese explains in his book, If Only, "If you decide to do something and it turns out badly, research shows that it probably won't haunt you down the road. You'll reframe the failure and move on. But you will regret the things left undone." You'll regret them for longer, too, because they're "imaginatively boundless": you can lose yourself for ever in the infinite possibilities of what might have been. In other words: you know that thing you've been wondering about doing? Do it.
And don't worry about burning bridges, because the other counterintuitive finding is that irreversible decisions are regretted far less. This may be why education and career figure at the top of the list of the areas in which people (or Americans, to be precise, according to a 2005 study) harbour regret: it's fairly easy to go back to university or change jobs. Family and finances come lower: it's harder to decide, late in life, to have (or un-have) children, or become a millionaire. But if you do have regrets, Roese says, don't try to eradicate them: mild regrets serve "a necessary psychological purpose", crystallising the wisdom we need to make more enriching future choices. Never regretting anything - with apologies to Edith Piaf and Robbie Williams - may ultimately be a sign of shallowness.
