How should you spend your life if you don’t want to end up filled with regret? The standard modern answer to this ancient question, often based on research by the psychologist Thomas Gilovich, is that we regret inaction more than action: not things we do, but things we fail to do. I’ve long been sceptical, though. Can’t you simply rephrase any decision so it fits in either box? Leaving your relationship to embark on a round-the-world adventure might be a bold case of “doing something”, or it might mean shirking the hard but rewarding task of building a lifelong partnership. Having children clearly seems like an action – unless you’re doing it solely to comply with social expectations, in which case it’s surely a matter of failing to forge your own path. And so on. Clearly, when it comes to avoiding regret, we’ll need a better rule of thumb than just “do stuff”.
Fortunately, Gilovich’s latest work, conducted with another psychologist, Shai Davidai, might just be able to provide one. Their new series of studies, which I found via the Research Digest blog, hinges on a distinction between what they call the “ideal self”, the person you’d be if you fulfilled all your goals and ambitions, and the “ought self”, the person you’d be if you met your obligations to others, and lived a morally upright life. Overwhelmingly, they found, people regret ideal-self failures – in short, not pursuing your dreams – more than ought-self failures, such as failing to visit a dying relative or cheating on a spouse. That’s not merely because everyone’s incredibly selfish, the researchers argue; it’s that we’re more likely to take action to repair ought-self failures, perhaps because they seem more urgent or shameful. You might work hard to salvage your relationship after an affair, resolve never to neglect your elderly relatives again, and suchlike. By contrast, unpursued dreams have a tendency to stay in the background, gnawing at you only quietly, until suddenly it’s too late.
Gilovich and Davidai are appropriately reticent about deriving life advice from their research, but I’m not: these findings are a powerful argument for figuring out what you truly want from life and giving it a shot, even at the risk of others’ negative judgments. Of course, the challenge is figuring out what that is. “Do what you want” risks becoming a call to impulsiveness and hedonism (and plenty of regrets, of both the ideal-self and ought-self varieties). That’s why I like the trick, with its roots in the work of Carl Jung, of flipping the question and asking not what you want from life, but what life wants from you. Looking beyond your immediate whims and desires, what’s trying to come into being through you?
I’m not sure it matters whether or not we each really have, as Jung believed, a soul with its own agenda, distinct from that of the ego, struggling to make itself heard. When faced with a big life choice, just asking the question that way can be enough to cut through the noise, to the quiet place where you already know what to do. Do that thing; you’re unlikely to regret it.
Read this: contrary to stereotype, philosophers these days tend to avoid pondering the meaning of life. But in his 2015 book A Significant Life, Todd May bucks the trend. Living meaningfully, he argues, is less a matter of what you do than how you do it.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
