I regret not trying in grade school. And I regret not reading books as a child or practicing guitar. I need to stop but I don’t know how to look at it. If I say it wasn’t meant to be I think of determinism. Are you the same?
1 Like
I occasionally regret the past but I try not to let it run my life. It’s hard when the past intrudes into the present, I’ll grant that. (Christmas is my worst time of year for this.)
1 Like
I regret never trying to form relationships. The closest i ever came was from not trying so i figured it worked like that.
Whenever jolly times come round, i feel the loneliness and the regret.
1 Like
You have a beautiful relationship with your camera.
1 Like
Unfortunately, I have a lot of regrets.
There was a time, a long time ago, when I was able to live my life with zero regrets, in spite of all the awful ■■■■ that had gone down in my life. I just was so happy with my current life. I figured everything that had happened in my life had brought me to where I was, enjoying a good and happy life, so there was no reason to regret anything.
My life is not as good or as happy now as it was in the mid-2000s, though. I feel the regrets now, but I try not to dwell too much on them.
I definitely regret staying in a relationship with my abusive ex for way too long, two years that were terrible much more often than good. Dirty ■■■■■ ruined relationships for me. Been eight years and I haven’t had a gf since, knowing how horrible they can be.
I regret having pined over my ex husband for 20 years. And he was a dirty, rotten @hole that didn’t deserve it.
I don’t know. I just wish things had turned out slightly different.
I regret doing hard drugs back in high school
I don’t know it’s always hard for me to regret my past. There’s lots of stuff I wish I hadn’t or had done but there are reasons for why I did it and regret disgusts me because of them, as I don’t feel my old selves deserve the judgment.
It’s an emotion I only use in the short term, in very rare cases in the medium term but I just find it not only useless and unhelpful in the long term, but downright counterproductive and the simple fact that someone engages in long term regrets is treated as a red flag akin to engaging in short term guilt by me. There is something deeply troubling about somebody feeling guilt about something they just did or regret about something they did a long time ago.
For short term guilt it’s self explanatory, to feel guilt in the short term you need to go against your morals which means your behaviour isn’t dictated by them, which raises all kinds of red flags about what exactly about you has the final say on what you do. For long term regret instead it scares me because it’s not about catching mistakes it’s about throwing blame, and the blame is thrown at literal versions of you, often acting under duress or different knowledge and development, if you can’t empathize enough with your past selves in order to not regret their actions I simply lack any faith in your ability to empathize with anything you are not currently going through and be compassionate and understanding of different perspectives, abilities, moods and life experiences.
Don’t I wish all my past selves did was train and study and eat nothing but the optimal form of nutrition, socialize and make money but that doesn’t mean I regret anything, I regret nothing. I had stuff to deal with internally and externally and a different pool of knowledge and problems, I know exactly why I acted the way I did, I followed either my morals, my ideals or my needs and I will not be disrespectful to what are essentially parts of me just because they didn’t get me what I want and aren’t all superhuman in their capacity to love or predict the future.
I have felt the most long term regret due to the onset of my first psychosis forcing me to not complete my part of a group project I had postponed. The regret was simply me not coming to terms with the fact that I had good reasons for postponing it and that the impacts of doing it straight away on my past self would have been massive if his projections of the future turned out as would have been predictable at the time and my situation didn’t soon get upended by the onset of schizophrenia. I just wanted to do what I set out to do and couldn’t anymore, I felt guilty for not doing my part and at the same time not at fault because I was literally unable to do it. I needed to find someone to blame and so I pointed at my past self for postponing the whole thing. It was unfair. Long term regret is ultimately very, very unfair to yourself and this unfairness doesn’t exactly give me faith in your ability to be fair elsewhere. Maybe you just like to act hateful, presumptuous and entitled with yourself but I don’t like it even if you just target yourself with your nastiness. You shouldn’t regret the distant past, it’s wrong.
People don’t generally judge guilt and regret by the same metrics I do so feel free to laugh me out of the room and don’t take it personally. That’s how I treat my regret and my guilt. I think short term guilt underlines a failure of catastrophic proportions in my ability to regulate my behaviour and that a mental breakdown is wholly preferable to doing whatever it is I did, and a mental breakdown is usually exactly what I am in for if I ever feel short term guilt. Thankfully saying I generally don’t doesn’t do it justice, it was to the point that years ago I mistreated my mother for no reason one evening because I was afraid I couldn’t feel guilt anymore. I had a small mental breakdown as a result of finding out I was very much capable of feeling guilt. I am very much of the idea that if my brain caused me to sin I am better served acting the headless chicken and that’s without any religious belief. I also think that lamenting the present serves the same purpose of regretting the past without the blame game and that regret is better used in the long and medium term as a tool to underline what aspects of myself I have not found the proper way to interpret and understand as opposed to serving to underline what I could have done better.
Emotions are there to serve a purpose, not to enhance or take away from the experience. As long as my emotions serve a purpose I welcome them, from frustration all the way to agony. What’s exactly the purpose of long term regret if not informing me that I have not spent enough time understanding the validity of my past behaviour within its context to the point that I’m growing the audacity to judge myself for it?
At that point what’s the difference between self-hatred and regret other than dissociation? Regret needs to be aimed at ingraining in ourselves some sort of teaching for the future, not used as an excuse to extend our ability to be judgemental to ourselves. I think there’s nothing quite the opposite of self-love as regretting the past. There is nothing wrong with lamenting the present without needing to go looking for culprits and explanations. Sometimes life just isn’t something we’ve already figured out how to deal with when it happens and that’s okay.
1 Like
If you live long enough you’ll definitely have regrets, it’s part of life
This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.