The Golden Mean

Imagine a decision that you can mess up at both ends of a spectrum – working too hard or not hard enough, eating too much or too little, being too risk-taking or too risk-shy. (Your humble blogger suggests that most human decisions in fact have this property: I was going to make a joke about "maybe except drinking poison", but then I remembered hormesis).

Now, imagine that more people in your circles make one mistake than the other, and live to regret it. If you go around listening to people's stories, they will all tend to point in one direction:

• "I wish I had socialized more in college instead of studying" (or studied more instead of socializing, depending on your friend-group).
• "I wish I'd spoken up for myself instead of letting things lie."
• "I wish I'd kissed him"

In one sense, you can glean useful information from these utterances: if everyone around you says they wish they'd socialized more in college, maybe you're the kind of person who ought to consider socializing more.

In another sense, these statements are not telling you which choice is better; they're just telling you which mistake is more common. It may actually be that the more-common path is less likely to lead to regret, but just from the base rates you'll hear of far more people regretting it.

I have a particular pet peeve, in this regard, for the oft-quoted line (from Lewis Carrol / Mark Twain / Other fake quote-attributees) about how we only regret the chances we didn't take, the relationships we were afraid to have, etc.

This is simply false: I have successfully filled every corner of the Do/Don't/Regret/Celebrate matrix. I have spoken up for myself and regretted it, I have not-kissed people and been glad about it, I have taken chances and felt permanently uncertain whether my life is better or worse as a result.

What is the outcome of this? I really don't know, which is probably why it isn't popular advice. I think the only thing I've never heard anyone regretting is telling all their friends to subscribe to the Atoms vs Bits newsletter.