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Comment by bennyelv | Hacker News Reader

The feeling of regret about a past decision is an odd one to me.

It's based on the premise that you know with some certainty what would have happened had you taken the opposite choice. That premise is false, you have no idea what would have happened if you had done things differently. Your life could be terrible, your life could be better. You have no way of knowing.

I believe the best treatment for it is to make sure you find satisfaction in your current situation. If you have that, then you never regret previous decisions. At least that's how it works for me!

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You never have no way of knowing anything. Cogito ergo sum and maybe we’re just a brain in a vat. But in the mean time we can make pretty good estimations, and saying “I expect a significantly better life with P above some threshold and error margin within some bounds” is a meaningful statement. Even in the face of nothing ever being certain.

You allude to it here:

> It's based on the premise that you know with some certainty what would have happened had you taken the opposite choice. That premise is false, you have no idea what would have happened if you had done things differently.

It isn’t false, note the “some”. You can have some certainty about hypotheticals. Experience and pattern matching are powerful tools.

But don’t let that get in the way of the exalted and commendable goal of accepting the past for what it is :)

Fair enough - and I agree with your argument. But it begs the question, if you know that the better life was within your grasp with expectation P then why did you not make the opposite decision?

Maybe you know things now that you didn't know when you made the decision. Or the circumstances which you hoped wouldn't come true as a result of your decision did come true so you got the lower probability sub-optimal outcome rather than a better one. Or maybe future you is different to past you and has different priorities which you didn't predict.

Either way, you can only make decisions on the information you have and with the judgement mechanisms you have learnt at that time.

With that in mind, regretting a well thought out decision that you now think was sub-optimal still seems odd to me!

Logically, you could be completely correct. Had I taken the other path, I may well be sitting here today saying "I massively regret not giving myself enough space to achieve".

And you're right, finding satisfaction on your chosen path is really the only way to deal with these types of emotions.

But all that being said, I'll fight tooth and nail to stop my kids from making the same mistake I did.

How do you know they were mistakes?

You believe they were mistakes now, with hindsight, for your life, but how do you know whether the same choices that you think were bad for you, might be wonderful for your kids?

I think of it like this: we all have many possible paths to take in life. But we only travel one.

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