This quick post was inspired by XKCD, a comic I read regularly. Here is the comic that inspired the post:
After reading this I did a quick experiment similar to what is shown in the comic. I Googled “I should have” as well as “I shouldn’t have”. As of this writing the results were as follows:
- “I shouldn’t have” returned 2,130,000 results
- “I should have” returned 33,800,000 results
What does this mean to you? To me the results speak for themselves, but the following quote captures it better than I could ever hope to:
“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” - Sydney Smith
Make today one of those days where you start to work on one of those items that you don’t want to end up on your “I should have” list.
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I think we regret things we should have done more because we don’t know the outcome. People tend to assume things would have turned out perfectly, and then we regret that lost ideal fantasy. We always think, “I should have kissed her, I missed out on a passionate love affair” not, “I should have kissed her so it could be awkward, but we’ll date for a few weeks anyways, before I realize she’s not my type”
When we already did something, we know what happened, and can deal with the (probably mundane) result better.
Chris,
That’s a good point. Regrets definitely assume ideal outcomes.
Thanks,
Scott
And: the number of things we have not done is larger than the number we did. so naturally we phantasize of what happened if we only…
It might be better to do as good was we can and accept what the result was instead of living in a ‘what if’-world
How powerful that one little comic drawing is. It just shows that very rarely we make mistakes that haunt us forever when it comes to taking action.
And I’ve done a lot of stupid things…
Yet.. not taking action- we’ll haunt us to our deathbed.
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