Unpursued dreams have a tendency to stay in the background, gnawing at you, until suddenly it’s too late
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.
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