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“I spent too much time trying to meet others’ idea of normal. Accept yourself, love your neighbor, and make each day a special memory.”
Nonbinary, 62, Utah
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“My biggest regret is not using my time as a stay-at-home mom to really teach my children about their relationship with God and Jesus Christ. I could have used my time with them better to help them develop and strengthen their faith, which in turn would have given them the best foundation to succeed in life.”
Female, 54, Minnesota
5.
Regret on the Surface
“my body is NOT a temple it’s a STORAGE UNIT for my REGRETS.”
@ElyKreimendahl, Twitter, 2020
What do people regret?
That’s a question that pollsters and professors have been asking since the middle of the twentieth century. In 1949, for instance, George Gallup, founder of the American Institute of Public Opinion, surveyed U.S. citizens about what they considered to be the biggest mistake of their lives. The number one answer was a resounding “Don’t know.”
Four years later, Gallup returned with what is likely the first polling question directly about regret. “Generally speaking,” his team asked in 1953, “if you could live your life over again, would you live it in much the same way as you have, or would you live it differently?” A majority of Americans, as you see from the headline on the following page, said they wouldn’t change a thing.
This discomfort with admitting and enumerating hardship makes sense. Think about life in 1953. World War II lingered in the public memory. The United Kingdom, with a newly crowned twenty-seven-year-old queen, was still rationing food. Japan and much of Europe were digging out of devastation. It was the year Joseph Stalin died, the Korean War ended, and the first polio vaccine was developed. With the exterior world so fraught, interior contemplation might have felt indulgent. Navel-gazing was still a few years from becoming a national pastime.
Yet peeking through the unease was a theme that researchers would slowly come to endorse. In the 1949 poll, the runner-up to “Don’t know” for biggest mistake was “Didn’t get enough education.” In the 1953 poll, among those who had regrets, the top choice, selected by 15 percent of the sample, was “Get more education.” That, too, makes sense. In 1953, just 6 percent of the U.S. population had attended four or more years of college. More than half of Americans had not completed high school.[1] Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court case that declared segregated public schools a violation of the Constitution, was still a year away. More Americans were beginning to imagine the possibilities of education in the future, which perhaps meant that more regretted not having or pursuing those possibilities in the past. By 1965, when Gallup conducted a poll for Look magazine about what Americans would do differently if they had a chance to relive their lives, 43 percent chose “Get more education,” nearly three times what respondents said eight years earlier.[2]
Over the ensuing decades, pollsters became less interested in regret, but academics assumed the mantle. In the 1980s, Janet Landman and Jean Manis of the University of Michigan examined the regrets of a collection of both female undergraduates and adult women who’d visited the university’s career center. The top regrets of each group landed squarely in the realm of education. For the older women, If Only thoughts typically involved curtailing their studies too early.[3] In 1989, Arlene Metha and Richard Kinnier of Arizona State University surveyed the major regrets of women in three age cohorts—those in their twenties, people between ages thirty-five and fifty-five, and those sixty-four and older. Across all three groups, the top regret they chose was “I would have taken my education more seriously and worked harder on it.”?[4] A different set of Arizona State researchers surveyed community college students a few years later and found similar results. “Educational/academic” regrets were most frequent.[5] In 1992, Mary Kay DeGenova, a family studies scholar, surveyed retired people and found that among the domains of friends, family, work, education, religion, leisure, and health, the most common regret was education.[6]
On it went. At Cornell University, Victoria Medvec and Thomas Gilovich, who conducted the famous Olympic medal study I described in Chapter 3, in 1994 asked an assortment of people about their regrets. Education—both “missed educational opportunities” and “bad educational choice”—came out on top. (Personal relationships—“missed romantic opportunity” and “unwise romantic adventure”—finished next.)?[7] The following year, Medvec and Gilovich joined Nina Hattiangadi to study the regrets of seventy-somethings who as children had been identified as high-IQ prodigies. Once again, education topped their list—including regrets about wasting time in college, choosing the wrong field of study, and not completing enough schooling.[8]
In 2005, Neal Roese and Amy Summerville decided to round up the existing research to determine with greater certainty which “domains in life produce the greatest potential for regret.” Their meta-analytic summary examined nine previous studies, including the ones I mentioned above, and established twelve categories of regret—for example, career (“If only I were a dentist”), romance (“I wish I’d married Jake instead of Edward”), and parenting (“If only I’d spent more time with my kids”). Education again came out on top. Thirty-two percent of the 3,041 participants in the studies they analyzed selected it as their prime regret.
Most common regrets (2005)
SOURCE: Roese, Neal J., and Amy Summerville. “What we regret most . . . and why.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31, no. 9 (2005): 1273–1285.
“Education is the number one regret at least in part because in contemporary society, new and further education of one sort or another is available to nearly all individuals,” they concluded. If you didn’t finish college, you might be able to return. If you needed additional training or skills, the right courses might be available. If you didn’t earn a graduate degree in your twenties, maybe you can pursue one in your forties or fifties. “Opportunity breeds regret,” they wrote, and “education is open to continual modification throughout life.”[9]
Roese and Summerville titled their paper “What We Regret Most . . . and Why.” And its conclusion seemed straightforward. But this analysis didn’t settle the issue. They and other researchers soon discovered that their answer to the “what” was faulty—and that their answer to the “why” revealed something deeper than they realized.
WHAT DO PEOPLE REALLY REGRET?