The work of Noam Chomsky helped me understand why. Until the late 1950s, most scientists believed that children were linguistic blank slates who learned language mostly by repeating adults. When children’s mimicry was accurate, they’d be praised. When it was off, they’d be corrected. And over time, this process would etch onto their little brains the circuitry of whatever language their parents spoke. The wide variety of tongues spoken around the world testified to this truth. Yes, some languages—Danish and German, for example—shared a history. But language itself lacked a single common foundation.
Beginning with a 1957 book called Syntactic Structures, Chomsky capsized these beliefs. He argued that every language was built atop a “deep structure”—a universal framework of rules lodged in the human brain.[1] When children learn to speak, they’re not simply parroting sounds. They’re activating grammatical wiring that already exists. Language wasn’t an acquired skill, Chomsky said. It was an innate capacity. A child learning to speak Vietnamese or learning to speak Croatian is not much different from a child learning to walk in Hanoi or learning to walk in Zagreb. They’re just doing what humans do. Yes, individual languages differ—but only in their “surface structures.” Hindi, Polish, and Swahili are individual variants on a single template. Underpinning them all is the same deep structure.
Chomsky’s idea revolutionized the study of linguistics and expanded our understanding of the brain and mind. He acquired a few detractors over his career, including some who rejected his left-wing politics. But his contribution to science is as undeniable as it is enduring. And one consequence of his work was the realization that among the languages of the world, similarity often conceals difference and difference often conceals similarity.
To cite one of Chomsky’s most famous examples,[2] these two English sentences seem nearly identical:
John is eager to please.
John is easy to please.
They both contain five words—a noun, followed by a verb, followed by an adjective, followed by an infinitive. Four of the words are the same; the other varies only by a few letters. But one layer down, the sentences are quite different. In the first, John is the subject. In the second, John is the object. If we restate the second sentence as “It is easy to please John,” the meaning holds. But if we restate the first sentence as “It is eager to please John,” the meaning crumbles. Their surface structures are the same, but that doesn’t tell us much, because their deep structures diverge.
Meanwhile, these two sentences seem different:
Ha-yoon went to the store.
???? ? ??? ??.
But one layer down, they’re identical—a noun phrase (Ha-yoon, ????), a verb phrase (went, ??), and a prepositional phrase (to the store, ? ???). Their surface structures differ, but their deep structures are the same.
Chomsky demonstrated that what appeared complicated and disorderly wasn’t the full story; beneath the Tower of Babel cacophony ran a common human melody.
It took me a while to figure out, but I’ve discovered that regret, too, has both a surface structure and a deep structure. What’s visible and easy to describe—the realms of life such as family, education, and work—is far less significant than a hidden architecture of human motivation and aspiration that lies beneath it.
THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF REGRET
Reading and rereading thousands of regrets is daunting; categorizing and recategorizing them even more so. But as I plowed back through the entries, I began identifying certain words and phrases that kept appearing with no noticeable correlation to the respondent’s age, location, gender, or the topic that person was describing.
“Diligent” . . . “More stable” . . . “Bad habits”
“Take a chance” . . . “Assert myself” . . . “Explore”
“Wrong” . . . “Not right” . . . “Knew I shouldn’t”
“Missed” . . . “More time” . . . “Love”
Words and phrases like these offer clues to the deep structure. And as they piled up, like thousands of dots of color in a pointillist painting, they began to take shape. The shapes span the lives of all of us and infiltrate every aspect of how we think, feel, and live. They divide into four categories of human regret.
Foundation regrets. The first deep structure category cuts across nearly all the surface categories. Many of our education, finance, and health regrets are actually different outward expressions of the same core regret: our failure to be responsible, conscientious, or prudent. Our lives require some basic level of stability. Without a measure of physical well-being and material security, other goals become difficult to imagine and even harder to pursue. Yet sometimes our individual choices undermine this long-term need. We shirk in school and leave before we should. We overspend and undersave. We adopt unhealthy habits. When such decisions eventually cause the platform of our lives to wobble, and our futures to not live up to our hopes, regret follows.
Boldness regrets. A stable platform for our lives is necessary, but not sufficient. One of the most robust findings, in the academic research and my own, is that over time we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn’t take than the chances we did. Again, the surface domain—whether the risk involved our education, our work, or our love lives—doesn’t matter much. What haunts us is the inaction itself. Forgone opportunities to leave our hometown or launch a business or chase a true love or see the world all linger in the same way.
Moral regrets. Most of us want to be good people. Yet we often face choices that tempt us to take the low road. When we travel that path, we don’t always feel bad immediately. (Rationalization is such a powerful mental weapon it should require a background check.) But over time, these morally dubious decisions can gnaw at us. And, once again, the realm in which they occur—deceiving a spouse, cheating on a test, swindling a business partner—is less significant than the act itself. When we behave poorly, or compromise our belief in our own goodness, regret can build and then persist.
Connection regrets. Our actions give our lives direction. But other people give those lives purpose. A massive number of human regrets stem from our failure to recognize and honor this principle. Fractured or unrealized relationships with spouses, partners, parents, children, siblings, friends, classmates, and colleagues constitute the largest deep structure category of regret. Connection regrets arise any time we neglect the people who help establish our own sense of wholeness. When those relationships fray or disappear or never develop, we feel an abiding loss.
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The next four chapters will explore each of these deep structure regrets. You’ll hear people around the world describing foundation, boldness, moral, and connection regrets. But as the chorus of voices builds, if you listen carefully, you’ll also hear something else: the vivid harmony of what we need to lead a fulfilling life.
“I regret not standing up to the men who raped me. Now that I am stronger both mentally and physically I will never let a man hurt me like that again.”
Female, 19, Texas
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“In 1964, I was invited to join Mississippi Freedom Summer by a college classmate. I took a job with my father’s boss in Oklahoma City instead.”
Male, 76, California
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