This finding echoes what researchers have been discovering for forty years. In 1984, social scientist Susan Shimanoff recorded the everyday conversations of a collection of undergraduates and of married couples. She analyzed the recordings and transcripts and identified the words that expressed or described emotions. Then she compiled a list of the emotions, positive and negative, that people mentioned most frequently. Feelings like happiness, excitement, anger, surprise, and jealousy all cracked the top twenty. But the most common negative emotion—and the second most common emotion of any kind—was regret. The only emotion mentioned more often than regret was love.[18]
In 2008, social psychologists Colleen Saffrey, Amy Summerville, and Neal Roese examined the prevalence of negative emotions in people’s lives. They presented participants with a list of nine such emotions: anger, anxiety, boredom, disappointment, fear, guilt, jealousy, regret, and sadness. Then they asked people a series of questions about the role these feelings played in their lives. The emotion that participants said they experienced the most was regret. The emotion they said they valued the most was also regret.[19]
Subsequent research around the world has produced similar results. A 2016 study that tracked the choices and behavior of more than a hundred Swedes found that participants ended up regretting about 30 percent of the decisions they’d made during the previous week.[20] Another research effort sampled the experiences and attitudes of several hundred Americans. This survey, which I’ll examine more fully in Chapter 5, found that regrets were omnipresent and spread across every realm of life, leading the study’s authors to declare that regret “constitutes an essential component of the human experience.”[21]
In fact, I have yet to uncover a study disconfirming the ubiquity of this emotion. (And believe me, I’ve looked hard.) Scholars in every field, approaching the subject from different directions and using a variety of methodologies, arrive at the same conclusion: “To live, it seems, is to accumulate at least some regrets.”[22]
* * *
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When Michele Mayo was about to turn fifty, she decided to get a tattoo—something to mark the milestone and affirm her convictions. As she mulled over her decision, she thought back to her childhood. The daughter of an American army officer and a French mother, Mayo spent her early years in Germany, where her father was stationed. During holidays, the family would take long drives to visit her grandmother in the French countryside. On those drives, Mayo, her sisters, and her mom would pass the time by belting out her mother’s favorite song.
In 2017, as an early birthday present to herself, she traveled from her home to nearby Salem, Massachusetts, and returned with the skin beneath her right wrist looking like this:
Photo credit: Kathleen Basile
Mayo’s mother was an Edith Piaf fan. And the singer’s words, which the family sang on those long-ago car trips, stuck with her daughter into adulthood. They embodied “how I live my life, how I felt about my life,” Mayo told me. She says she doesn’t have regrets. Yet like the others I talked to, she follows that claim by describing blunders she made and the choices she bungled. Like all of us, she’s frequently climbed aboard her mental time machine to rewrite a story, comparing what is to what might have been and taking responsibility for the gap. For Mayo, though, the sinking feeling at the end of this chain of thinking, the negative emotion many try to elude, has been valuable. “Those things that I wish I might not have done taught me something about what to do in the future. . . . Even the mistakes I think of as learning experiences,” she says. “I hope on my deathbed I can say that.”
The five words on her wrist remind her of that aspiration every day. But she’s also curious about the singer who made those words famous. “Did you know that she [Edith Piaf] died destitute?” Mayo asks me. “I think about her and wonder, did she really at the end not have any regrets? Imagine if you could interview her now,” she says.
Despite the many wonders of video conferencing, I cannot pull off such an interview. But biographers and journalists have provided clues about what Piaf was thinking on October 10, 1963, less than three years after recording the song that would seal her fame. As she lay in bed, life about to slip from her battered forty-seven-year-old body, her final words were, “Every damn thing you do in this life you have to pay for.”[23]
Does that sound like a person with no regrets?
However, if Piaf had reckoned with her regrets, if she had confronted them rather than tried to wriggle past them, she would have discovered something more important: Every damn thing you do in life can pay off for you. Because, as we’re about to discover, regret doesn’t just make us human. It also makes us better.
“I regret nearly every big decision I have ever made. I apparently suck at the big decisions. Little decisions are a snap.”
Male, 55, West Virginia
//
“When my husband was hospitalized just before his death, I wanted to climb into the bed next to him to cuddle, but I did not. How I wish I had done that.”
Female, 72, Florida
//
“I wish I didn’t worry about what other people think. I still struggle with this.”
Male, 33, Japan
3.
At Leasts and If Onlys
Of the 306 events at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the women’s individual cycling road race was among the most grueling. The course stretched some 140 kilometers (nearly 87 miles) across city streets and through a national park. It required riders to make several steep climbs, survive one treacherous descent, and negotiate a long patch of cobblestone road. But when the yellow flag dropped at 12:15 p.m. on the first Sunday of August, sixty-eight elite cyclists set off alongside Copacabana Beach for a shot at Olympic glory.
The race lived up to its brutal promise. The temperature hovered in the seventies (the low twenties Celsius) with a punishing 75 percent humidity. The sun frequently broke through the clouds and roasted the pavement. When the sunshine retreated, a light rain misted the course. One rider suffered a savage crash. Others exhausted themselves early. And nearly four hours after the start, with just three kilometers remaining in the race, American Mara Abbott held the lead, followed by a clutch of three riders about twenty-five seconds behind her.
“She’s got gold in her hands,” said announcer Rochelle Gilmore, who was calling the race for Olympic television.
But Abbott, known more for climbing than for sprinting, couldn’t hold on. With just 150 meters left—that is, with 99.9 percent of the race complete—the other three riders pushed past her. Clustered together, they strained for the finish line.
Anna van der Breggen of the Netherlands edged out Emma Johansson of Sweden by the width of a tire. Italy’s Elisa Longo Borghini rolled up behind them. All three women had beaten expectations and earned Olympic medals.
Imagine the look on their faces.