A person with no regrets must have had no alternative options in life. It’s natural to regret not taking a different path, so having no regrets must mean either that you were too blinkered to see all the myriad possibilities of life, or that you were too bad to have any genuine alternatives to what you did.
When I visit a new city on holiday, I might regret giving in to the pain in my feet and not walking along an extra few scenic metres. When I think about my career, I regret all the other jobs I might have done that might have gone somewhere: staying in academia, somehow managing to escape the manager I had as a trainee accountant and working for someone decent in the same organisation, holding out for a more appropriate first post-qualified job etc…. When I think about my social life, I regret not staying in touch with more friends; I regret being oblivious to romantic overtures from nice women and not being vicious enough to cut nasty ones from my life.
Having no regrets means having lived the perfect life, with no mistakes, misfortunes or alternatives: it means being deluded, because such perfection is vanishingly unlikely. You might argue whether wistfulness over misfortune is really ‘regret’ or instead some similar emotion, but the point remains the same, no matter how much you try to trim its scope: if you think that every mistake was for the best, because good came of it, you are making a logical error. Good can come of making no mistakes. For every good event that happened after something bad, I can imagine a world in which the good thing happened even when the bad one didn’t.
This is not the best of all possible worlds: choosing to think that it is means deliberately avoiding its, and our, failings, and we cannot improve something whose flaws we do not acknowledge.
The question of regret touches on a wider one: of the conflict between happiness and truth. Is happiness a virtue, and is the purpose of life to be happy?
These two questions underpin a whole world of self-help and popular culture, as well as our life choices. They are easily dismissed as impractical philosophising, but they are important. Many people think that they know how to live life, and a philosopher pondering semi-abstract questions is irrelevant to real life. But society’s massive appetite for self-help books and mid-life crises shows that people do realise these questions’ importance.
If you could plug yourself into a matrix and live a near-perfect life, generated just for you by the computer system feeding experiences directly into your brain, would you? You could be wealthy, powerful and attractive until your real body withers away. It’s an ancient idea: before we had computers, philosophers pondered the same question phrased as the possibility of a magical demon casting an illusion on someone.
Many people would do so, but many of us wouldn’t. For me, some essential aspect of life would be lost: it would no longer be meaningful. I might as well buy some opium and get high every day, as some people do.
And who is it who takes drugs every day? It’s the poor and lost. We know that partly this is because of local availability and perhaps culture. But we also know it’s due to desperation. Give rats in cages opium-laced water and normal water to choose from and they become addicts rapidly. Give rats in cages with wheels, dens, tunnels and space the same choice of water and they choose a lot less opium.
Give American soldiers in Vietnam opium and then bring them home, and the ones with good families and lives to return to forget the drug. The ones with poor lives, made worse by war memories, are far more likely to sink into further drug use.
The delusion of ‘no regrets’ is another opiate, like religions which promise eternal, pleasant life after the misery of the current one. ‘No regrets’ is yet another way we can achieve happiness by divorcing ourselves from reality. It is better camouflaged: it might seem innocent and uplifting, but that makes it more insidious than a physical drug.
We should not blame the poor and suffering for their need for something to make them feel better. The eternal pain of misery; the desperation and longing for something more from life can drive even strong minds to make mistakes (such as falling for conmen and voting to leave the EU, or giving one’s savings to scammers). But we also should not offer falsehoods as comfort. Almost everyone would be disgusted if we offered opium to the poor in place of trying to improve their lives, even if we changed the name to, say, soma. Funnily enough, soma is a real painkiller despite the name being invented in a dystopian book.
Yet we offer religion and self-help quite happily. ‘No regrets’ is a message I am sure you can find on popular algorithm-driven attention farms, alongside similar injunctions to be happy, ignore the negative and focus on what positives you can.
Although these messages have been patently absurd for the 50 years (I guess) they’ve been sold, there is finally a bit of a backlash, as researchers find that people are no happier from following these happiness-inducing methods.
This is because people need more from life. We need meaning. We all have slightly different ideas of what is meaningful: good relationships, family, making a difference… Some people even genuinely get meaning from material success, although most people pursuing it are just shallow and thoughtless and have mid- or late-life crises when they realise that they are unfulfilled. Achieving these things in a simulation strips them of their value: they become mere hedonism; indulgent dreams that give pleasure only in the moment.
I have known philosophers who have questioned why this is: who have asked whether an achievement that required struggle and skill is any less valuable if the results are only simulated. After all, the skill and struggle were still real. Others have asked why meaning is so important: they support the idea of hedonism as the only purpose in life. We can put these questions to one side: self-help books and trite aphorisms don’t teach unbridled hedonism or try to persuade us to adopt it, and most people do want something more from life.
We know that pleasure is not the only end in life. It’s an essential feature of a good life: I’m not an ascetic trying to persuade everyone to wear a hair shirt and flagellate themselves. Nor do I agree with the majority of people who think that sex for pleasure is a sin or that gorging oneself on chocolate and alcohol is depraved. That would be grossly hypocritical, given my typical evening.
These pleasures are necessary fun in life, but not sufficient to make a life good. There are ‘higher’ things, such as truth, beauty, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, knowledge and so on. Each person’s mileage will vary on these: many people have little regard for truth even though it’s foundational for any of the rest. On the opposite end of the scale, I don’t regard beauty as a higher virtue than any fleeting pleasure, whereas many artists have revered it as the highest goal in life, even equating truth and beauty.
‘No regrets’ tells you to forget sadness: to believe that all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. It’s absurd. Even Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg ought to have regrets and they have been immensely fortunate. ‘No regrets’ tells you never to ponder what might be, but instead to accept what is. It tells you to kill your dreams and forget your principles, to accept what you’re given and submit to your fate. You can’t help but submit physically, in the sense that no-one is a magician who can change reality with a snap of the fingers, but do you want to submit mentally too: to subdue your spirit when it starts to awaken?
You choose: try your best to turn yourself into a slave of
circumstance with no regrets, or assert your freedom of spirit, and acknowledge all the alternatives, for better and worse?
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