Regret is A Tool

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s estimated that we spend over 110 hours every year dwelling on past regrets. Over a lifetime, that will equate to a year of your life spent mulling over your regrets. It would be easy to say that it’s a waste of time, but I think it really depends on what you do with the other 8650 hours in the year.

A student that reviews their test to understand where they went wrong is far better off than the student that is ignorantly blissful about their B- grade. But the student that spends hours on end beating themselves up over the mistakes they made is wasting their time.

Regret is a tool with a purpose, to learn. Everything else is just performative masochism.