On regret and feelings

Regret-minimization is a common practice among human beings. We select the less risky options to avoid regretting the alternative in hindsight (most people most of the time — that’s a generalization). Regret is the emotion responsible for our feeling of uneasiness when ruminating about a past event or decision. It is also an emotion often leveraged by other individuals and groups around us to apply some degree of psychological pressure in decision-making—think about sales tactics that leverage regret-minimization by advertising a big limited discount on a product, which pushes interested individuals to feel urgency and try to minimize regret by buying one or multiple units of the product.

Just as importantly, regret is an emotion similar to any other. It is a backward-looking emotion with a sprinkle of forward-looking desire and hope. You regret not having done something in the past because of the possible future ramifications that would have entailed in your present or future life, which you hope would be better, whatever that means for your life in your thinking brain. In truth, regret merely is. It is a signal that you may have considered other options in a past decision you made or did not make.

You would have never known the outcome of the option not taken, which is why you can regret it—because you feel the inherent soul-crushing pressure of the universal uneasiness of existence, and you wish for a better place to be. In fact, that better place may not exist. Hope is fear in disguise; a seeming belief that if only you had done X, you would be in a better situation today or tomorrow. Such thought is abstract and counterproductive, I would argue. Ruminating about the past, or hoping about the future is nothing but a thought in the present. As any thought does, it rises and passes away, leaving space for more thinking.

"We discovered an excellent dish at that restaurant and we never try anything else, to avoid regret".

— Kahneman, 2019