/discussion

There's a question that catches me sometimes at three in the morning, no reason at all: why does it sting more to remember the design course I never even tried than the terrible job I took in 2016 and quit three months later? The job was a mistake in plain sight. I lost time, lost money, fought with my dad over it. But today, if you asked me to list my three biggest regrets, it wouldn't even show up. The course, though. That one's still there. It's not just emotional noise on my part, or at least not only that. It's a pattern that's been studied quite a bit, and honestly I was surprised the first time I read about it. Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec, at Cornell, spent a good chunk of the nineties trying to figure out why people gave such different answers depending on when you asked them. Ask someone about their most recent regret and the answer almost always involves something they did — a decision made, an action taken, that went wrong. Ask about the regrets of an entire life, decades of distance, and the pattern flips. What's left over is the stuff they never did. There's a study, I don't remember anymore if it was that one or something built off it, with participants from Terman's longitudinal study — people tracked from youth into their seventies — where that reversal shows up again. Action hurts fast and heals. Inaction hurts slow. Sometimes it doesn't heal at all. Why, though. The most accepted explanation has to do with what action and inaction do, or don't do, with time. An action, even a bad one, is a closed event. It happened, it's over, and sooner or later you find some kind of silver lining to hold onto — at least I learned something, at least I met people, at least I know now it wasn't for me. The mind likes endings. Even bad ones. Because an ending can be processed. An inaction has no event to process. There's no fact to digest, just a counterfactual gap that imagination fills however it wants, with none of reality's friction to ruin the party. The design course never had a boring professor, never had an exam scheduled for the week I couldn't afford the bus fare. It only ever had the happy ending I never tested against anything real. There's also a matter of accessibility — literally, how easily the memory surfaces when you're not expecting it. Regrets over inaction seem to get pulled up from memory more easily than regrets over action, which helps explain why they keep coming back years later, half-uninvited, in the middle of a dull meeting or while staring at the ceiling. Action regret, on the other hand, drops off the radar. Not because it got resolved — because the mind already closed that file and put it away. Actually, backing up for a second: I think this is also why I rarely dream about the 2016 job. Never have, actually. The course, I've dreamed about three or four times. Short term, it's the opposite, by the way. And that has an explanation too — undoing an action mentally, a recent one, is easier and more vivid than undoing an inaction. The mind simulates nearby alternatives to what actually happened, and actions that fall outside the norm generate that kind of simulation much more forcefully than a simple absence of action does. That's why the thing you said wrong in yesterday's meeting still makes your whole body cringe. The invitation you turned down five years ago doesn't even cross your mind. Yet. Worth saying, because it would be dishonest not to — not every study that tried to replicate this found the same result with the same strength. There was a 2021 replication that confirmed the general direction, but weaker than the original. One of the experiments didn't even find that long-term reversal. Behavioral science is like that, I think. The pattern is real, but it's not physical law. It varies person to person, culture to culture, and probably also depending on how reversible the decision was in the first place. Either way, there's something practical to pull out of this, even without falling into cheap self-help territory. If action hurts fast but heals, and inaction hurts little now but never really heals, the asymmetry in cost points somewhere fairly obvious once you sit with it. When in doubt between trying and not trying, the price of trying and failing tends to come out cheaper down the line than it feels in the moment. That's not a license to go do everything on impulse, not at all. It just means that voice saying "better not risk it, at least I won't be wrong" is miscalculating the kind of pain it's avoiding. It's saving you the short-term sting and quietly buying you a much longer debt — one the brain, apparently, is particularly bad at paying off. And maybe that's why I still think about the design course sometimes, out of nowhere, in the middle of some afternoon when I should be thinking about something else entirely