Question to chew on: How many things are more important for us to consider than our lives?
TLDR: Most of us have a vague sense of what we want from life, but we rarely stop to examine it seriously. Research backs this up: roughly 90% of people report significant life regrets, and the deepest ones aren’t about mistakes made but about lives unlived. There’s a persistent gap between the life we’re living and the life we’d choose for ourselves.
The fix isn’t complicated. It just requires two things: getting honest about what actually matters to you, and checking in regularly on whether your life is moving in that direction. The more intentional you are about both long-term, the less likely you are to look back with regret.
Imagine for a moment that when we die, we face some form of cosmic being; before this being ferries us off to whatever comes next, they show us the life that we could have lived. The life that they show us isn’t some impersonal, stereotypically desired life, but they show us the best life that we could have created for ourselves, an “ideal” life as we would have defined it – a life where we made all the right choice, pursued all the right opportunities and cultivated all the right relationships. Ostensibly, it is the life that we would have chosen for ourselves if we could do it all over again.
How would you feel if this happened? If this happened to you tomorrow, how well would you think you have lived?
As we consider this, it’s likely that many of us feel a pang of conviction, regret or sadness. Research consistently shows that regret is nearly universal; roughly 90% of people report significant life regrets. Often, the deepest regrets aren’t about mistakes made, but about lives unlived: the relationships not pursued, the risks not taken, the person we never quite became.
When we put life that we have lived side by side with an “ideal” life, there is a very strong likelihood that there are gaps – that we haven’t done everything perfectly and some of our decisions have had negative consequences on our lives.
Perhaps one could argue that the standard of an “ideal” life was never a fair comparison, and that hindsight is always 20/20, but the fact remains that the feelings that are elicited by this question and the prevalence of regret in our society point toward a systemic disconnect between the lives that we are living and the lives that we would choose for ourselves.
So, this begs the question: how can we do a better job bridging that disconnect?
Before we attempt to answer this question, there are two key caveats that we must bear in mind: 1) a single set of steps to achieve an “ideal” life does not exist, and 2) an “ideal” or perfect life (as we would each define it) is likely unachievable without foresight, so the goal is to develop an approach that better approximates “ideal” with the constraints of our reality in mind.
Now, this approach only requires two simple things:
- We must develop a forward-looking, prioritized set of things that are important to us based upon a strong understanding of our current priorities and our best guess for our future priorities.
- We must periodically evaluate our lives and the direction that they are heading, relative to the things that we have established are important to us.
At the most fundamental level, this approach prescribes that we develop our best guess for what we want / are likely to want for our lives and that we be conscious of how we live our lives relative to that best guess. The more frequently we update that guess and take stock of where we are relative, the less likely we are to live with significant regret.
This sounds simple and intuitive, and it is, but we don’t do this. Consider for a moment the last time you sat for 30 minutes to dedicate your entire focus to thinking about what you want for your life, and where your life is / is heading, relative to your desires (bonus points if you have considered this irrespective of your current momentum, i.e., considered options that aren’t modeled by your upbringing or environment).
This approach sounds like something we should all be doing intuitively, but as a society, we simply aren’t prioritizing it. We all have a vague sense of what we want for our lives, and we do course correct when we are confronted by a reality that we can’t ignore, but seldom do we anchor our vision for our lives and the approach for our course correction in a sober and thoughtful assessment of our reality.
There are many valid reasons that we don’t do this: life is hard; life is complex; the future is uncertain. These are reductive statements, to say the least, but irrespective of the challenges we face, we owe it to ourselves to use our very best thinking to shape our lives. What else is more deserving of good thought?
