A question to chew on
How many things are more important for us to consider than our lives?
Summary
Most of us have a vague sense of what we want from life, but we rarely stop to examine it seriously. Research suggests roughly 90% of people carry 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.
Closing that gap takes 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, the less likely you are to look back with regret.
The life you could have lived
Imagine 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 we could have lived.
The life they show us isn’t some impersonal, stereotypically desired life. It’s the best life we could have created for ourselves: an “ideal” life as we would have defined it. A life where we made all the right choices, pursued all the right opportunities, and cultivated all the right relationships. It’s the life we would have chosen for ourselves if we could do it all over again.
How would you feel if this happened? If it happened to you tomorrow, how well would you think you had lived?
Regret is nearly universal
As we sit with that question, 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.
And often, the deepest regrets aren’t about mistakes made. They’re about lives unlived: the relationships not pursued, the risks not taken, the person we never quite became.
The deepest regrets aren’t about mistakes made. They’re about lives unlived.
The gap between the life you have and the life you’d choose
When we put the life we’ve actually lived side by side with an “ideal” life, there’s a very strong likelihood that gaps appear. We haven’t done everything perfectly, and some of our decisions have had negative consequences.
You could argue that an “ideal” life was never a fair standard, that hindsight is always 20/20. But the feelings this question stirs up, and the sheer prevalence of regret, still point to something real: a systemic disconnect between the lives we’re living and the lives we would choose for ourselves.
So this begs the question: how can we do a better job of bridging that disconnect?
How to bridge the gap
Before we answer that, two caveats are worth keeping in mind:
- A single, universal set of steps to an “ideal” life doesn’t exist.
- A perfect life (as each of us would define it) is probably unachievable without foresight, so the goal is to better approximate “ideal” within the constraints of reality.
With that in mind, the approach only asks two things of us:
- Define your priorities. Develop a forward-looking, prioritized set of what matters to you, grounded in a clear understanding of your current priorities and your best guess at your future ones.
- Check your direction. Periodically evaluate your life and where it’s heading, relative to the things you’ve decided are important.
At its core, this approach asks us to form our best guess about what we want for our lives, and to stay conscious of how we’re actually living relative to that guess. The more often we update the guess and take stock of where we stand, the less likely we are to live with significant regret.
Why we don’t do this
It sounds simple and intuitive, because it is. And yet we don’t do it.
Think about the last time you sat for 30 minutes and gave your full focus to what you want from your life, and where your life is heading relative to those desires. (Bonus points if you did it independent of your current momentum, considering options that aren’t handed to you by your upbringing or environment.)
This is something we feel we should be doing intuitively, but as a society we simply aren’t prioritizing it. We all carry a vague sense of what we want, and we course-correct when reality forces our hand, but we seldom anchor our vision, or our corrections, in a sober and thoughtful assessment of where we really are.
There are plenty of valid reasons. Life is hard. Life is complex. The future is uncertain. These are reductive statements, to say the least, but whatever challenges we face, we owe it to ourselves to bring our very best thinking to the shape of our lives.
What else is more deserving of good thought?
Sources
- Prevalence of life regret: Frontiers in Psychology systematic review (citing Wrosch et al., 2005)
- The deepest regrets are about the ideal self we never became: Davidai & Gilovich, “The Ideal Road Not Taken” (Cornell)
