Modern Wisdom - #437 - Daniel H. Pink - How To Overcome Regret

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

Daniel Pink is a psychologist, speaker and an author. Regret is the most common negative emotion humans talk about. It's even the second most common overall emotion which we talk about after love. And yet our relationship with it is pretty terrible. Having no regrets is not only a bad tattoo from the 90's but also a philosophy that robs of us valuable insights from life. Expect to learn the most common types of regrets people have in life, whether action or inaction is the cause of most suffering, how Daniel suggests we can grow past our regrets, why never looking backward is limiting our growth, how people believe in both free will and things happening for a reason and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Get a free v60 brewing kit and 40 filters from Pact Coffee at https://www.pactcoffee.com/ (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy The Power Of Regret - https://amzn.to/3I0UUx9 Follow Daniel on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DanielPink  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Daniel Pink, he's a psychologist, speaker and an author. Regret is the most common negative emotion humans talk about. It's even the second most common overall emotion which we talk about after love. And yet, our relationship with it is pretty terrible, having no regrets is not only a bad tattoo from the 90s, but also a philosophy that robs us of valuable insights from life. Expect to learn the most common types of regrets people have in life, whether action or inaction is the cause of most suffering, how Daniel suggests we can grow past our regrets, why never looking backward is limiting our growth, how people believe in both free

will and things happening for a reason and much more. Little bit of an update, I have decided to stay in New York for another week, came out here with Jordan after the podcast in San Antonio and met up with Douglas Murray and some other people. And I quite like it here, it's very fresh and absolutely freezing cold, but it's my birthday on Wednesday, so I'm going to stick about. And then from next weekend, I'm back in Austin and there are a lot of podcasts lined up for that. So keep your ears peeled over the next few weeks. And now please welcome Daniel Pink, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. What's modern society's problem with regret? We dismiss it as something that should be avoided rather than embrace it as something that can actually change our lives. I think it's part of a bigger problem with modern society and that we don't know how to deal with negative emotions. We think that negative emotions make us weak. We think that negative emotions start dangerous.

When, in fact, negative emotions can make a strong. Negative emotions can make us better, particularly our most common negative emotion regret. That's the most common negative emotion. Yeah, there's some interesting research starting in the 1980s, where they, as a social scientist, they excuse the Shamanop, who did research in the US, where she recorded everyday conversations among people.

And then they took the transcript of these conversations and they coded the conversations for the emotions that were expressed. The most common negative emotion people expressed is regret. The second most common emotion overall that people discuss is regret. The second only to love.

So regret is, regret is a ubiquitous emotion. Everybody has regrets. The only people who don't have regrets are people with some kind of problem. People who have neurodegenerative disease or people who are sociopaths. Otherwise, everybody has regrets. Why is it so common? Well, that's a great question. And I think that's the puzzle that, you know, I love your listeners to have your listeners linger in their head for a little bit. Because here you have this emotion that is unpleasant, right? Okay, so we're going to have to feel good, we're going to feel bad.

It feels bad, it's a negative emotion, and yet it's ubiquitous. So that's a great way to frame the issue. Why is it hard to, why is it regret both hard to take and hard to avoid? And there's a little bit of a paradox here, because you say, well, wait a second, when human beings are wired for pleasure, we seek pleasure. Well, by is something that's so unpleasant,

so ubiquitous, and the answer is, it's good for us, it helps, it's useful, it's there for a reason. And what we know from 50 years of science is that our cognitive machinery is pre-programmed where regret, regret is actually an important So from 50 years of science is that our cognitive machinery is pre-programmed for regret. Regret is actually an important and integral part of how our brains work. And so when we embrace this idea that we shouldn't have regrets, that we shouldn't look

backward, that we should dismiss negative emotions, we are doing ourselves a grave miservice. How's the brain program for regret? Well, you have to say, the brain is program for regret because regret helps us learn. Okay, so just think about this. Let's use it in an analogy. Imagine if we did, let's go to back to this big issue of negative emotions. Imagine if we didn't have the emotion of fear. We wouldn't survive, right?

You're in a, your hotel is on fire. Ah, I'm not scared of a burning building in New York City and you end up melting in your, you know, your desk chair into some hotel, right? All right. You know, imagine a world without grief, which is a terrible emotion, right? But imagine if we didn't experience grief.

The reason we experience grief is because we experience love. Right? Grief is teaching us something. It tells us something. And regret teaches us. We're great. We're great. Clarifies it's part of our cognitive machinery because regret

more than any other emotion in our life. Clarifies what we care about and instructs us how to do better. If we treat it right, we don't always treat it right. Clarifies what we care about and instructs us to do better. If we treat it right, we don't always treat it right. Clarifies what we care about and instructs us to do better. Yes. So it's to do with it's both a forward and back. Yeah, well, it's intro, that's a great point. It's both.

And those two things are inextricable. What regret does is that we look backward Feel the stab of negativity for something we did or get into for a decision we made or didn't make all right that stab of negativity Clarifies what matters to us and instructs us about what we do next and so and and it's a great It's interesting you picked up on that because it's it's it's integral to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results.

It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. It's going to be a great way to get the best results. because their brains haven't developed enough. With regret, let's say that I regret that I didn't study accounting when I was younger.

I imagine I have that. No one has ever said that. Okay, so give me some philosophy. Okay, perfect. I regret that I didn't study philosophy. Okay, perfect. I regret, okay, great. I regret that I didn't study philosophy when I was younger. Okay, so think about, think about what I had to do with that. First of all, I go back in time to when I was in university,

which is 35 years ago. So I'm already, I'm already sort of cognitively gotten in a time machine. Zip back there. I know what really happened there, but I'm also going to use my incredibly inventive mind to negate what really happened. So I'm a fabulous, too. I'm going to tell an entirely new story where I studied philosophy. Then I'm not done. Then I get back in my time machine and I zip to the present. Alright, and I say, wow, if only I studied philosophy and as I did in my recreated past, I'm now arrived at a present, but the present has been reconfigured because of my past decisions and I'm now a more enlightened person.

I'm now more attractive to women because I can talk about humanume and I can talk about Spinoza. I have a better sense of what my life is about. And so it's about time travel and fabulous and it is incredibly cognitively sophisticated. It is very hard for me to imagine another species doing that. I mean that very seriously. I think that we're learning a little bit more about animal emotion and condition. And we know that we know there's some animals that seem to experience grief. We know that most animals experience some kind of attachment and something akin to love. But regret, it's just too cognitively sophisticated.

It's one of the things that makes human beings unique. And so why has it maintained? Why hasn't it not been washed out through evolution? It's actually been enhanced through evolution because it's useful. What's the opposite of regret? Is it gratitude? No, I think the opposite of regret is maybe rejoicing. I think the opposite of to regret something is to rejoice it, to say, oh, I'm so glad I made that decision. I'm so glad I didn't study philosophy because I'd be a

barista right now. I'm so glad I didn't study philosophy because, because Shofan hour had no idea what he was talking about. You know, I'm so glad that I didn't, you know, it's a rejoicing. Yeah, it's interesting. I was just wondering why, well, we have a negativity bias and learning lessons from what's effective is important, but it's less effective, it's less important than learning the things that could have killed you or went, you know, terrifyingly wrong. So I'm trying to think about how, if there's a scalar,

if, you know, if a little bit of rejoicing can dampen the pain of regret at all. Well yes, I know I mean there things you can do okay so let's take it let's take a step back. So in the broad architecture of regret they're often two kinds of regret regrets of action and regrets of inaction regrets about what you did and regrets about what you did it do. and regrets about what you didn't do. All right, so with action regrets, you can, you have some options with an action regret. Let's say that I have hurt somebody. I can try to make amends.

I can try to make restitution. I can apologize. With certain action regrets, let's say, oh my gosh, I can't believe I painted my house orange. Well, you can repaint your house on more congenial color, so you can undo certain action regrets. The other thing you can do with action regrets with your hinting at Chris is that you can mitigate some of the pain by what I call at leasting them, which is, and this is what I mean by that. Our ability to process regret is the logicians, philosophers, along with scientists, called

counterfactual thinking. We can, we can, we can, some in a world that runs counter to the actual facts, right? And so there are different kinds of counterfactuals. You can do an upward counterfactual, imagine how things could have been better, if only I'd studied philosophy, right? That makes you feel worse, but it makes you do better. do an upward counterfactual, imagine how things could have been better if only I'd studied philosophy, right? That makes you feel worse, but it makes you do better. You can also do a downward counterfactual.

Well, at least I studied accounting and I have a good job. So you can do a downward counterfactual. The classic example of this is with, is why in the Olympics, bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists routinely. If you look at their faces, bronze medalists say, ah, at least I got a medal, unlike the Schmoe who finished fourth, silver medalists are saying, oh, if only I kicked a little harder,

I'd have a gold medal, all right? So what we know, getting back to action and inaction regrets is that with action regrets, we can at least, we can say, and I've collected all these regrets from around the country, around the world, rather, and you can say, oh, well, I regret marrying that idiot, but at least I have these three great kids. And you can, and think about these downward kind of factuals, these at least, is that they make us feel better. They don't necessarily help us do better, but it's okay to feel better. I mean, sometimes that's actually useful.

What were the most common regrets that you found? Well, let me, instead of asking that question directly, let me stay on brand and give you a lengthy, discursive, and contextual preample before answering that question. So what I did is, on that one, is, so in order to research this book, one of the things that I did is I looked at the academic research, I did my own public opinion survey, quantitative survey of the US population, and then I also collected, in the book itself,

we had 15,000, we're now over 18,000, 18,000 regrets from people all over the world. And what I found is that around the world, people have the same four core regrets over and over and over again. And they're less about the domains of people's lives than they are about something underneath that's going on there. So let me give you one of those these four core regrets to try to exemplify that. I have a lot of regrets about people who regret not traveling, not traveling enough. So that's like in the sort of personal category.

Oh, I had a chance to go to Greece, but I didn't do it. I had a chance to study when overseas, when I was in university, and then take the chance. A lot of people regret not studying abroad in university. So that's an education regret. Then I have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of regrets all over the world where someone regrets finding somebody attractive, wanting to ask them out, not doing it, and then regretting that that that that that chickening out. Okay, so that's a romance regret.

And then I have lots of regrets about people who say, I stayed in this crappy job, but what I really wanted to do was start my own business, but I didn't have the guts to do it. That's a career regret. But to my mind, those are all the same regret. Those are regret, you're at a juncture, you can play it safe, you can take the chance, you don't take the chance and you regret it.

So one category of boldness regrets, which are if only I'd taken the chance. And then there's three others that I'm happy to talk about too. And that's an inaction regret, that first one. The bonus one is definite. Bonus is almost always an inaction regret. They're actually relatively few, it's interesting question. They're relatively few people. I mean, again, they got this massive database of regrets. There are people who regret acting too bold, but they are the distinct minority. I would say there's a

two bold, but they are the distinct minority. I would say there's a, I mean, I don't 40 to one ratio, 50 to one ratio of people who regret, of between people who regret not acting bold enough and people who regret acting two bold. It seems to me that it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. It seems to me that maybe, maybe adventure is kind of like a little bit of a common theme in that boldness stuff that you're thinking about. Look, if only I'd been a little bit braver, maybe I would have had something bigger than adventure going on, Chris, and it's in, I'll see your, I'll see your adventure and raise you mortality. I think that at some level all of us human beings are conscious that we're mortal that we're not here forever.

So it's an existential thing. Yeah, I think that it is, I think that it's partly existential. It's basically saying we are here on this planet for an astonishingly brief amount of time. So what am I going to do something? What am I going to see stuff? What am I going to learn? What am I going to grow? There's an emerging field in psychological science

around the concept. There's something called psychological richness that not only do we want a pleasant life, but we want a psychologically rich life, which would include things like adventure. And I think that's what's driving that. I think that's what's driving the boldness regrets. Yeah, it seems to me that the boldness regrets

are around, like I did this thing in the past, and if I continue to do this thing in the future, as life gets even more sparse and there's even less life for me to have, I'm going to potentially fritter away more of my days not doing things that actually fulfill me existentially. I think you're spot on and I have dated approved that because on that.

So the second piece of the research that I did was a large public opinion survey, a quantitative survey of the US population. So we survey 4,489 Americans asking them all kinds of questions about regret and what it means and what they regretted and what I was really looking for were demographic differences. Do men have different regrets than women do? And the demographic differences were much less pronounced than I would have expected, except on what you're talking about. And it's this. When we are young, say in our 20s, people tend to have roughly equal numbers of action regrets and inaction regrets.

But as we age, it's all inaction, not all, but it's inaction regrets take over for exactly the reason that you're saying, I think, is that the finish line is a little bit closer and people say, holy smokes, I still haven't done that. I got to step up. It's kind of common mean culture, you know, to talk about you're supposed to, you never regret the things that you do and either things that you didn't do. I think I've seen that posted around on the internet a lot. I don't know why, it's not true, it's not that you never do, but I don't know why people have picked up

on that particular mechanic that there is a skew toward inaction being more painful or at least more prevalent than action. Yeah, it's more prevalent. I'm not sure it's always more painful, but it's more prevalent. There are all kinds of reasons for that. One of them is that, as we were talking about earlier, is that with action regrets, you can actually do something about them.

So I got a guy in the book who got a tattoo that said no regrets, then regretted it, and got got removed. So, that's a way of undoing, you know, like action regrets you can sometimes do something about until you can resolve them. In action regret, let's say I regret never visiting Turkey, all right. How do I, I can't, there's only one solution to that, you know, I I gotta go do it and if I don't do it, I'm still hit by that. And the other thing is that people tend to be bothered by the what ifs. And what's interesting about some of the boldest regrets and some of the other regrets

is that people were less out comments than I expected. We're not saying I should have asked her out on the date. I should have asked them out on the date. Not because they say, oh, and as a consequence of that, I would have had this blissful marriage and did it. They're just, they're not saying that. They're saying, I just want to know what would have happened. Oh, so a lot of this is closing that sort of zygonic loop a little bit. It's wanting to just lock that off so that they know what would have happened.

Yeah, I think about this a lot. So here's some, uh, some broad science cod psychology for you. Coming straight out of the research lab that is my brain. I'm pretty sure that there is something called an anxiety cost. So opportunity cost is going to the theme park or going to the gym. You choose to go to the theme park, the cost of going to the theme park is not going to the gym. Right. That's opportunity cost. I'm pretty sure that there's an equivalent that occurs

when, for instance, in your daily routine, everything that you need to do as a part of your daily routine sets when you wake up on a morning. Let's say that you're gonna meditate and take a dog for a walk and go to the gym and do some other things. The longer that you wait throughout your day, until you do that thing, the more time of your day is spent, ruminating and thinking about the fact that you still need to do that thing. So let's say that you'd gone to the

gym and walked a dog in Dunham meditation first thing in the morning, you could have basked for the remainder of the day, reveling in this sort of productive glow that you've had. Well, look, I've already done those things. I don't need to take my time thinking about that. However, if you don't go to the gym until 6 p.m. you will spend a non-zero amount of time earlier in the day thinking, oh, I've still got to go to the gym, I've got that thing to do, I can't believe I've got that thing to do. And that to me is the anxiety cost. So the sooner that you can get certain tasks done, the sooner that you can, and the equivalent could be done with thinking about asking a girl out. There's a girl in college that you really

want to ask out, you could spend the next two years of college thinking about asking her out, or you could do it now, stress test the idea, and you won't have to ever think about that anymore. Now that to me, that anxiety cost is such a motivator. You think, look, if I just go and do the thing, and it seems, given the fact that action and inaction skews toward inaction being more prevalent, it seems like that might help to actually push people. Okay, I'll just do it. I'll just do it. I know that inaction is a more consistent regret than action ones.

And I know that I'm not going to have to think about it again. If I just get it done, she might have halitosis. She might be a total bitch. I'll ask her. this. You might be a total bitch. Alaska. So here's the thing. I think that one of the lessons of this is that we should have something of a bias for action. And because for a couple of reasons, number one is that I think we've under it for there are a few reasons why I think we should have a bias for action. Number one, for exactly the reason that you're saying that it extinguishes the what if question. And the what if question

can linger on us as a, I mean, you're essentially describing it as something of a cognitive tax. It's a tax on our attention. It's a tax on our willpower. It's a tax on our, you know, ability to focus in a way. So, and so the action extinguishes that. The other thing which I think we've totally underestimated is how much action helps us learn. That is, we sometimes have the sequence wrong. We think that the way you do stuff is you learn how to do it and then you do it.

But a lot of times doing stuff helps us learn what to do and how to do it. It's certainly true when we're thinking about our life course or when we're thinking about what to do with our lives. We tend to say, okay, I got to plan this out and then I'm going to do it. But the way you discover what it is you want to do is by doing stuff. And so I think a lesson of these boldness regrets is that we should have, you know, I don't think a wild bias toward action, but we should have a bias toward action because action extinguishes our what if and it helps us learn in ways that we don't often realize.

What was the next category of regrets after boldness? So another category of regret are what I call foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are people who regret, say, spending too much money and saving too little. People who regret not taking care of their health. People who regret not working hard enough in school or university. People who make these small decisions, they're largely about conscientiousness, about prudence, small decisions early that have that accumulate and have pretty nasty consequences later on. And so, foundation regrets,

if bullies of Retarp only had taken the chance, foundation regrets are only had done the work. And what they show is our need for stability. A good life is not precarious. It's hard to have a good life if you're uncertain if your platform is wobbly. And people do regret making bad small decisions that have a collective force of weakening their foundation of giving too much precariousness to their life. It's so interesting how these regrets, in retrospect are reminding us of a lot of things

that we're told when looking forward. You need to look after your health. You should be going to the gym. You should be careful about how you spend your money. And in retrospect, we're being taught that this is like, memetic evolution is providing us with, okay, what are the things that after the entirety of life still sticking somebody's mind as a thing? Now that's not to say that the things that they say that they regret would have actually improved their lives had they have done

them, but they certainly wouldn't have regretted them anymore. You got it exactly right, this is the part where we were talking about earlier, where red is clarifying. The stuff that sticks with us teaches us what we value, what we value, and I think that what we value is stability. We value stability, but we also value boldness at the same time, those things are perfectly compatible. And what regret reveals, I say it as in the book, is what these four regrets reveal in some ways is a photographic negative of the good life. I got these 16,000 people who were telling me what they regret the most. By doing that, they're telling me what they value the most. These four core regrets tell us what people value the most.

Two of the things they value is they want a good life, it has some stability to it, but a good life also has some growth and some psychological richness and some existential excitement they've invented to it, it's here to say. What's the next category? Moral regress. Those are regress where people are at a juncture in their life. They can do the wrong thing, they can do the right thing, they do the wrong thing, and they regret it. And these are things like the two biggest areas are bullying in school, a lot of huge numbers of that, and then moral infidelity, things that violate either that prison individual moral codes or a broader moral code. And I think that that suggests that people, actually, and I'm convinced of this, I think most people, I really do, most people want to be good.

I'm convinced of that. I think there's an evolutionary argument for that. But I think that most of us want to be good, and most of us, not every single person, every single time, but most of us feel pretty bad when we don't act well. We don't, we're not good. Yeah, well, I mean, the regrets aren't signaling to a group. Maybe it'll make you act in a certain way, but it's very much an internal singular.

That's a very good point. That's a really, really, that's a very, very good point about that, and that's a great point, actually. And that's why it is, that's a great point actually and that's why it is that's a great point that's why it's so instructive because it's it's inherently not performative right so the expression of no regrets is a performance if I say to the world I have no regrets I never look back for that's performative I am performing courage but when I feel regret and it's coming this way,

there's no performance there. It's an honest signal to yourself. Yeah, it's an honest signal. You can have a fair bit of faith that the things that you regret are things that you actually regret. Now, did you find, can you imagine that certain people may overly regret? People may tune up. Absolutely. Tune up their regrets too high. There's no question about that. And this is because we haven't been taught effectively how to deal with negative emotions. And so, on one pole, you can ignore your negative emotions.

That's a bad idea. That leads to delusion. But on the other pole, you can wallow in them. You can ruminate over them. That's a bad idea too, because that leads to despair. What we should be doing is we should be confronting our negative emotions. We should be thinking about our negative emotions, and we should be applying a systematic way to enlist these negative emotions to help us live better in the future. That's the key, and the trouble is nobody ever teaches us

how to do that. So there has to be a distinction between sort of reflection and rumination. Absolutely. Rumination, rumination is terrible for us. But the reason that people, a reason that people ruminate, or a main reason that people ruminate, is they don't know what to do when a negative emotion comes in. Because we're so over index and positivity. People think that if they're experiencing a negative emotion, oh my god, everybody else is so positive, there must be something wrong with me, and that can bring them down. What's more is that when they experience a negative emotion because they're human, they haven't been struck down on what to do with a negative emotion. And there are ways that we can process negative emotions far more effectively, and you can arrest that march

toward remination. What should they do then? What should people do? Oh, well, there's all come, and there are a bunch of things that we can do on that. I mean, I like to look at the process as inward, outward, forward, inward, outward, forward. So inward, what you have to do when you experience a regret

is you need to practice something called self-compassion, which is a line of research that began 20 years ago by Christian Nepp at the University of Texas. Basically this, when we look at, and I'm sure your listeners are probably big violators of this, when we make mistakes, when we screw up, the way we talk to ourselves is brutal. We lacerate ourselves, We criticize ourselves in such cruel terms

that I can't imagine that most of us would ever talk to another human being the way we talk to ourselves. Alright, don't do that. There's no evidence that's effective. There's no evidence that that kind of severe self criticism improves performance. In a sense, it's to what you were saying earlier, it's a little bit performant for yourself. You're basically virtue signaling to yourself about what a badass you are. But it doesn't improve performance. What improves performance, and I encourage your listeners to look at this research on self-compassion because it's powerful, is what improves performance is this. Treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Basically, treating yourself with the same kindness you would treat somebody else who came to

you with this kind of thing. Recognizing that your mistakes and your missteps are part of the human condition, that you're actually in some level not that special, that if you have a regret about, oh, I should have started a business, you're not alone. If you have a regret about misreading somebody, you're not alone. It's part of the human experience. And the third thing is that these regrets, these mistakes, these mistakes, these scrubs, they're a part of your life. They don't fully define your life. They're a moment in your life. And so when you do that, when you sort of reframe how you think about an inward,

that makes the way for, that paves the way for, you know, the other parts of the reckoning process. Okay. So that's inward. That's inward. Yeah. Outward, disclosure. Disclosure. There is a strong case to be made for disclosing your regrets. For a couple of reasons. You know, here's the thing. Doesn't look at me as an example. So I got these 18, okay, so I put up this site with like two tweets. I have 15,000 regrets on people all over the country, all over the world. 15,000 people saying, hello, yes, hello complete stranger.

I would like to tell you my biggest regret, all right? So that's kind of wacky in itself. Then I also had a, you know, in the form I said, you know, if you wanted to, because I'm a writer, writing a book about regret, and I said, if you'd like to be contacted for a follow-up interview, please include your email address. You feel free to include your email address. Otherwise, it was anonymous. I thought that maybe 5 or 6% of people would include their email address.

We had 32% included their email address. 32% said, yes, I want to tell my complete stranger my my word, right? And I want him to email me so we can talk more about it. Okay, that's telling us something right there. And so what is it about disclosure? We got the inward reframing, let's go outward. Disclosure is an unburdened.

There's no question about that. But the other thing about disclosure, and this is extremely important, is that disclosure is an integral part of the sense-making process. And the reason for that is that the way we can construe things, we can construe them to oversimplify a bit at an abstract level or a concrete level. And there are advantages and disadvantages on those different levels of construal. So negative emotions, emotions in general, but negative emotions especially are abstract.

They're blobby. They're amorphous. They feel menacing because of that. When you convert those menacing emotions to words, spoken or written, they're more concrete. Concrete things are less medicine. So, you defend them in a way. And then, the fact that they're in language allows you to begin making sense of them. So, that's disclosure.

So, if you're if they're we overstate how much disclosing our vulnerabilities will affect how people think of us. In general, there's 30 years of research saying that when we disclose our mistakes and our Scrooves and our vulnerabilities, people actually think more highly of us, not less highly of us. So, but even if you're skittish about disclosing, what you should be doing is, just, you know, you're right about your regret for 15 minutes a day for three days. That's an incredibly potent way to make sense of the regret. So that's outward. The next step is forward. You've got to extract a lesson from it.

You've got to extract a lesson from it. And the way we extract lessons is by getting some distance from it. It's pretty clear, it's essentially in convertible, that we are better at solving, we think it's sovereign our own problems, and are pretty good at solving other people's problems. And that's all because of distance. So you can do things like talk to yourself in the third person.

There's a lot of research on that. So for you, if you have a regret instead of saying, what should I do? You should say, what'd you Chris do? There are things, you can use our time travel skills. And you can say, you're deciding what to do or how to extract a lesson from this regret Make a phone call to the Chris of 2032 and say hey Chris of 2032 What do you want me to do in response to this regret the Chris of 2032 has a pretty freaking good idea because he's not enmeshed in the quick the Chris of 2022 You can even do something like the very simple technique

of saying, this is good for all decisions. You're trying to decide what to do, ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do? When you do that, people always know what to do. What would I tell? So that's this. So you want to reframe, treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt.

You want to disclose in order to concretize it and make sense of it, and then you want to take a step back and extract a lesson from it that you can apply it next time. And when we do that, negative emotions, they still hurt a little bit, but they don't destroy us, and we actually kind of, in some ways we co-op them. We enlist them to make us better, and we avoid repeating those negative emotions later on. Did you look at when it comes to disclosing a difference between writing for yourself versus writing for someone else, speaking to yourself versus having a conversation with somebody else? I didn't look at that. A lot of the research on writing is writing only for yourself.

And the disclosure, so when we talk about disclosure, the verbal disclosure is almost always to somebody else, but at the same point to yourself. The written disclosure is almost always only to yourself. So I don't know about whether writing an essay and publishing an essay about your regret. My hunch, and it's only a hunch, is that it would be as useful, if not more useful, than simply speaking about it, because the very act of writing is a form of sense-making. And so you might make greater sense of it by writing about it. And then the disclosure gives you both the unburdening and allows you to build affinity. And in some ways puts your issue out to other people who then you can enlist in deciding what to

do and figure out what to do next. I really like the disclosure element of that, that concretizing and defanging of whatever it is that you feel. I think I accuse the American imperial measurement system of basically being the same thing, that you guys don't actually know how much something weighs. It's just a notion about what it might be. It's in this region, right? You know, it's pounds, it's stones, it's a whatever.

Like it's just a thing. And I kind of feel like undisclosed thoughts a lot of the time, or ideas. It's one of the reasons that I love writing a newsletter. I've never had a newsletter for ages, and it's just a thousand words at the end of the week, but it forces me to concretize something that I've really been thinking about for the last week. Exactly. And I speak for hours, hours, four or five hours a week on the show, it's different.

It's something different between writing and speaking. There's a greater rigor to it. Correct. Yes. Yes. Typically, when you know it's going to be consumed elsewhere, and this is something that I discovered long ago, it's actually one of the most important lessons I've learned, which is that writing, we tend to think that

what you do is you figure stuff out and then you write about it, but writing itself is a form of figuring out. Writing itself is a form of figuring out what you think. And again, the broader kind of academic term I used for that because I think it's useful. I don't know if anybody else cares, but it's sense-making. We're trying to make sense of things. And the way that we make sense of things is by being able to shift between these two levels of construal, between looking at things abstractly and looking at things concretely.

The same thing is true when it comes to the research on self-distancing and problem solving. But one of the things we have to do there is that we want to construe things when we look at our own problems, we're like scuba divers. Scuba divers don't know anything about the ocean, but they know a little bit about the ocean, but what they know is like what's around them right there. They are no sense for the sweet, for the ecosystem of the ocean.

So you don't want to be when we go into our own problems we scuba divers. And the way you solve problems is you want to be an oceanographer. And so you need to actually affirmatively take steps to zoom out and look at things differently. Is sense making in the literature now as a term? Yeah, oh yeah, no, it's not my term. It's there. It's a term that can be used a lot in the space that I'm in, in the podcasting space, it's mostly to do with cultural issues.

What does it mean to understand how the world operates outside of institutions when you can't trust the news organizations and the government and blah, blah, blah. But it's interesting to find out that it's actually a legitimate term that exists within the literature too. Absolutely. I mean, there's, you know, there, there, there, there are some interesting papers in organizational behavior about since making organizations, Carl, a pre-illisioner's Carl Leite, WVI, CK has done some work on how we make sense of, how we make sense of

situations as groups, how we make sense of events and situations and emotions as organizations. So it's a term, but I think that what I think human beings are sense makers. We have this very confusing chaotic world that we're trying to navigate and we're trying to figure it out. We're trying to make sense of it. And the way you make sense of things is not singular. That is, you don't do it only abstractly way you make sense of things is not singular. That is, you don't do it only abstractly,

you only concretely, you do it both. You don't do it only on the specific or only on the general, you do it both. You don't do it, you don't, you don't, you do it not only looking back, but also looking forward. That is, you need some dexterity in order to make sense. What is the fourth category of regrets?

Fourth category are connection regrets. These are regrets about relationships, all relationships, not only romantic relationships, and back most of them, we're not romantic relationships. Relationships about, among parents to kids, kids to parents, siblings, relatives,

friends, neighbors, colleagues, and essentially the story there is that you have a relationship that wasn't attacked or should have been attacked. And it comes apart. And it usually just drifts apart. It doesn't explode apart. And it drifts apart. One side wants to reach out.

It doesn't, because they say, it's going to be really awkward to reach out. And the other side's not gonna care. And so it's your support and the trouble there is that they're wrong. It's. Reaching out is often not awkward at all and the other side almost always cares. And so the connection regrets are it only I reached out and they reflect our need for affinity, for connection, for love. I bet as well, if you were to ask the people that said, they won't care if I reach out and you said to them,

well, what about if they reached out to you? How would you feel these people would say, I'd love it. It would be fantastic. It would be brilliant. It would completely erode all of the worry and the concern. And yet, they are unable, unable to extrapolate from their experience because we tend to think

that we are much more special than we really are. You know, I mean, one of the things that we labor under, one of the things that can strains us in our ability to navigate the world and make sense of it is something called pluralistic ignorance, where we think that we have a belief, but no one else shares it. No one else is it. I'm so special but no one else shares it. No one else it, yeah, I'm so special. No one else shares that belief. I mean, you see it in, I always think about it in school. So the professor gives a lecture and she says,

are there any questions? And you're saying, oh my God, I'm totally confused. I don't understand this, I don't understand that. But no one else is asking questions. So they must understand it, I don't want to look like an idiot. But in fact, you didn't say, well, maybe they're thinking these exact same things, they don't want to look like an idiot. So we tend to think that we are much more special than we really are. But say to a shim, if you have a thought, it's safe to assume that some non-zero number of other people have also had that thought. zero number of other people have also had that thought. Or, or might be having that thought right now.

And so, you know, we have to be, again, it's part of this toggling in this sense making. Sometimes you are unique. Sometimes what you're feeling and thinking and seeing is unique and idiosyncratic to you. Sometimes it's extraordinarily common. And it's much more common than we, it's much more common than we think. We have an illusion of our own specialness. Again, I don't want to hamper anybody's self-esteem listening to this.

You're all very special, but you're also like a lot of other people. I'm like a lot of other people. I'm surprised by the... Well, actually, before I say I'm a surprise, what were you most surprised came up as a common regret? I'm not surprised by any particular thing that came up. I think what I was surprised by more was the universality of these regrets, by how common they were especially across nations, how little seeming national difference there was in a lot of these regrets. I'm surprised by the bullying.

I'm surprised by how many people. It makes sense in retrospect. I didn't bully anybody in school, so maybe it's just my lack of pluralistic ignorance. Yeah, it surprises me that that many people felt like they'd bullied someone. I don't know how many bullies they were in my school. Maybe, but I suppose you don't, it's not like you need to be a bully. It's not like it's some label,

hello, I am the bully I will punch you in the face. It's one incident perhaps that sticks with people. They'll have done one thing at one time, stole money from some kids glenched box one day, and that's the thing that stays with them. It can be a perfect student throughout all of time except for that. I was a little surprised by that, but when they first started coming into the database, but then it's like, this is a very common regret. And at some level, I'm kind of heartened by it. I'm kind of heartened by the fact that people who mistreated others regret it 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later. I mean, it suggests that they've learned something, that their values are

being clarified and that it's giving them some guidance on what to do next. It is strange. I wonder what someone is hoping to do that. Look, I hurt somebody in the past. If I do this again in future, this isn't the sort of person that I want to be. I have this vision of myself as an integrity laden human that is going to feel proud. Yes, it's an interesting one. Does agency relate to regret at all, the ability to have impact on a situation or not? Agency is critical to regret. Agency is essential to regret.

You can't have regret if you don't feel the sense, if you don't have any agency. So you can look at it like, okay, so, I'm looking at the window here in Chicago and it's a very overcast day and maybe I would prefer that it was a sunny day, but I can't regret that it's not sunny. I'm disappointed that it's not sunny, but I can't regret that because we're a great regards agency.

I don't control whether the sun shines or not. And so agency is incredibly important. That's one reason why it hurts so much is because it's your fault. This appointment is not your fault. The line gets blurred, though, between what we know is our fault and what we know, we have agency over and what we don't. If you get hit by a car, your belief that I could have would have shoulda looked to the left reversed back from the, you know, and then some catastrophe occurs. You can regret that despite having not had any agency over this idiot driver that just hit you, but believing

that you did. Exactly right. And sorting that out is incredibly important. Let me give you an example of that from the survey, from the quantitative survey. So I wanted to tease out this question of agency, and I also wanted to tease out this question of, if you believe purely in fatalism, then you don't have regret. Purely fatalistic view of the world. There's no agency and therefore there's no regret.

And so I wanted to see where people, what the ratio is. So I asked in this quantitative survey of the US population, I asked a question about free will. I said, I said, you believe in general that people have free will, that they have some control over what they do, how they do it. Huge majority said, yes, I believe in free will. Then else when the survey asks the sneak in the opposite question, which is,

you think that in general everything in life happens for a reason. They serve a more fatalistic thing. And almost everybody said, yes. And so what you had is people believing in both of these things. And it's frustrating. You're rubbing your face in frustration. I buried my face in my hands in frustration thinking this is contradictory, but

It might not be because that's what our lives are like we don't there aren't clear You mean you said it just now. There isn't there can be a A fuzzy border between where we have agency and where we have not and sorting that out is part of it And so you have these people who believe both and free will and that everything happens for a reason. I think that that's part of what it takes to navigate our lives. And that's one of the other things that Ruger teaches us.

It forces us to sort that out. Where did I have agency? Where was I, with a certain stance? You can look at this in narrative terms too. I mean, Dan Adams was a personality psychologist in Northwestern University up the road from where I am right now. He says that we forge our identities in narrative terms. There are two kinds of narratives in our lives.

What is what he calls a contamination narrative, which is where things go from good to bad. The other is a redemption narrative where things go from good to bad. The other is a redemption area where things go from bad to good. And people who are healthy, people who learn and grow and progress, see their lives in terms of redemption narratives, not as perfect, but as better, as going in that kind of trajectory. And so when we think about these our lives and narrative terms, we inevitably have to ask the question, okay, my life is a narrative. Am I the author of that narrative? Or am I a character in that narrative? And the answer is yes, you're both,

and you have to try to sort that out. And that is, again, this is like, we're having the sense making hour with Chris Williams, but that is also a part of what it takes to make sense of the world. Where do you have agency? Where do you, you know, and I think what's interesting about this emotion of regret that is unpleasant and that we try to avoid and that we try to bat away is that when we actually

reckon with it, it leads us into discussions like this. It leads us into discussions about what we can control and what we can't. It leads us into discussions about how we make sense of our life. It leads us into discussions about what makes life worth living. And so if we actually treat this emotion like grown-ups rather than run away for a minute or a minute over it, it is instructive and it's clarifying. Is there an implication in this that the way we should live life is in a way that minimizes our regrets in future? I think that's true to a point, because you can't minimize ever regret.

That's the key. You can't minimize ever regret. So if you're trying to go around minimizing ever regret, you're going to go nuts. You have to be able to minimize the right regrets. And once again, this chorus of 16, 17, 18,000 people is telling us what they regret. And they tend to regret the same thing.

So, you know, if you say, okay, what am I gonna have for dinner? I'm gonna try to minimize my regret about having dinner. So I'm gonna have more regret about having fried chicken or am I gonna have more regret about having meatloaf tonight. The me, let's say, let's take me,

the me of five years from now is not gonna give a shit one way or another. I can guarantee that. Like if I could get the me of 2027 on the phone and call him up and say, okay, you're going to say, Dan, I don't care. I have completely forgotten that evening five years ago. It has no material effect in my life. But if I say, I'm in Chicago and let's say I have an old friend in Chicago and I haven't talked to him for a while and I said, oh I should reach out but it's going to be kind of weird if I reach out. Okay I'm not going to, the Dan of 2027 will tell me, hey dude, reach out because I'm going to regret this in five years if you don't reach out right now. And so we should try to minimize our regrets, but we should try to minimize the right ones. And it ends up being a relatively small set of regrets that we should be minimizing.

So we should be in some sense maximizing, on minimizing, no regrets, and essentially saying good enough is good enough. And whether you have fried chicken or meatloaf tonight, whether you buy a gray car or a blue car, those kinds of things ultimately don't matter. The view of the future is not going to care one way or another. I would say that over a short time span, you may be able to see those come out a little bit more tightly. When you're looking at anything over 20 years,

there's maybe what, between five and a hundred decisions that are probably going to stick out that you might actually be able to remember. But if you were to say, I'm supposed to be on a diet. I'm on a diet because in future, I want to be somebody that's fit. I have the choice this evening between some nice steamed salmon and asparagus or the fried chicken.

What would me tomorrow want me today to do? To make me tomorrow is going to say, well, I feel a little bit lethargic here. And my performance in the gym wasn't very good. And I didn't sleep too well I Mean I think that that the perspective changes with a little bit with the distance But I think that future you I think that future you is generally interested generally has your best interests in mind I really do I think that the situation there is

interest in mind. I really do. I think that the situation there is, in that particular instance, is to change the choice architecture, so you don't even have to make the decision. So the only thing you're offered is something that is good for you. I asked Jordan Peterson this question the other day, I'm going to ask you as well, because I feel like it kind of relates to what we're talking about here. I asked him whether there is a value in life of having an nemesis, of having an enemy, someone or someone or something that motivates you because many of us, me included, trying to live a life of peace and not make enemies of people or things or ideas or groups or whatever. But I can't deny myself that when I have resentment in my heart, there is an extra degree of fire

that gets lit underneath me that I want to prove that person or idea or thing or whatever wrong, that that amount of motivation and drive comes from a place that is really, really difficult for me to tap into. And it's the juvenile lower resolution, shitty vibration version of myself. However, it's true, right? When I resent something or someone, I put my foot down on the gas. resolution, shitty vibration, version of myself, however, it's true. Right? When I resent something or someone, I put my foot down on the gas. And I'm wondering whether to tie it into what we've spoken about today, whether regrets

can also fill that hole, whether regret can act as that fire, it can almost act as an ideological nemesis, but like a, you know, a nemesis against a situation that you've been in the past. Well, I mean, I think that let's let's let's let's take on this notion of nemesis and we can think about it in terms of our personal lives, but we can also think about it in a broader narrative. Why do so many stories hit the hero against the nemesis? Because what is it? What's the what's the narrative function of that nemesis? The narrative function of the nemesis is to present an obstacle in the way of a goal. And it's also to clarify who the hero is. And so it's not that.

Exactly. Exactly. And so if one feels that one has a nemesis, and you're reasonably psychologically well adjusted, you're not creating phantoms and you're not paranoid. If you feel like you have a nemesis, that is telling you something. If something presents as a nemesis, it's telling you what you value and not that as you say. And it's also telling you what your goal is, which is to bypass that nemesis or to overcome that nemesis. So it can be clarified. This isn't some ways why something like envy, which

is a pretty bad emotion to have. There's not a lot of positive envy. Pretty useless, isn't it? Yeah. And, but envy can be clarifying that if you feel envy, you say, OK, what am I really envy here? Why am I feeling this way? What is it that is causing this envy? And it's a clarification of, it's a clarification of what you value.

I think it would envy. It's an interrogation of what you value rather than a clarification of it. You have to ask yourself, OK, why do I feel and what is it? Do I admire this person's clothing? Do I admire this? Do I admire this person's? I don't know professional success. Do I admire this person's wealth? And how you have to interrogate that? How important is that really to how important is that really to me? But but but again, I again, it's an issue.

It's an issue. I don't know if I have a nemesis. I never literally never thought about that. But I guess if I do have a nemesis, it would be things that we believe that aren't, is just aren't true and trying to Except bugs me if when we believe that no regrets and you should never look backward is a inappropriate and healthy blueprint for life That's just wrong and so maybe that that false belief is a negative

You know things that things that are things that people believe that just are not true, maybe operate as a nemesis for me. It's so strange because regret is a topic as an uncomfortable one. It's not nice for people to experience. It's not that even thinking about regrets as a topic itself is generally kind of a bit icky and discordant. And yet, you have convinced me that it's a gift. You have convinced me that what a regret does is it shows us the direction in which we don't want to go in future and that

even at the time the way that we interpret situations is often the most you've got to buy a season what we see what we blah blah blah blah blah. But over time with the benefit of a little bit of perspective, you actually end up thinking, okay, well, what are the things that stuck about? What are the things that I actually did or didn't care about? What are the things that I actually wished that I had or hadn't done differently? And those that arise, you don't need to do sense-making in the moment because your system has filtered everything out, except for the stuff that is left. Like somebody that's sifting for gold or whatever in a river, okay, what's left? What's left is the thing that didn't go away with time.

That's the thing that you still need to work on in future. This is going to be the same thing if the situation happens again. Hey, man, how do you? I've nothing to add to that, it's perfectly set. You're exactly right. Daniel Pink, ladies and gentlemen, people want to keep up to date with what it is that you're doing, why should they harass you on the internet? They can go to my website, which is danpink.com, d-a-n-p-i-n-k.com, and we got a newsletter,

all kinds of other stuff. We just free, lots have lots of free resources on the website. Information about the books, all kinds of really good stuff. So, thanks, Stan. Thank you, Chris. That was super interesting. Thank you, Chris. That was super interesting. Yeah, oh, yeah.

Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah. you