johnny depp of course
and that 's johnny depp 's shoulder and that 's johnny depp 's famous shoulder tattoo some of you might know that in one thousand nine hundred and ninety depp got engaged to winona ryder and he had tattooed on his right shoulder winona forever
and then three years later which in fairness kind of is forever by hollywood standards they broke up and johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done and now his shoulder says wino forever
i have a tattoo
that didn 't happen to me i got my tattoo when i was twenty nine
and i regretted it instantly
and by regretted it i mean that i stepped outside of the tattoo place this is just a couple miles from here down on the lower east side
in other words i had drunk our great cultural kool aid about regret which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time that we should always look forward and not backward and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets
this idea is nicely captured by this quote things without all remedy should be without regard
what 's done is done
right so this is lady macbeth basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people
and as it happens shakespeare was onto something here as he generally was because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths
and fully humane i think you need to learn to live not without regret but with it so let 's start off by defining some terms what is regret
regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better
and in fact the more
we have of either of these things the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret
the more acute that regret will be
so let 's say for instance that
you 're on your way to your best friend 's wedding and you 're trying to get to the airport and you 're stuck in terrible traffic and you finally arrive at your gate and you 've missed your flight
why
because if you miss your flight by three minutes it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions
that would have led to a better outcome i should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel i should have gone through that yellow light these are the classic conditions that create regret we feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly but almost came out well
now within that framework we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things
and how we spend our leisure time
pertain to these things finance family issues unrelated to romance or parenting health friends spirituality and community
so in other words we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance but it turns out when you look overall at what people regret in life you know what our financial decisions don 't even
they account for less than three percent of our total regrets so if you 're sitting there stressing about large cap versus small cap or company a versus company b or should you buy the subaru or the prius you know what
make it go away
the second characteristiccomponent of regret is a sense of bewilderment so the other thing i thought about there in my bedroom that night was
how could i have done that what was i thinking
this real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret we can 't identify with that part we don 't understand that part and we certainly don 't have any empathy for that part which explains the third consistentcomponent of regret which is an intense desire to punish ourselves that 's why in the face of our regret the thing we consistently say is i could have kicked myself
the fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative to perseverate means to focus obsessively and repeatedly on the exact same thing now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop so it 's not that i sat there
in my bedroom that night thinking make it go away
it 's that i sat there and i thought make it go away make it go away make it go away make it go away
so if you look at the psychologicalliterature these are the four consistent defining
and i think of this as a kind of existential wake up call that night in my apartment after i got done kicking myself and so forth
i lay in bed for a long time and i thought about skin grafts
and then i thought about how much as travel insurance doesn 't cover acts of god probably my health insurance did not cover acts of idiocy
and the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot sometimes instead of control z we actually have zero control
and for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists and i know where of i speak this is really hard because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right
now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos and i 'm going to return to that point in a few minutes
or you can have your last day at work
and this doesn 't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life
because of course sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences either for our own or for other people 's health and happiness and livelihoods and in the very worst case scenario even their lives
now obviously those kinds of regrets
incredibly piercing and enduring i mean even the stupid reply all regrets can leave us in a fit of excruciating agony for days
so how are we supposed to live with this
i want to suggest that there 's three things that help us to make our peace with regret and the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality
if you google regret and tattoo you will get eleven point five million hits
we are all in this together
but it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets i don 't think that 's the case though
all of us who 've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black
humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive
it connects the poles of our lives back together the positive and the negative and it sends a little current of life back into us
this is my tattoo
it
i can guess what some of you are thinking so let me reassure you about something
some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are
i got this tattoo because i spent most of my twenty s living outside the country and traveling
and when i came and settled in new york afterward i was worried that i would forget some of the most important lessons that i learned during that time specifically the two things i learned about myself that i most didn 't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring
and simultaneously how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north and what i loved about this image of the compass was that i felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image and i thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device
well it did but it turns out it doesn 't remind me of the thing i thought it would it reminds me constantly of something else instead
being here 's the thing
if we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best and if we love people and we don 't want to hurt them or lose them
we should feel pain when things go wrong
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