The future is the redo

The most painful thing about regret is that the arrow of time only runs one way. But thank God for that

(source)

I don’t think I feel regret in the way that most people mean. Part of this is because I’m rather willing to do the stupid thing in life¹. Given the choice between fucking around and finding out, vs staying put, I almost always choose the former.

Contrary to what popular advice would have you believe, this has not led to a rich and meaningful life full of stories and adventures. What it has led to is honestly quite unpleasant at times. Many of the narratives that the world has to peddle don’t make sense anymore. Instead of feeling free and inspired to write my own, most stories feel like a disappointment - including mine, perhaps more than anything. It has led to a bunch of experiences where my main reaction upon looking back is to think, “woah, that was kind of fucked up, and I was kind of a fucking idiot”. It’s led to plenty of people getting hurt, including myself, and nothing worthwhile to even justify all that pain with.

But what it hasn’t led to is regret - and I don’t say this with a single drop of satisfaction. I’m less confident in my decision-making abilities than ever.

I’ve heard people say that they would give anything in the world to be able to turn back time and do things differently. This is a feeling that has never made sense to me. This is not because I’m particularly happy with the outcomes of my life², but because it’s a hypothetical that doesn’t make any sense. Most people’s definition of regret is that given the information they have now, they would go back in time, while still somehow retaining the knowledge of that experience, and use that knowledge to do things differently. Someone with a PhD in physics can prove it one way or another, but I’ve never found this to be a useful mental model because time simply doesn’t work this way³.

But if we loved again, I swear I'd love you right

I'd go back in time and change it, but I can't

-Back To December, by Taylor Swift

So when Taylor Swift sings “if I loved again, I swear I’d love you right”, I am both empathetic and in slight disagreement. I recently took a personality test on conscientiousness and scored far below average, so apparently I am not a very responsible person. I never do things because I am supposed to, whatever that even means. What I have found is knowledge, now unshakeable, that certain things need to be done⁴ because life will get real hellish, real fast if you don’t.

This makes me sound like an asshole, which I may or may not be, but it is far more reassuring to myself than the flimsy idea that I might be a “good” person. There’s a familiar anecdote that goes something like this: a man makes a mistake at work that costs the company several million dollars. He walks into his boss’s office, ashamed, and expects to be fired. His boss says, “Fire you?! I just spent several million dollars training you!”

The familiar adage goes “once a cheater, always a cheater”, but I once heard a friend flip this script on its head. There are three kinds of people in the world, she said. People who have never cheated, and think they never will; people who have cheated, and will continue cheating; and people who have cheated, and know that they will never cheat again. And I mean know. A deep in your bones, on penalty of setting-my-entire-sympathetic-nervous-system-on-fire-again-for-an-entire-year kind of knowing.

But I get the sentiment behind the regret. That desperate screaming at the world when you finally realize your own ugliness, and selfishness, and stupidity, and complete and utter failure to see other people as people. The overwhelming self-contempt from being forced to admit that such atrocious actions actually came from you. This self-hatred is so painful that the only way to solve it seems to be rolling back time and doing it all over again. The crime is so atrocious that breaking the laws of physics seems more feasible than forgiving yourself.

So I extend the following ridiculous idea: you don’t get to roll back time, but you do get a redo. The redo is the fact that you’re not dead, and you have a body that kind of works, and a brain that has some capacity to observe and reason about things, and the free will to make choices. The redo is simply the future and the fact that you’re alive to live it.

I think this is why the Christian idea of repentance is so powerful. It’s less about beating you down for what a shitty person you’ve been⁵, but stressing, in no uncertain terms, how mind-bogglingly different your thoughts and actions could be tomorrow if you choose to buy into the idea of doing just a little bit better next time.

I’m not sure that a secular equivalent exists. CBT certainly doesn’t have the same ring. Compare the statement, “your beliefs shape your actions and your actions shape outcomes”, with “you are a child of God and he expects great things of you, no matter how far you have strayed. Do you take Him up on this”? Which one gets your soul up off of its ass? Which one stirs you enough to actually wake up, from the half-sleep of habits and unconscious biases and calcified mental frameworks that you can’t even see anymore, because they’ve become a part of the window through which you view life? The ones that are soaked into the curtains, and smeared into the glass, and rusted into the hinges, as if they’ve been there since the beginning?

I do wonder where the pre-occupation with regret comes from. I think it's because we're afraid to lose time. To learn a lesson and do better going forward is to forgo the time that we did spend fucking up, and know that we can never get it back. We’ve spent some of the precious resource that is our life, and all we have to show for it is shame and pain and failure. If we could roll back and reclaim that time, we'd be “further ahead” by now.

Except then no living would happen at all. I don’t know about you, but I fuck up enough times on a daily basis that I’d be hitting the rewind button by 10am. I might never make it to 11am at all. This would be the problem with actually allowing redos: getting through a day would require perfection. Maybe some Olympic-level Buddhists could pull this off; the rest of us would be stuck in this doom loop forever.

Most of us are constantly being shitty people⁶. And most of the time, it just doesn’t hurt anyone that we care about enough to make us realize it⁷. The silver lining on the God-forsaken garbage-fire that is regret is this: something mattered enough to make you pay attention for once. And maybe that means you’re not completely fucked. It means you have a feedback loop, and are capable of learning, and there is a remote possibility that you might not do the same dumb shit next time. You’re sufficiently pulverized to remember the lesson, but not dead in any sense that matters. You’re still in the game. And that’s something.

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#140

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1. I.e. quitting every stable job I’ve ever had, joining a Love-Island style startup incubator, keeping supposedly childish hobbies way past their sell-by date, etc

2. You think I’d be writing a blog like this if I were?! No I’d be out there walking my dog and hugging my kids or something

3. I don’t even know how to begin conceptualizing a world where this is possible. Do you retain the knowledge and emotions of the previous decision as if you’ve lived it, without actually having lived it, because you went back in time and made a different decision? Isn’t the pain of that decision’s outcome the precise thing that makes you so badly want to go back in time and do things differently? Would you have any appreciation at all for the new set of outcomes? Is it possible to truly feel emotions about an experience that you haven’t lived?

4. Or not done

5. When done right, anyway. Some “churches” seem to have entirely missed this point and are just wholesaling shame by the truckload. Pelting it at whoever happens to walk by, and then wondering why nobody is coming back.

6. To be fair, the forces encouraging us to be shitty people are strong! Some institutions even profit off them and are thus incentivized to dopamine-reward your shitty behaviour as much as possible. This is doomscrolling. This is addiction. This is the moral satisfaction of telling someone on the internet how bad of a person they are, for voting this way, or reading that book, or tweeting this thing, or whatever.

7. Almost always due to a lack of caring, not due to a lack of hurt. Let’s not give ourselves too much credit.