Regrets and Fears
Even if you are leading a remarkable life, you could have regrets and fears. Maybe you regret you missed a perfect investment opportunity. Perhaps you are worried about your kids' performance at school. Perhaps you blame yourself for what you have said to your friends. Or maybe you've wasted too much time and money on impulsive purchases, video games, social networks, relationships, or other obsessions that become irrelevant later. Or maybe you are pessimistic about the future, no matter if it were yours, your family's, or your community's. It seems that complete serenity exists in dreams only.
But why can't we remain calm all the way? Perhaps we have pride and prejudice, suffer from hindsight bias, or know nothing about our ignorance. We tend to rationalize what has happened before even if we don't know anything. Even worse, we are prone to spot elusive patterns and generalize them to future events. We often forget that we live in a complex world, and life is path-dependent. What happened in the past does not mean that it will happen in the future. What has never occurred before does not indicate it won't emerge in the future. While it is good to know the past or the future, it is not sufficient: we must choose how we act and give it a try now.
When we attempt to cope with regrets and fears, we must be careful not to be gullible to others' advice, either solicited or unsolicited. Many people love to consume self-help tweets, videos, blogs, or books that tell stories of billionaires, political elites, film celebrities, or social media stars. They believe that they would get some magic remedies to cure their headaches. While these stories may have their merits, we often underestimate their harm to ourselves. Most successful people have their edges: they have competitive advantages over others in their life. Their stories are difficult to be duplicated. When we spend days or months applying their methods to solve our problems without caution, we will likely use the wrong solutions. While it is nice to have others' advice, we should constantly scrutinize their validity and applicability and examine our conditions first. We should not play others' games. Without mindfulness, it is almost dangerous to directly apply others' solutions to our problems. After all, it is us who pay the price for the consequences of our decisions and actions. Nobody likes to act when the motion brings more regrets or fears.
My past has been filled with numerous regrets and worries, like many people. I read over 50 books on how to handle these negative feelings. I tried every piece of advice offered in these books. None of them worked for me. After my failing attempts, I ignore them. Fortunately, I didn't give up. I figured out my algorithm for dealing with regrets and fears through trial and error. It is no magic, but it works for me. Here it is:
Add all the regrets, fears, or anything that make us feel uncomfortable to a list. Label each of them as a problem. It helps us relieve the burden of memorizing and reinforce them in our brains.
Ask two questions for each problem: 1) is it well-defined? 2). how can we act to improve our conditions? When a problem is well-defined, there at least exists a solution, even if we don't know what the solution looks like.
Remove the problem that is either 1) not well-defined, or 2) beyond our capacity to solve. The removal helps reduce the space of regrets and fears.
Come up with an initial solution to the first problem, either by trial and error or by seeking help from others. Adapt from the initial solution until we're satisfied or give up. Remove the problem from the list. Repeat step 4 until all the issues have been solved.
Return to 1 whenever you have new regrets or fears.
My approach might not work for you, and is certainly not perfect. But I’d be glad if it helps somehow, even a little in your fight against regrets and fears.
When we are anxious or worried, it is helpful to remind ourselves that time is asymmetric. We own no past nor future. All we have is present. We can't change what we did before, nor can we control the future. However, we still have the option to act and improve our conditions.