In an earlier post I suggested regret avoidance as a good life strategy, at least as a first approximation. However, a common-sense approach to regret avoidance is dangerous, because common-sense opinions about regret avoidance are systematically inaccurate. For example, people expect to feel more regret...
- when we learn about other alternatives than when we don't
- when we accept bad advice than when we reject good advice
- when our bad choices are unusual rather than conventional
- when we fail by a narrow margin rather than a wide margin
- what we do rather than what we don't do
But are these assumptions correct? Often, they aren't. As with many aspects of self-knowledge, the default beliefs are wrong, and self-discovery consists largely of the realization that we didn't know ourselves as well as we had thought we did.
An equally important question is whether to accept the default stance toward regret, or to gain some measure of control over the circumstances under which one feels that regret is appropriate (or perhaps, if one perceives regret as a necessarily negative emotion, by finding a way to not experience regret at all). By this line of reasoning, the preceding approach would be designed to "work within the system", whereas this latter approach would be designed to "break free from the system". Admittedly the latter is much harder, but potentially much more rewarding.