Why Avoiding Regret Is Bad Advice

Regret is part of life. Looking back, we all wish that we would have made different decisions at some point. If I only had stayed in my last job. If I only had turned down that offer. If I only had invested in that stock.

Regret can be a useful feeling. It makes you question your decision-making and can help you make better decisions if the situation repeats itself or a similar one arises. However, focusing on avoiding regret is not a good way to make decisions.

Regret is based on hindsight

The problem with regret in decision-making is that hindsight is 20/20. For most important decisions in life, the consequences are uncertain. When investing in a stock, you don’t know whether the market will go up or down. When going on a date, you don’t know whether your prospective partner will be a good fit. When deciding to take an umbrella in the morning, you don’t know whether it’s going to rain in the afternoon. You have to guess. So you read market reports, ask trusted friends about your date, and check the weather report.

A good decision is one that gives you the best chances of a good outcome, but rarely one that guarantees success. Every now and then, you will make a good decision, given all the information you have, and things will still go wrong. It was sunny in the morning, the weather report gave a low chance of rain, and still, it poured down in the afternoon as you were in the middle of the park, soaking wet and regretting leaving your umbrella at home.

And when you face a bad outcome, you will likely regret the decision that led to it. It’s only human. With the benefit of hindsight, you will convince yourself that you could, no, that you should, have known better. But you probably couldn’t.

If you can point exactly to the piece of information that you could have used and did not, you should treat that as a learning opportunity. You were told that people at your new job were very competitive, but you ignored it and took the job anyway. Then you hated the experience precisely because of that? Keep that in mind for your next job. But if there was no telltale or crucial piece of information you ignored, don’t try to convince yourself that you somehow had magical powers and could have predicted a bad outcome.

Avoiding possible regrets is not a good way to make decisions.

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Regret focuses on the negative

Another problem with regret is that it is based on negative experiences. What is the opposite of regret? How often do you mull over the things that went well?

Human beings have a tendency to outweigh bad outcomes compared to good ones. Psychologists Kahneman and Tversky famously called this phenomenon “loss aversion” in their Nobel Prize-winning research (in their words, “losses loom larger than gains”). So, if you focus on regrets, you are probably overweighting bad experiences, which will make you too cautious.

Still, you will find plenty of decision-making advice based on regret avoidance: Make decisions that you will not regret! The most extreme example is the one that starts with, “People on their deathbed regret this and not that.” Whatever that particular advice might be, it is based on how people might feel at a very specific point in their lives, with the full benefit of hindsight, and most likely taking for granted everything that went well and focusing on everything that did not.

Good, rational decisions are not based on avoiding regret. They are based on getting the best information you can on how likely the different possible consequences of your choices are, carefully balancing the pros and cons (making sure you properly evaluate the options, as explained here and here), and then choosing the best option at that point, even though you cannot control everything. This means that you need to accept that things will go wrong every now and then, and you need to cut your past self some slack. If you did the best you could, it was probably a good decision, even if the outcome was bad (if most of your decisions give bad outcomes, however, you might want to seek decision-making advice).

Regret makes you inconsistent

There is a more subtle problem when you make decisions focusing on avoiding regret. You might become inconsistent and manipulable. For example, suppose you are moving to a new city and have three job offers from firms in the same industry: A, B, and C. You do not know whether you will like the city, whether wages in that industry will pick up in the next couple of years, and whether you will actually enjoy the kind of work. You have some ideas about all that, but you really do not know for sure.

When you compare A and B, you realize that firm A is a bad idea if you dislike the city because the location and home office policy will force you to actually be there more often than in the case of firm B. So, if you happen to dislike the city, you will really regret to have chosen A. That means that you prefer B rather than A.

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When you compare B and C, you realize that the starting wage at C is higher (but wage increases are less likely). So, if the industry does not pick up, you will regret being stuck with a worse wage at firm B. So you prefer C rather than B.

When you compare A and C, you realize that the job description is more rigid at C and offers less flexibility and possibilities to change. So, if it turns out that you do not enjoy this kind of work, you will regret taking the job at firm C, while at firm A, there might be ways to change. That means that you prefer A rather than C.

So you should not choose A, but B. Wait! You should not choose B, but C. Wait! You should not choose C, but A! What? Regret avoidance is an example of a decision method that does not build a preference and hence makes you manipulable (as discussed here). Depending on your mood that day or whatever some of the potential employers decide to emphasize, you might choose anything. Your decision will be pretty random and certainly not a good one.

This does not mean that every decision you regret was a good one. Far from it! But your brain triggers regrets as a response to bad outcomes, not to bad decisions. You can learn to make better decisions (check previous posts: here, here, and here), but you cannot avoid bad outcomes all the time. Treat regret as a learning opportunity, but do not focus on avoiding it.