“But isn’t every decision not to do something, also a decision to do something else in disguise? So when the senior citizen said ‘I wish I had pursued my music career’ couldn’t that just as easily have been rephrased as ‘I wish I hadn’t become an accountant’?”

…

“Every single person that has regrets, has them with the benefit of hindsight. But you don’t have the benefit of hindsight when you’re making your decision do you?”

“So it makes no sense to judge a decision you made without the benefit of hindsight and let it affect your emotional state. When you make these types of decisions, and you make them carefully, sometimes you’ll choose right and sometimes you’ll choose wrong. All you can do is always make the best decision given the facts at hand. If you’re lucky you’ll learn your lesson from the wrong decisions and correct them. But other than that you can’t beat yourself up about these kinds of things. It’s just not useful.”

“The other thing is, regretting a pivotal decision basically means you want an entirely new life.”

…

“And so the only time you ever regret a decision, is if you’d rather give up every single part of your life from then until now.

“And that, my friend, is the regret fallacy.”

Professor Figueroa to Dan Shipper