“So much wasted time.” – Actor and singer David Cassidy’s last words.

 

In 2011, a former nurse named Bronnie Ware published The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, a book based on her time working in palliative care. She found that the same regrets came up again and again:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. (Side note: It wasn’t so much the work itself; it was missing their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship).
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Somewhere in the future, a very old and wrinkly version of you wishes they could be where you are right now, whoever you are, reading these words.

Regrets are unavoidable if you want to have any life at all. Wishing for a life without regrets is really wishing for omniscience – for the ability to make perfect choices and navigate perfect trade-offs. While you can’t eliminate regret, you can take action today to avoid the most painful ones.

Regret minimisation 

The nerdily named “Regret Minimisation Framework” (it’s a short clip, 2 minutes – worth watching) might be the single most useful heuristic for making big decisions.

Here is the main thrust of it, lightly edited:

“The framework I came up with—which only a nerd would call this—was a regret minimization framework. I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and look back on my life… wanting to minimize the number of regrets I’d have.

I knew I wouldn’t regret trying, even if I failed. But I knew the one thing I might regret was not ever having tried… and that would haunt me every day.

When I thought about it that way, the decision became incredibly easy. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and ask, ‘What will I think then?’… it helps you see past the short-term distractions and make choices you’ll never regret.” – Jeff Bezos.

There’s a similar mental exercise with the twee name: 

The rocking chair test

“I have stood at the bedside of maybe thousands of people as they took their last breath. What people say in their final moments…is pretty important. They don’t mess around. When people are dying, in their last words nobody has ever said ‘Pastor Rick, bring me my trophies. I want to look at them one more time.’ Or even ‘Bring me my college graduation certificate. I want to look at it one more time.’ When people are dying and they know their time is short, what they want in the room is not things or trophies or achievement. What they want is the people they love.

Eventually, we all eventually figure out that it’s all about love. It’s all about relationships. I just pray you’ll figure it out a whole lot sooner.” – Pastor Rick Warren

Visualise yourself much older, in the twilight of your life. Think of that older version of you looking back at the decisions you’re facing now. What would they want you to do?

Now play it forward: you’re on your deathbed – hopefully in a very long time from now. The light of your consciousness hasn’t been dimmed by morphine or ravaged by dementia. The shadow of death seeps across the room, moving toward you like molten tar. Every memory, every sensation, every story you’ve ever lived is about to flicker out. In that moment, words like “memory” or “shadow of death” will seem pitifully inadequate, like faint scratches on a pane of glass miles away, nowhere close to the reality unfolding before you.

Looking back at your life in that moment, what will truly have mattered to you?

Of course, your real death almost certainly won’t be like that. You likely won’t be lucid. But right now you are. 

We can sense the shape that a misspent life would take. It could be distilled down to one major theme: “too much preoccupation with unimportant things.” There’s nothing easier than filling your life up with bullshit. Still, there are ways to waste less time and live with fewer avoidable regrets.

A few nudges that might help all of us move in better directions: 

The cliché is true: You regret more what you didn’t do than what you did

Take more chances. Have that difficult but important conversation. Ask that person out, publish that video of you playing music, publish that story. 

The timing will never be right. You have more freedom and personal agency than you might think. If you want something, go out and get it. You are responsible for getting what you want; no one will hand it to you. 

All you have is right now

A wandering mind, constantly lost in limbo – chasing a future vision or reliving a long-gone past – is an unhappy mind. All you have is this present moment. The sense that life is short isn’t really about the amount of time you have. It’s about how easy it is to waste it.

Comparison is the thief of joy 

When scrolling through Instagram and the like, you’re looking at a meticulously curated and manicured highlight reel of other people’s lives, not their real lives. People compare their lives to the glossy façade others project into the world, and come away thinking that their own lives are inferior. Comparison with an illusion is the thief of joy. Speaking of social media…

You will probably regret spending so much time in front of screens

People worldwide spend about six and a half hours on average every day looking at screens for leisure (browsing the internet, watching TV, watching streaming series, gaming and so on).  Let’s imagine that those numbers are wildly exaggerated and it’s “only” three hours a day. Play the tape forward and that still adds up to 15 years of your waking life spent on screens. Social media and especially short-form content are designed to keep you hooked and warp your perception of time. Don’t scroll your life away.

The spotlight effect holds most people back

The top regret on the list was, “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The spotlight effect (the tendency to think people notice and care about the small details of your behaviour) can stunt your life. Care more about your own opinion of yourself, not theirs. 

High hopes, low expectations

Lowering your expectations while maintaining high hopes is the lens gives you the most advantage in life. Cautious optimism tempered by realistic pessimism reduces our pain at the inevitable annoyances and disappointments of life. And it increases our overall happiness when things turn out well, which they will do a lot of the time.

Health is the foundation of your happiness

Play two tapes forward with two scenarios: one where you don’t work out or eat well, and one where you do. Over a lifetime, the latter is a more joyful, more effective, more productive, more vital, and better life by every measure possible. 

Investing in your relationships is your best shot at happiness

It’s impossible to be happy without spending time with people you care about. Even a short coffee with an old friend beats an hour of scrolling or texting. Invest in your relationships and friendships. Surround yourself with good people and aim to be one too. Let the rest fall away. 

This last point is the most important point of all:

Your calendar shows what you value

Our calendars – what we choose to do with our time – say more about our priorities than what we say.

What fills your calendar fills your life. Really think through what’s important to you and how you can carve out more time to take action on those things or improve the quality of the time you spend on them. If it’s not in the calendar, it’s not going to get done.

It might be spending more quality time with your partner or kids, exercising more, seeing your friends more, playing an instrument, taking those trips you always wanted to take. 

Whatever you want to do more of, it has to go into your calendar, not into a “someday” shelf in your mind, because that day will probably never come. You might just run out of time.