Living life with no regrets
 

I read an article recently about some woman who lives her life every day and doesn't regret a thing. Example - she has many tattoos that she doesn't and don't she will ever regret. She dyes her mohawked hair pink, and has no qualms about it. She doesn't even regret having kids and being this kind of parent.

Am I the only one who sees something wrong with living your life with no regrets? I think it's ignorant and immature. It seems to be a fast-growing trend among people (mostly girls) my age. They say "I live my life with no regrets and I couldn't be happier!" If you ask me, regretting mistakes you've made is the only way to learn and to grow.

You can't possibly tell me that 20 years from now, every girl my age with a tribal tramp stamp tattoo is going to say they didn't regret getting it. You can't say that you have no regrets in life if you slept with someone who has gential herpes. I think living life with no regrets is a stupid trend, and saying you live a life with no regrets is basically lying to yourself. What makes me sick is that these people think they are better than everyone else. Sure, they're happy now, but what about in the future? You can't be 19 forever.

Me? I regret plenty, including wasting my first year of college as an art major, so now I need to double up on classes to meet requirements so I don't become a super senior. I regret passing up a great girlfriend opportunity a few years ago to hold out for someone my friend thought was cool. I regret busting my friend's lip open by mistake yesterday at work.

And you know what? I've learned from them and all of my regrets. What about you, GFF?

I think you have to be careful about regret to a certain point. Learning from your mistakes is a positive outlook. People have to think about what they do before they do it, I think thats a big problem in general. There is a quote that I cant quite remember who quoted "A smart man learns from his mistakes and a Wise man learns from others mistakes" Back to the regret part, I dont think you should overly beat yourself up about a certain issue, but I do believe there is a lesson somewhere in each path we choose to learn from. As far as having no regrets "I think that anyone would regret sleeping with someone with genital herpes"

I am a man full of regrets. Sometimes it's hard for me to move out and move on when I think about the things that I done. I don't know if living life with no regrets necessarily means making but not learning from mistakes. I think living a life of no regrets is being able to accept that what has happened has happened. Sometimes I fail to look further away from it and I find it hard to accept what I had done.

Mistakes are learning experiences too, so in a way, it's a good thing they happen to you. So you don't really regret it in the end, I guess.

I can understand the theory behind living life with no regrets, but there are some people that take it too far. I believe that mistakes are a learning experience and that a person should feel enough regret to learn from them, but not so much that the mistake is all they think about. I believe there are some lines that should and should not be crossed.

Anyone who says that they have no regrets might as well just say that they have no conscience, because that's what it comes down to. No one is perfect. We all make mistakes. Being able to recognize and learn from our failures makes us better people.

I would think that learning from your mistake and regretting that same mistake are two separate things; the former takes conscious effort while the latter is just a feeling one gets because of how personal the situation is. Though i don't think it's possible to live a life without regrets, I ask myself "who's happier, the regretful me: who beats himself up everyday for every little mistake (which I do) or a hypothetical, regretless man with STD's: who remembers the awesome sex he got when he contracted that STD?"

The only way to not have any regrets at all is if every decision you have ever made, in your life, worked out absolutely perfectly. And of course, "perfectly" is very subjective. Maybe you made a mistake and had sex without protection and you or your partner became pregnant as a result, at a time in which one or both people involved were not ready to become a parent. Is this a mistake? It would be very easy to look at it as such. Is it something that you should regret, or would regret in twenty years? Probably not; you probably love your kid and wouldn't change a thing about some perceived mistake you made twenty years ago.

While I have made some mistakes in my lifetime, and looking back on things, knowing what I know now, I would have probably acted differently, but at the same time, I do not dwell on what I perceive to be mistakes. I recognize that my life is what it is, I am who I am, because of these supposed mistakes; and I happen to like who I am. That is where the real difference is. Do you dwell on your perceived mistakes, unable to move forward from them, or do you recognize them as experiences that you learn from, and grow from.

Living your life with no regrets doesn't mean to do whatever you feel like doing, when you feel like doing it, it means recognizing that mistakes are an inevitable part of life, and that the fun part of life is learning from your experiences. You learn more from screwing up than you do from keeping the status quo.

There are differences between mistakes and regret.

People make mistakes. You can't really REGRET a mistake if you LEARNED from it. Regret is a foul little emotion. One should accept the mistakes one has made and MOVE ON. There is no point in pointing out what you did wrong and angsting about it. So you fucked up a few times. Who cares.

Totally and completely agreed.
To say that not regretting everything is to lack a conscience is ignorant.
To learn from your mistakes and move on is to grow as a person, parent, mother, father, student, etc.

Regret is what makes us sentient beings, and learning from it and moving on makes us into intelligent beings.

Your logic only applies to mistakes, though. Conscious decision that we make that we know at the time are wrong, yet we do them anyway (and who hasn't done this?) are a whole different story.

You have to be able to recognize purposeful malice/evil/laziness/etc. with yourself, and if you don't regret it later, then your conscience needs a little work.

What's wrong with accepting your own shortcomings and realizing that beating yourself up over them isn't going to accomplish anything? Shouldn't it be a lot more important to focus on how you're going to behave next time instead of how you were last time?

Ah, humanity. We aren't all flawless. We're all prone to knowingly make bad decisions out of personal desire or gain. This is the major flaw of humanity. We're all going to do it. We're all subject to it. Even the best person can never do anything completely altruistic.

Regret is a nasty emotion. It's best NOT to regret, in my opinion, but to replace "regret" with "have learned from."

Sometimes, people act out in maliciousness, evil, or laziness (insert response as necessary) because they feel it's warranted. No one said it makes a whole lot of sense, but sometimes, emotions can override rationality.

It gets the best of all of us sometimes.

Anyone who lives a life with no regrets most likely hasn't ever tried to do much with thier life. One of the ways you gain regrets is through failure, and failure can only honestly come from trying to be more than God (or whatever creative force you believe in) intended you to be. If you live a life "with no regrets" it means you never tried to grow at all,and never found your boundries.

Now, as mentioned earlier, living a life for regrets is stupid and self destructive. Just learn and move on.

Okay. Apparently, you like to live your life living in regret? I don't know. Regret is something that only enables self-pity. Either you LEARN from something or you don't. If you DONT learn from an experience, then yea, you should regret. In my opinion, its not the WISEST thing to do (in fact, if you don't learn from a life fuck-up, you're a fucking moron who can't use his brain)

I think a lot of people misunderstand the definition of "regret." Regret means that you wish you had not done something.

Sure, at Thanksgiving, you may regret having eaten ALL THAT FUCKING STUFFING O GOD, but really, thats a silly thing to regret.

"Never tried to grow at all and never found your boundaries." Yea, no. Thats not what regret is about. Thats what LEARNING is about. REGRET helps NO ONE.

I like how you threw the God crap in there, though. Awesome job. (Religion has nothing to do with regret.)

I like how I've heard high school children say they're living life without regrets, you know, before they actually do shit. Isn't regret perforce a retrospective thing? And I'm with Sass on this one. I've done a lot of things that have made me sad, but if I regretted them, I'm essentially regretting the person I've become. I can't do that. I tend to like myself in most circumstances.

Alice, this addresses your concern too. Even those deliberately malicious things I've done, those experiences helped mold me into what I am now. My own capacity for evil, I think, allows me a greater compassion for others.

People make mistakes, we are human it's the human curse. Many times we regret those mistakes yes it happens. Living life truly without regrets is getting past that stuff, thats why it's called the past. This way you can move on and work on enjoying the rest of your life. you will have regrets, but you can fix some of th damage you've done. It's all about forgiving youself to let others forgive you. once you have moved on and forgivin yourself the guilt isn't there anymore and you have no regrets. that is what living life with no regrets is. Doing the things you wanted and fixing your wrongs as much as you can so your satisfied. you feel no regrets and so your happy.

This is a tough one. Living with regret for a long period of time is bad, as mentioned by Sassafrass and others. However, you'd need to experience that regret, however brief, in order to learn from your mistakes, or poor decisions. Doesn't mean you have to dwell on it though.

Problem I have is that a great number of these 'no regret' people are just using that as an excuse to be an intentionally bad person, with no interest in self improvement. If someone is that complacent, then the 'no regret' shtick gets a pretty bad name.

Those who learn from their mistakes and move on are great. But there are a lot of people who will just ignore their mistakes and never chose to learn from them. Wouldn't want to lump the two into the same 'no regrets' category.

Agreed. I don't dwell on shit, per se. When I think of regretting something, I think of making a bad decision and accept it as a bad decision.

The biggest subject of regret for people my age, I think, is tattoos. Everyone's like "I won't regret this when I'm older," but I'll bet dimes to dollars that they will, especially the dumb sluts that get tramp stamps. I'm the kind of guy who regrets bad decisions, like screwing up relationships with people, hurting people, hurting myself, and so forth. If I didn't regret these things, how would I learn from them and grow as a person?

This is why I think the whole "living with no regrets" thing is such a load of 20-something trendy bullshit. They just say this to feel less guilty about doing things that poison their bodies like binge drinking 3 nights a week. I get drunk on special occasions only. Getting drunk often (hell, once a week is often in my book) takes all the fun and all the pleasure away from getting wasted. Plus, I plan on going places that involve using my brain, so I need to preserve these brain cells while I have them. What's one night of drinking to an entire future of being intelligent and not some dumbass working at a supermarket their whole life?

I think it's impossible to live a life without regret. However, what regret you have, should be shortlived. Yeah there's days where I regret fucking around in school and stuff, but whatever, I don't dwell on it or let me bring it down.

I think, people that can easily replace regret, with the feeling of having learned from a mistake, consider themselves living without regrets. Regret is inevitable, it's how you get over it that determines what you do. If you sit and mull and angst over mistakes from years ago, you're not really learning from them. If you learn from them and give life a go with this newfound knowledge, then yeah, I think that could be considered living without regrets.

Ok, maybe that didn't make a lot of sense, but basically the idea is that, if you're learning from your mistakes and not dwelling on them, then yeah, that's a life without regrets.

I think people get regret confused with boding on the past. To truly regret nothing is perhaps one of the stupidist things I've ever heard. It is essiantly saying, I will not learn from my mistakes. However, refusing to bode on the past is good, as it is refusing to obsess; and as such you learn your lesson and move on.

agreed

Regret is defined as a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over something that has happened. So, if you are glad for what you have learned from your mistakes, you are experiencing no regret. Having no regret is not pretending not to make mistakes but the acceptance of one's mistakes. It means doing things just for the hell of doing things, because not doing them would create a lost opportunity, and the worst that could happen is it doesn't work out and you know not to do it again. Being regretful does not equal learning from your mistakes.

To learn from a mistake, there must be at least one moment of repentance. The sheer idea that I shouldn't have done that. How could this have been different.

Exactly. I don't think any sane person would believe that it's a good idea to sit around beating yourself up for days on end over something you did that you wish you hadn't, but there needs to be a moment where you say to yourself, "You idiot. Don't ever do that again." You have to be able to smack yourself around a little, tell yourself what a stupid thing that was, and move on with the knowledge that you don't want to make that mistake again.

To me, that's regret.

You know, it IS possible that the woman thought long and hard about what she wanted to do--what choices she would make, then made them. So, yes, if she did what she chose to do, then she can say she lives with no regrets.

If she never felt depression or MENTAL ANGUISH over something she did--then, again, no regrets.

It's her life, let her live it the way she wants. Anyone who tries to mold themselves to someone elses definition WILL have regrets because they won't be happy.

I've tried living without regrets. Its good to in my opinion. You are less stressed as a result and happier in the end.

You did something, and you have to own up to it. Regretting it just makes you look bad and feel shitty in the end.

when u live a life with no regrets its bcuz u are living a life full of lies. Theres no way of being completely happy... Unluckly this world is full of unjustice.

A few years ago I would agreed with this. If a person dwells on wrong doing that they have done in the past there is no way they could ever be happy. You've done it - you've live it - you can't change it. The only one not making you happy is yourself. People have gone years remaining happy because they have learned to forgive and forget and move on.

I think it's depressing if people go around regreting everything they've ever done. People make mistakes, move on. Thinking that people live without regret are living an immature life is absurd, they're the smarter ones. At least they're happy with their life. I could regret and dwell on why I shouldn't have eaten that hamburger, or why I should have stayed in school, or why I should have had kids by now, but these things don't bother me because I don't see why they should. It's not what makes ME happy. If someone wants to have tattoos and kids, and they're cool with it, more power to them.

Living a life of regret makes you depressed and resentful. If you'd rather live your life that way and think that you're better off, then go ahead.

I'm sorry, but you do not understand quite what a 'regret' is.

Under the old, pre-bobo meltdown policy, I'd tell you some examples of regret, for instance the kind your parents felt when you were born. But it's a post-bobo world, and I should be nice. Therefore, I'm glad you never had to feel regret such as those around you have felt before. :)

True. Taking it a bit further, it's a "no consequences" attitude. For example, people think they can party all night and drive home with a 2.0 blood alcohol level because hey no worries right, and then they kill someone. Or they pass out drunk and wake up pregnant and with AIDs. Or they don't bother to study in high school, and so then can't get a college degree nor a decent job. Or that let others pay their way through the world. There's consequences in life, and I don't feel sorry for the idiots that ignore these consequences: I feel sorry for those in their vicinity who fall prey to the outcomes of their actions. Tattoos & such may be lower on this chain of thinking than driving drunk, but they both basically fall under the same attitude...