Wise Words? Regret vs. Hope

 It's that time again

I once again find myself at a crossroads, which itself lies at the end of a very long road, and it would be a lie to say that the journey here has not left me exhausted and drained. 

Fatigue has always been one of the hardest thing for me to feel when making decisions. It swarms together and seems to amplify the presence of regrets in my mind, making all roads appear thorny and treacherous.

When I've asked for advice on large life decisions before, one of the most common things to hear is "trust your gut." This is good if nebulous advice; it can still be unhelpful to people who are in deep internal conflict. So if for nothing more than my own benefit, I want to examine what I consider to be the conflicting cocktail of emotional realities at the core of our "gut" feelings. If you ask me, the two factors at play here are what we "can" versus what we "should" do.

There are only certain things we "can" do. For as much as I believe in the independence and individuality of the human experience, there are certain factors which are outside of all of our control. An easy example could be anything which took place before your were born: things like who your parents are, where you're born, and what factors your environment contains. Not just your hometown or your home nation, but the state of the world itself. These are all things that exist in the before time, over which control is impossible.

As time goes on after we are born, the past of our world is now our past too, and we become more and more affected by our the consequences of our own choices. 

First we grow slightly older and start to learn basic causality and responsibility, then we enter the "adult world" once we fulfill certain criteria determined by our society. At this point, we have the ability to determine or at least influence the size of our circle of impact. Some people have large impacts on their families, some on their communities, and some on scales which seem to introduce unique challenges to the human experience. We now live in the age of cancel culture, which to quote this video by Contrapoints (who would have a lot more personal experience here than me), can serve to alienate people whose public value has been very concretely commodify in a way which I imagine feels very objectifying.

Whatever the scale of your influence though, things which are done immediately move into the past. That means that whatever amount of control you had is now lost, and things which may have once been in your control are now as immutable as the president or amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the year you were born. However, unlike those examples which affect us but do not reflect solely on us, personal mistakes can form a big part of how other people see us. So as time goes on, we gain a more nuanced understanding of this causality, and it's possible (though not guaranteed) for us to gain a more clear understanding of what we "should" do.

The passage of time and the linear direction of it are, to us humans at least, some of the few true constants in the universe.But just because something is immutable does not mean that all forces exist within it peacefully. When I talk to other people who also suffer from depression, one thing which seems to be constant is an inflated sense of regret and guilt, which locks us into thinking about things we "should" have done even though we "can" do nothing differently now.

Luckily though, at least as I'm writing this, I am not dead and there are therefore a lot of things which I "can" do, which gives me the option to actually think about what I "should" do in a pragmatic sense which has practical value.

What we should do is informed by a lot of different things, but I think past regrets form the bedrock of all that other nuanced decision making. Though senses of regret can be inflated to the point of self mutilation, its important to remember that the emotion exists for a reason. All of our human emotions have healthy and unhealthy manifestations, the consequences of feeling them all depends on the context in which they're being applied and the degree to which we feel, weigh, and react to them. This is a more general idea which I'm not going to take the time to prove now, but I'll prove it in the case of regret and if I think of a rebuttal or maybe even read one in the comments :o) I'll respond to that at a later date. 

As stated earlier, regret is a frustrating emotion because it forces us to consider the "should" of things which we "can" do nothing about. The idea behind this is that it may help us consider what to do in future situations which resemble the one in which a mistake was made. Making mistakes is often painful, so when we make one and then try to learn a lesson from it we are eager to not make the same mistake or a similar one again. However, this is far from a full proof, one to one causality. Take this quote as at least evidence of this idea's presence outside the wacky world of my head.

 "Unfortunately we quickly forget the lessons we've learned, and then we have to learn them all over again"

- Jet, Cowboy Bebop, Toys in the Attic

Examining past scenarios and trying to relate them to current ones is a form of pattern recognition. We are looking at the events from our lives and trying to see where our actions shifted the sequence of events and how we might want to change that in the future. However, as humans, we are prone to seeing patters where there are not any. An example of this which comes to mind is the report (SINGULAR) which surfaced when I was a child that vaccines cause autism, an explanation of which can be found here. That explanation is long and detailed, but one of the core issues which allowed the movement to take off is that its common for children to receive their first dose of the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine at 12-15 weeks, which is also when symptoms of autism typically become noticeable by parents. This tendency to assume that two things which occurred at the same time must share a causal relationship is sometimes called the Causal Fallacy. 

The Causal Fallacy helps lend regret its immobilizing power. It makes things which happen together sometimes seem as though they must always coexist with one another. In the case of regret, after a certain amount of hardship, it can start to feel as though an individual (usually the self but sometimes the victim of bullying) is associated with failure itself. Such a conception is common in the binary world of toxic masculinity, where its common to label people as either "winners" or "losers" as though they are immutable traits of their very essence. It's very possible that these same attributes are assigned in female and non binary spaces but I wouldn't know so I won't speculate. Being branded as a "loser" in whatever form it takes is very immobilizing, because it makes it seem as though all future endeavors will always end in defeat.

"I'm a winner. I'll always be a winner, and you'll always be a loser."

 -George's Boss, The Revenge, Seinfeld

"Conform or be cast out"

-Subdivisions, Signals, Rush, Peart

I've often felt like a loser. School was always a challenge for me and as I've grown up its been hard to look back on all the time spent trying to succeed and justify it in contrast to a more personally meaningful education or god forbid some fun. I've always struggled in social situations, and sports have never been my friend either. The only one I stuck with was cross country and my lasting impression of that period of my life is an eating disorder. On top of that, the only romantic relationship I've ever had was a total disaster and in many ways I'm still trying to build back some of the vital bridges that toxic mess cost me. 

So, what do I do now in the wake of all that wasted youth? Regret forms the bedrock of decision making, but I don't want to stare at my regrets anymore. Fear is a more powerful foe than most of the specific things we're afraid of.

Thankfully, my most recent and final (YAY) semester of college was much more successful, academically and socially (although not romantically ;-; ). And one of the things I decided while having the opportunity to participate in some more social stuff was that I did not want to complain anymore. That doesn't mean I want to start telling lies about how I feel, only that I want to try and remove the amount of power I'm giving the regrets in my life.

I don't care if words are wind and can't move stone or break bones, words have power. They are the most common physical (in the form of air waves) manifestation of the human mind and they are the bedrock of how we learn everything. A picture may be worth a thousand words but words can imply non specific images and feelings in the minds of people who hear or read them. They are the only art medium which is in part constructed in the mind of the observer. And when we speak of or even think of things, we reinforce those neural pathways in our brain and we reinforce certain perceptions of ourselves or our world to other people.

One of my only truly great teachers once told me that I was using a lot of my mental energy talking shit on myself. Those weren't the exact words she used, but the sentiment stuck with me even though when I first heard the phrase as a 17 year old, it was still rejected by my paper shredder mind as naive and optimistic drivel. But with hindsight, I can now see that not only do negative thoughts not lead to positive improvement, but they are actively trying to convince yourself and everyone around you that you suck. It may seem like humility, but self humiliation is still a form of narcissism. You are obsessed with your own self image, but rather than the more obviously egocentric act of placing yourself above others in order to feel superior, you place yourself below others so that all good qualities and actions appear as miracles and you never have to feel the pain of a fall from grace.

So I'm trying to reject regret and live a more holistic and truthful positivity. That certainly sounds nice, but what the hell does that even look like?

Well if I had a definitive answer to that question I wouldn't need to write this thing, so to make it a little easier lets talk about some of the positive aspects of things we "should" do. If we're trying to move away from regret, I think a good place to start again would be the logical opposite of regret: hope. For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to define hope as the things we want with relative certainty but whose attainability is unknown or downright unlikely or even impossible. 

The certainty of hope comes from the way it affects us emotionally. It provides us with a warm fuzzy feeling much like love or happiness, but it necessarily concerns something which is not with us in the present. The combination of certainty in emotion but uncertainty in outcome had led to some negative opinions on hope. Two which quickly come to my mind are

"It's the hope that kills you"

- Ted Lasso, Hope that Kills You, Ted Lasso

"Hope tortures your fucking ass" 

- Clancy (Duncan Trussell), Annihilation of Joy, Midnight Gospel

Both of these quotes paint hope as something which by its nature causes suffering, in two different circumstances. Ted Lasso refuses the claim that hope kills you and instead postulates that he "believes in belief"(Ted Lasso, Hope that Kills You). In contrast, Duncan Trussell's word are his belief itself, which seems to imply that hope is in fact painful. And in the context of the conversation he's having, he's arguing that hope necessarily protects us from something which he and his guest Jason Louv call "the feeling", which I think could more clearly be called Presence (Duncan Trussel and Jason Louv, Annihilation of Joy, Midnight Gospel). I like both of these pieces of media, if something gets quoted on this blog it made me think which is basically the most I as a cerebral person can ask of media, but I do disagree with both so allow me to go into just a little more detail about the arguments themselves. 

To Ted's point, I believe in belief too. But to me the limitation of what he says is that its more or less a pep talk. He says he clings to hope and says that not having it is bad but he doesn't really explore how he holds to that belief. The reason he feels the need to address this at all is that his team is going into a match in which they are not favored and some of the more reserved and English members of the team have expressed that having hope in the outcome of the match will make the inevitable loss even more painful. Once you feel that warm fuzzy feeling, it'll be all the more painful when it turns into a could have been. Better to just hide your heart from the disappointment and not allow yourself to be crushed by the defeat.

Now that match ended in defeat even though the team took Ted's shallow advice and held out some hope, so in the end the show doesn't make a definitive statement on hope (which is fair enough, it's a TV show not a college lecture).  But in my experience, the appeal of hopelessness is shallow, and it ends up bringing more of the disappointment it predicts. "Negative minds produce negative outcomes" is a common phrase used to punch down on hippies and psychologists as optimistic swill, but in my experience there is some truth to it. Allow me to elaborate.

I used to go to Super Smash Bros tournaments in high school and college in what I explained at the time as a quest for social connection but what was more accurately a search for external validation from any sort of peer group. And the thing was, as I got older, a lot of the people who I would play against in tournaments would still be pretty young. Middle school and high school a lot of the times, commonly 14 and 15 year old boys. The thing about playing against those kids as a 20 year old man(?) was that I would enter those matches feeling like losing would not just be a bad outcome but an embarrassing mess. The fear of loss would weigh heavy on my mind and I always played worse against opponents I did not respect. They were still stupid kids so I won some of the time, but there were was always an increased number of mistakes and rash decisions. And as much as I hate to sound like a scrub, I certainly could have won some of those matches I ended up losing. Especially the ones I played in the losers bracket (most fighting game tournaments have double elimination systems where you lose twice before being eliminated). So certainly, dismissing hope can sometimes lead you to turn to fear of regrettable outcomes instead, which as I said earlier is very much something I'm trying to avoid. Partially because it makes you sound whinny but partially because it literally increases the chances of hardship.

But is hope the only alternative to regret? Duncan Trussell seems to postulate that presence is the best alternative, and he has a Netflix show, so maybe he knows something. Like Ted Lasso, I think what he says is true but I still think it misses the whole picture. Presence is wonderful, I think existing in the present moment is very important for everyday happiness, but I don't think its useful for existential questions. Being in the here and now allows us to experience our present state of life, but sometimes we want to enforce some change in our lives. Being present in a situation which abuses you and just accepting the positive and negative elements of it as they are and continuing forward isn't contentment, its complacency.

But why does Duncan go so far as to say that hope "kicks your ass"? Well I think that has a lot to do with the nature of the hopes that people hold. If you are in a desperate situation and are clinging to a wild hope which could never come true, the persistent ripping of that from your soul will certainly leave a scar. If you're stuck in a literal hole in the ground and you hope to grow wings and fly away, not only are you punishing yourself but you're literally sitting there as you sink deeper into the ground. As Greta Thurnburg said in her address to Congress in 2019, "This is not the time and place for dreams. This is the time to wake up. This is the moment in history when we need to be wide awake." But just because it is not the time for unrealistic dreams does not mean that we need hope any less. In fact, I think we need it all the more in these dark times. 

Duncan Trussel correlates hope with Disney movie idealism, comparing it to signing in the fields with animals signing a la the beginning of Cinderella. But is the the only kind of hope? I tend to think not. I think hope which is unrealistic is actually not too different from regret, it focuses on how you feel the world "should" be without any "can" do way to make that happen. 

So what "can" we do? Well a lot of that comes down to which choices are easiest to make. Now I come from a midwestern catholic background, so I was always aware that anything worth having was worth working for, but I think the Causal Fallacy we talked about earlier can skew this truth into the thing you have to work the hardest for is the best thing. Where I feel this falls short is it fails to take advantage of one of the most interesting and useful aspects of human beings: our natural proclivities. In other words, the things we enjoy doing for no other reason than because we enjoy doing them. Often these things are challenging and require a lot of effort from us in more than one way, but crucially, we find the concept approachable and interesting enough that the intrinsic rewards of the activity justifies the effort. 

Now one of the toughest things about the human experience is finding this thing. It's easy to get discouraged by those who seem to have more talent or resources for your passion than you do and in a capitalist system where we have to work for the machine in order to eat and have a place to stay, even the humble among us are forced to do something other than think feel and create for survival. Or else you have to find a way to sell what you create, which is not necessarily an amoral practice, but if you start to rely on it for survival that extrinsic motivator can start to override whatever the intrinsic motivation there was originally and ironically destroy your career through the phenomenon commonly called "selling out." 

For those of us who are unable to sell our art or even find the time to create at all, it is all the more important to develop a meaningful balance in your life which fills you with the most hope. Its not necessarily about doing what's easy, it would be more accurate to say that we have to chose the paths which look traversable so that we know we'll be able to keep going when the going inevitably gets tough. You can't avoid suffering in life without total detachment from physical reality, so I think the best thing to do is not necessarily to give in to that suffering and wear it like a crown of thorns, but to find a life which is worth suffering for.

What that looks like is different for each person, but it must be something like what the ancient Greeks called the "good life." Not just a hedonistic life of pleasure seeking, but a meaningful existence which produces good ends through good means in order to feel good and do good.

At least, that's what I'm hoping to find. 

If only because if I don't at least look.

I know I'll regret it.