post-regret
- I have an essay about this from 2017, "Transcending Regrets, Problems, and Mistakes", which, based on what people have told me, is probably the most powerful & beautiful piece I have published.
- This page is where I'm collecting further thoughts on the topic.
- "we can build on this"
- = a beautiful expression of post-regret
- you can say it about pretty much anything
- "it would have been worse if it had gone according to plan"
- Written November 6th, 2019:
- A beautiful line, out of nowhere, in Some Nights by the band fun:
- My heart is breaking for my sister and the con that she called "love"
But when I look into my nephew's eyes,
Man you wouldn't believe, the most amazing things, that can come from
Some terrible nights - We are all born of this.
- I would not have been born if not for the Cold War.
- My parents would not have been born if not for World War II
- My grandparents would not have been born if not for The War To End All Wars
- There aren't any profound stories to tell, for me, about chance meetings related to these wars. It's just that those events were all so large that clearly if they had somehow been prevented so many things would have gone differently that even if somehow these two people had met and fallen in love, their children would have been of different sperm and egg, and context.
- We clearly need a place from beyond regret, in order to begin to appreciate our lives at all, without shutting things out.
- We find our way into situations that touch all of our oldest fears, and then it's really hard to find our way out because those fears represent exactly the sorts of situations we don't know how to get out of.
- tweets
- Music
- Reflective, with grief: Anthem by Leonard Cohen
- Thoughts on dealing with Regret when it shows up
- The Curse of the Counterfactual (LW post by PJ Eby)
11 linked references
April 1st, 2024
- the yang to post-regret's yin — acceptance isn't the same as acceptance, the obstacle is the way, self-trust comes from respecting distrust
- In a world of karma and causality, "Changing the past" is the only thing worth striving for.
You are trapped, inexorably, on a rail-path that pulls you into the future that the past created.
You cannot make anything in the future 'better' without in some way changing the past.
The Trying-To-Be-Wise say, "You shouldn't try to change the past; you should try to accept it."
What do you think changing the past feels like, from the inside?
Once the past has truly changed, you don't *feel* it as changed; you feel it as has-always-been.
"Failure to accept the past" is merely the experience, from-the-inside, of what it means to need to change the past.
"Accepting the past" is merely the experience, from-the-inside, of having changed the past so that a better future can happen.
January 13th, 2023
boggling a bit at spiritual bypassing, spiritual material… › it seems to me that there are sort of a few things being … › using [your ability to experience the reality that in som…
- interestingly, this also seems related to my post-regret post...
- and insofar as there was something missing there, it was kind of doing this bypassing
August 30th, 2022
- new thread re post-post-regret - my threads on twitter
post-blame apology
- This is an equivalent realization to one I recently had around post-regret, recognizing that while in some sense nobody has ever made a mistake in the entire history of the universe, it's important to be able to have the thought "ahh I fucked up there"
June 1st, 2021
- addendum to Intend Philosophy & Paradigm that jives with post-regret
Sequence on NNTD
topics — I want an auto-generated N/M progress bar here › ~ everything is fertile fodder for learning/jazz - synerg…
- relates to post-regret
January 25th, 2021
- This is a very interesting bit related to post-regret. Points at the role of healthy regret, and the idea that if one's mind is dwelling on some decision or situation in a regretful way, then there may be something important to learn from that past thing, even if the regret energy itself is unhelpful.