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Little is more paralysing than the fear of making the wrong choice. I see this in my clients, many of whom feel stuck in cycles of indecision and procrastination. And I recognise it in my own life, which, until recently, meandered noncommitally between possible futures, preferring the safety of uncertainty over the risk of decisively forging a path that I may one day live to regret.
Regret is so frightening because it confronts us with our most fundamental anxieties. It reminds us of our finitude: that we can do this thing only once. It speaks to the responsibility we bear as architects of our lives, and what the 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) as our ‘dizzying’ freedom to make finite choices in a world of infinite possibilities. And, perhaps most disturbingly, it calls into question our authenticity, articulating the gap between the person we would like to be, the life we would like to have lived, and the reality of our day-to-day actions.
If this is all feeling a bit existential, I’ll explain. I’m training to become an existential psychotherapist, so death, the passing of time, and all things ‘existential angst’ are my domain. One of the core tenets of existential psychotherapy is that many of us spend a great deal of energy distracting ourselves from the anxiety-provoking conditions of our existence. Writing in Existential Psychotherapy (1980), the existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom splits these ‘givens of existence’ into four universal categories: mortality (that our time is finite), existential isolation (that we are ultimately alone), freedom (that we bear responsibility for our lives), and meaninglessness (that we look for meaning in a world that continually presents itself to us as senseless).
According to existential psychotherapy, if we are able to confront the reality of our fragile human existence, rather than absorbing ourselves in what Martin Heidegger called the ‘everydayness’ of life, we can live more bravely and authentically. Encountering death can help us live richer, more intentional lives; acknowledging our existential anxieties can limit their power over us; and confronting our regrets can help us move forwards more courageously and decisively.
Of course, some degree of regret is unavoidable. Choice inevitably involves loss: a path not taken, a parallel life unlived. Condemned to make choices, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it in Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), we must navigate a world of infinite possibilities, and find some way to make peace with paths not travelled. And yet, not all regrets are created equal. Why do some regrets fade, while others persist with increasing intensity? Why can some of us let go of the past, while others are engulfed by it?
One answer comes from the psychologist Marijo Lucas, who, in a 2004 paper for the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, puts forward the concept of existential regret. According to Lucas, regret is underpinned by two key ingredients. The first is existential anxiety. This underlies all forms of regret, and confronts us with our existential and temporal limits: that, however regrettable, we cannot change the past, and must live with its consequences.
But it is Lucas’s second ingredient, existential guilt, that distinguishes existential regrets from our more everyday encounters with the feeling. Think back to a time when you let yourself down; a moment in which you betrayed what you knew to be good, true or fair for the sake of short-term gratification or out of external pressure. Perhaps you put off applying for your dream job and missed the deadline, or you chose to stay in and watch TV rather than visit an ailing relative. Existential guilt arises when we look back on a choice and feel that we have abandoned ourselves. We encounter it when we make decisions that are misaligned with our values, or emerge from a state of distraction or self-sabotage rather than thoughtful, conscious intent.
Living a fulfilling, less regretful life has a lot to do with making authentic choices
For Lucas, this is the crux of what makes the lived experience of existential regret so painful: the felt sense of having behaved inauthentically and acted against our deeply held values or beliefs. Regret may be inevitable, but if we feel we acted thoughtfully and remained true to ourselves, we can look back and say we made the best decision with the information we had at the time. If we betray our values, on the other hand, forgiveness may feel out of reach.
At the core of Lucas’s theory is a simple and compelling idea: that living a fulfilling, less regretful life has a lot to do with making authentic choices. This idea has historic roots, but also particular resonance in our ‘you do you’ cultural moment. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (1846), Kierkegaard wrote of the importance of ‘becoming what one is’, an idea reflected in Friedrich Nietzsche’s call in The Gay Science (1882) to ‘become who you are’. For Heidegger, living authentically meant rising above the ‘they’ of the herd and confronting the realities of existence, rather than getting lost in the detail of everyday concerns. More recently, the palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware documented the most common regrets of her dying patients, with a lack of authenticity rising above all other forms of regret. ‘Of all of the regrets and lessons shared with me as I sat beside their beds,’ she writes, ‘the regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common one of all. It was also the one that caused the most frustration …’
Of course, being true to ourselves is not always a straightforward endeavour. Our selves are complex, multifaceted and often contradictory. Nevertheless, at a time when many of us feel paralysed by choice, authenticity may offer a compass for moments of indecision. If, as Lucas suggests, authentic choices are easier to bear, living in closer alignment with our values and authentic preferences may help us avoid the worst pain of regret. If we can approach past missteps with curiosity and acceptance, regret can even provide useful lessons – telling us what matters to us most, helping us choose differently in the future, and guiding us towards a more purposeful, satisfying life.
When thinking about my own regrets, existential or otherwise, the eating disorder that consumed my early 20s looms large. As an experience, it was life-interrupting and world-shrinking. It caused people I love immeasurable pain, and left imprints on my mind and body with which I am still grappling. It was, by so many measures, regrettable. But it also complicated my sense of what it means to make authentic choices.
I experienced anorexia as a kind of possession: a sense of being taken over by a malignant, totalising force, whose voice appeared to me as my own, but held entirely opposing desires, beliefs and values. Described by Megan Warin in her book Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia (2010) as an ‘alterity-within’, anorexia is frequently experienced by those who live with it as a kind of bifurcation of self: a battle between an ‘anorexic’ self and a ‘true’ or ‘healthy’ self. Anorexia’s ‘voice’ is attributed its own agency, independent from the counter voice it battles against. ‘It’s like there are two people in my head,’ says one participant in a study exploring the ways anorexia can complicate the experience of selfhood.
My journey out of anorexia was a culmination of hundreds of daily choices I had to choose again and again and again
Externalising the anorexic voice as something to distrust, battle against and ultimately overcome was helpful in my recovery. Also helpful was the idea that, despite my significant guilt and shame, the illness wasn’t fundamentally my fault. I found comfort in the idea that what was happening to me was a direct consequence of faulty biology, rather than something I had consciously caused.
But while becoming ill was not a choice, getting better felt like a colossal exercise of will. Recovery is a lot like being at war with yourself. The smallest of decisions become battlegrounds: to walk or take the bus; whether to eat a croissant for breakfast; how much milk to put in your coffee. My journey out of anorexia was a culmination of hundreds of daily choices that I had to choose again and again and again. Or as the writer and activist Jessica Gaitán Johannesson puts it in her essay collection The Nerves and Their Endings (2022): ‘a recovery which happens every time I choose the world, and choose the world again’.
While the choices we face in life are generally less fraught than those demanded by eating disorder recovery, we nevertheless all have our own versions of choosing the world. We know what it is to choose the discomfort of change over the safety of stasis, to take a leap into uncertainty when what is known no longer serves us, or to choose life when grief or despair threatens to pull us into darkness.
Life, much like recovery, is not constructed out of dramatic forks in the road, but rather from thousands of micro-choices that, taken together, build habits, relationships and trajectories. Every day we make choices that, if chosen consistently, bring us closer toward or further away from the things we care about and the lives we want to lead.
Of course, there is much in life we cannot control: the circumstances into which we are born, our biochemical or genetic wiring, the flow of time that ages and eventually extinguishes us all. But, within limitation, we have choice. This negotiation between constraint and freedom, what Heidegger calls our ‘thrown’ condition, and our capacity to project ourselves into the future and forge new possibilities for ourselves, is central to existential thinking about what it means to be authentic, choice-making beings.
Authenticity, for Heidegger, is less about staying true to some kind of inner authentic self, and more about taking responsibility for our choices, and constructing ourselves through action. It’s about intentionally carving a path in life without losing ourselves in social norms and expectations or fleeing from our freedom. The authentic person, he writes, ‘chooses to choose’.
We face choices not only in how we move forward in life, but also in how we appraise the past. Do we remain stuck in a cycle of rumination, or do we find ways to accept the past and move on? Do we deny our part, or do we take responsibility for our choices and try to do better next time? Noticing the stories we tell about the past, and crafting new stories for ourselves, is much of what we do in therapy.
Finding ways to accept the past with more compassion can help to set us free
One quite radical way of rethinking our relationship to the past, which may bear on how we navigate our regrets, is Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati. Translated as ‘love of one’s fate’, amor fati represents a radical acceptance of all that is and has been. Nietzsche writes:
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it – all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary – but love it.
Amor fati embraces a kind of narrative fatalism: that life has happened how it was meant to happen, how it was always going to unfold. Without denying our individual responsibility for its construction, it encourages us to accept the story of the past as our story, however undesirable its narrative arc might feel.
Learning to love our fate isn’t easy, and perhaps not always desirable, particularly if we have experienced trauma or injustice. But finding ways to accept the past with more compassion can help to set us free.
I will never be able to get back the months I spent on an eating disorder ward, or undo the hurt that my self-destruction inflicted on people I love. I cannot take back unhappy years in the wrong jobs or dating the wrong people. And, truthfully, if time travel were a possibility, I’m not sure I would want to go back. These things, along with everything else, are the building blocks that made me. They helped clarify my values and priorities. They helped me date the right people and find the right jobs. While my eating disorder has been harder to come to terms with, I know that erasing it from my history would dismantle all that has flown from it: the support groups I have run for others in recovery, my decision to become a psychotherapist, my gratitude for a healthy body.
I had not yet discovered existential psychotherapy when I was working through my recovery, but I can now see a clear thread between the forces that drew me to it and those that helped me out of my eating disorder and into life: a direct confrontation with existential despair, a quest for meaning, a desire to live in closer alignment with my values, and the recognition that I had to take responsibility for my life.
And as I continue the messy process of forging a life, and fumble in the dark with my clients as they do the same, these existential confrontations continue to provide some kind of compass. As Kierkegaard reminds us in Either/Or (1843), we cannot live a regret-free life. In a world of dizzying freedom and finite possibilities, some level of existential anxiety is to be expected; some regret unavoidable. But if we can bring more intention and authenticity to our decision-making, if we can follow the path of our own choosing rather than one set out for us, if we can face up to the past and approach our missteps with curiosity and acceptance, we may find a way towards a life less marred by indecision and regret.
