If Only: Is Regret Discipline or Self-Torture?

Bölüm metni

There is a sentence you say at two in the morning, when nothing can be changed: if only. You call it conscience — but what if it is only a way of hurting yourself for a past that no longer exists? And if you tore that sentence out, what would be left to keep you honest?

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That sentence that arrives when you're staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night: "if only." Why are you still handing down a sentence for something you cannot change — and is that punishment actually making you a better person? In this episode we ask whether regret is a compass, or a trap you've set for yourself.

It's a little past three in the morning. You're lying on your back, your eyes fixed in the dark on that never-changing emptiness of the ceiling. You have to be at work tomorrow morning; you should sleep. But your mind isn't sleeping. Your mind is replaying a scene: an answer given ten years ago, a message never sent, a sheet of paper you signed, or didn't. And over that scene it keeps insisting on the same two syllables. If only.

Turkish borrowed this word from Persian; the original is "kâşkî." In Arabic, the same sigh comes out as "yâ leyte." Almost every language has a short, nearly childlike formula that does this job — because what's being expressed isn't complicated, only unbearable. The human being is the only creature that can see a thing that never happened as though it had. "If only" is the bill for that gift.

If we want to lay out the anatomy of regret, we need three parts. First, a fork in the road: at least two doors, and the fact that you chose one of them. Second, an outcome: one you don't like, one that hurts, one whose account you haven't settled. Third — and this is the part that truly burns — imagination: the capacity to bring to life what lay behind the door you didn't choose.

Without that third part there is pain, but no regret. Someone whose house collapses in an earthquake suffers the pain of the ruin, but does not regret it, because the fault line was not their decision. But if, that morning before leaving the house, they had wondered whether to have that wall reinforced and then dropped the idea, something entirely different mixes into the pain. Regret is the price of agency. Someone who believes they never decided anything regrets nothing — which is why some people turn never deciding into a strategy for living. Does it work? We'll come to that.

There's a measurement that shows just how arbitrarily imagination operates here. Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec and Scott Madey examined footage from the nineteen ninety-two Barcelona Olympics; they had observers who didn't know the results rate the athletes' facial expressions at the moment of the medal and on the podium. The picture that emerged looks irrational, yet all of us recognize it: silver medalists were unhappier than bronze medalists. Objectively, silver is better. But the film playing in the silver medalist's mind is "I almost came first," while the film playing in the bronze medalist's mind is "I almost didn't medal at all." What determines happiness isn't the medal in your hand; it's the alternative your mind produces all by itself.

And the production of those alternatives isn't random either — it has a direction. A now-classic question from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky goes like this: Paul considers swapping the shares he holds for another company's shares, decides against it, and stays put. George swaps his. Both lose the same amount, twelve hundred dollars. Which one regrets it more? More than ninety percent of participants point to George: the one who acted. Because inaction is easy to defend — you can say, "I didn't do anything." Action demands a signature, and a signature means responsibility.

But time reverses this picture. When Gilovich and Medvec asked people to look back over their entire lives and name their greatest regrets, the list changed: regret over the things they hadn't done outweighed regret over the things they had — in the studies, by roughly a factor of two. Even a wrong marriage turns into a story over time, becomes tellable, yields its lesson. The book never written, though, never closes. A mistake you made has an ending; a thing you never did has none. Like an unclosed parenthesis, it takes the rest of your life inside it.

And this is exactly where that moment of staring at the ceiling hurts. Because what's at stake there isn't a single decision; what's at stake is the person you could have been and weren't.

So — if you had chosen the other door, would you have been saved? In eighteen forty-three in Copenhagen, a two-volume book appears under the pen name Victor Eremita: Enten-Eller, that is, Either/Or. Its author is Søren Kierkegaard. Among the short, disjointed notes at the start of the first volume lies a sequence of sentences that breaks the modern person's spine. Marry, he says, and you will regret it; don't marry, and you will regret that too. Laugh at the world's follies, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will regret that too. Hang yourself, and you will regret it; don't hang yourself, and you will regret that too. And in the end he leaves this as the summation of all life's wisdom: either way, you will regret it.

This is not a display of pessimism but a diagnosis of a structure. To choose is, by definition, to kill. To walk one road means closing off all the others. When you chose that department at university, four departments you didn't choose died; when you stayed in that city, your lives in the cities you never moved to died; when you stayed with that person — or left them — one more possibility was buried. Every biography is also a graveyard. And the residents of that graveyard never grow old.

Here's the most unfair thing about the life you never lived: it never gets tired. Real life has tax debt, mornings when your back aches, dishes in the sink, a relative who wears you out. The alternative life in your head has none of that. Its tires never go flat, its child never spikes a fever in the night, its boss is never an idiot. In the trial you stage in your mind, real life sits in the defendant's chair with every one of its flaws on display, while the alternative life never takes the stand at all. In a court like that, the life that didn't happen wins every time. That's the mathematical trick of regret: we compare what we lived through to the advertising poster of what we didn't.

Modernity industrialized that trick. What Barry Schwartz examines in The Paradox of Choice is exactly this. As the number of options goes up, satisfaction doesn't rise — it falls. Schwartz and his colleagues divide people into two camps: those who want to find the very best, and those who take something good enough and get on with their lives. The ones chasing the best may well end up with better outcomes, but they report more regret, less satisfaction, more comparing. Because the moment you say "the best," you leave behind you an endless queue of options you didn't choose. When the supermarket jam shelf holds forty varieties, the jar you pick stops being simply a good jam and becomes a verdict handed down against thirty-nine other possibilities. The same logic runs in the dating app on your phone, on the job listings site, in the twenty tabs you open while apartment hunting. Our grandparents had little regret, because they had few doors.

And here we meet the darker face of the question in our title. When regret leads nowhere, it turns into a machine. The thing Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent decades studying is called rumination, and the most honest image for it is the way cattle chew the cud — bringing the same mouthful back up and grinding it again. Her finding is unambiguous: people do this because they mistake it for a form of problem solving, when in fact rumination is the opposite of problem solving, and it doesn't ease depression — it deepens it and draws it out.

You can catch the difference in the grammar of a single sentence. The mind that asks "why me, why did this happen to me, why am I like this" is spinning in place; it's asking a question that will accept no answer, because it isn't really looking for an answer — it's handing down a punishment. The mind that asks "here's what I did in that situation, and here's what I'll do if it comes around again" is walking forward. The first one stares at the ceiling. The second one looks at tomorrow morning.

So the question becomes: is there a way to say yes to what has already happened — to say yes without lying to yourself?

In eighteen eighty-two, Nietzsche opens the fourth part of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft — The Gay Science — with a short passage written for the new year. In it he makes himself a wish: from now on, his only desire is to wage no more war against what is; to learn to see even what strikes him as ugly as beautiful; to stop laying blame. And he gives this stance a name: amor fati, the love of fate.

In a later passage of the same book, he turns it into a test. Imagine, he says, that one day in your loneliest loneliness a demon steals up beside you and says: you will have to live this life again, and countless times again; nothing new in it, every pain, every joy, every small thought, even this moonlight you see now and this spider, will come back in the very same order. What do you do? Do you grind your teeth and curse the demon, or can you say, "I want this again"? Nietzsche frames the question not as a recipe for happiness but as a set of scales. It measures the real mark you'd give your own life.

A few years later, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he rebuilds the same idea in the language of the will. The deepest wound in the human will is that it cannot will backward; the past is the stone the will can get no grip on. Deliverance lies in turning "it was so" into "thus I willed it." And in one of his last books, he boils the formula for human greatness down to a single sentence: to want nothing to be other than it is — not ahead, not behind, not for all eternity.

It's worth remembering that the man who said this was sick, nearly blind, drifting from one boarding house to the next with relentless headaches, writing books nobody bought, and profoundly alone. Amor fati is not a declaration of pleasure; it's a discipline. It isn't something said by a person who finds it easy to love their life — it's something said by a person looking for a technique that would let them.

Two hundred years before Nietzsche, in Amsterdam, another man who made his living grinding lenses drew a far colder conclusion from the same problem. In the fourth part of the Ethics, published in sixteen seventy-seven after Spinoza's death, there's a proposition: regret is not a virtue, it does not arise from reason; the person who regrets what they have done is twice wretched. The logic is mercilessly clean. First you gave in to a misguided desire, and now you're giving in to your own whip; you're taking two separate losses in two separate places, and you're growing stronger from neither.

But the really interesting part of Spinoza is the note he attaches to this proposition. He says: because human beings so rarely live by reason, feelings such as humility and repentance — like fear — do more good than harm in practice. In other words, the philosopher is saying this: for an ideal being, repentance is a needless pain; for a real human being, it is a brake that actually works. Perhaps the answer to the question in our title lies inside that distinction: repentance is unnecessary for a being governed wholly by reason; for beings like us, it is, for now, necessary.

Now let us look at the same matter in the language of these lands. The eighteenth-century thinker İbrahim Hakkı of Erzurum, known for his Marifetnâme, wrote a poem known as the Tefviznâme, and it is still recited from memory today. Tefviz means handing the matter back to its owner. The poem opens by saying that things which look like misfortune can be turned to good; it counsels a person not to fall into vain imaginings, not to let the heart grow clouded; and at the end of every stanza it returns to the same two lines: let us see what the Lord will do — whatever He does, He does beautifully. The verbs are striking: he says "let us see." Not a fixed piece of knowledge, but a judgment still waiting to unfold. What is asked here is acceptance of fate, but without finishing the sentence of fate inside your own head.

To keep acceptance from being confused with passivity, this tradition draws a very clear line within itself. That famous saying goes: tie up your camel first, then trust in God. The station of acceptance in Sufism looks at what is finished and done; it does not tie a person's hands against what is still to come. Acceptance toward what has happened, will toward what is yet to happen. The moment you lose that distinction, both amor fati and trust in God turn into a narcotic: they become a cover for calling oppression "fate," for calling neglect "it was written this way." To love what has happened is not the same as refusing to intervene in what is happening.

And to be honest, there is one more limit to saying yes to the past. A person can say of their own suffering, "I willed it this way." They have no right to say that about someone else's suffering. Amor fati is ethical in the first person singular and cruel in the third.

Accepting the past silences the if only. But something is left missing. Because repentance is not only a pain to be soothed; it is also a message, a notification. And in the thought of these lands there is a very finely tuned mechanism for what to do with that notification.

In Arabic, tevbe — repentance — literally means to turn back. A short saying found in the hadith sources goes to the heart of the matter: remorse is repentance; that is, the feeling of regret is the turning itself. At first glance this seems to say that the emotion is enough. But al-Ghazali, in his work İhyâu Ulûmi'd-dîn, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, divides repentance into three parts: knowledge, state, and deed. Knowledge comes first: truly seeing where what you did is taking you. Out of that knowledge a state is born, and that state is remorse — the heart's pain. And out of that pain a deed is born: stopping, making amends, resolving never to return to it. In the architecture of the Revival, remorse is the middle link in the chain; without knowledge in front of it and action behind it, the chain snaps and all you are left holding is the pain.

This may be the clearest statement of the distinction we have been looking for throughout this whole episode. Repentance, with knowledge placed before it and action after it, is discipline. Without the knowledge in front, it is only shame; without the action behind, it is only torture. The same feeling, in two different chains, becomes two different things.

How the Qur'an uses the words if only is also remarkable in this light. In the chapter of Mary a day is given a name: the day of longing, the day of regret. In the chapter of the Criterion there is a man biting his hands; twice he says if only, once about the road he took and once about the companion he chose. In the chapter of the Tidings a voice is heard saying, "if only I had been dust." Every if only in the text is an if only that comes far too late; none of them can be made good. Yet those words are being recited to someone alive today. Which means the religious text turns future regret into the compass of a present decision. The direction of the if only has been reversed: a voice that looked backward and wounded has become a voice that looks forward and warns.

Right alongside this, within the very same tradition, stands a clear prohibition aimed at rumination. In a saying transmitted by Muslim, a person is warned against saying, about a matter already finished, "if I had done it this way, that would not have happened" — because the word "if" opens the devil's door. Notice: self-examination is not forbidden; in the same sources, taking account of oneself is explicitly recommended. What is forbidden is the "if" sentence built on top of something that can no longer be changed. Fourteenth-century ethics and twenty-first-century psychology draw, oddly enough, the very same line: do not chew it over — settle the account.

Modern research doesn't treat regret as a pointless malfunction either. Neal Roese's work on counterfactual thinking shows that regret is a functional signal: from it you learn where you measured something wrong, what you overvalued, which of your own values you betrayed. And there's a practical test for telling whether the signal is helping you or harming you. Can you turn your regret into a single forward-looking sentence? "The next time an offer like that comes along, I'll take it." "The next time we fight, I'll call before I go home." If it translates, that regret is a lesson. If it doesn't, what you're holding isn't a lesson — it's a small courtroom you've built for yourself, and since you are both the judge and the defendant, the verdict never comes.

So where do we hear this signal most clearly? Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse, gathered the notes from her years spent at the bedsides of the dying into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The sentence at the top of that list is this: I wish I'd had the courage to be myself — to live my own life, rather than the life others expected of me. The rest belong to the same family: I wish I hadn't worked so hard, I wish I'd been able to say what I felt, I wish I hadn't let my friendships fade, I wish I'd allowed myself to be happier. Not one of them is the confession of a mistake. Every one of them is an absence: the thing left undone.

And here an unsettling symmetry emerges. Almost every regret voiced at the end of a life concerns something that could still be done today. Which means that list isn't a lament — it's a recipe. The present-day equivalent of a deathbed "I wish" is a list of acts of courage.

And this reveals that regret's cruellest quality and its most useful quality are one and the same thing: regret reminds us that time runs in only one direction. Repentance repairs your relationship with the past, but it does not give back the lost year. Acceptance eases the pain, but it does not make what never happened happen. No retroactive surgery is possible. The only thing that is possible is running the same mechanism forwards.

So the task of the person staring at the ceiling at three in the morning is not to stop the film playing in their head; it's to turn the film around. The question "why did I do that, that day" has no answer, because that day's circumstances, its knowledge, its fear are all gone now; the person asking the question has never met the person who could answer it. But the question "what will I do tomorrow at nine o'clock" does have an answer — and that answer can be given tonight.

And usually it's something small. A phone call. An apology. An application put off for years. The next morning won't erase the mistake you made ten years ago; but it will erase one line from the list of regrets you'd have ten years from now.

That brings us to the end of today's episode here on Neuron Philosophy. Until we meet again, in a new story.

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