Name: 【TED】Kathryn Schulz: Don't regret regret (Kathryn Schulz: Don't regret regret)
Uploaded: 2014-08-15T13:12:59.000Z
Duration: 16 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

And that's Johnny Depp's famous shoulder tattoo.

and he had tattooed on his right shoulder

which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards --

and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done.

And now his shoulder says, "Wino forever."

I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s,

but I deliberately waited a really long time.

who have gotten tattoos when they were 17

and regretted it by the time they were 30.

I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place --

and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight

on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street.

Which is a great place to do it because nobody cares.

And then I went home that night, and I had an even larger emotional meltdown,

And this was all actually quite shocking to me,

But I had always felt like, look, you know,

It somehow got me to where I am in life right now.

In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret,

which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past

that we should always look forward and not backward,

and that one of the noblest and best things we can do

is strive to live a life free of regrets.

This idea is nicely captured by this quote:

And it seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first --

something we might all agree to sign onto ...

basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss

And as it happens, Shakespeare was onto something here,

Because the inability to experience regret

is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics

It's also, by the way, a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage.

in the face of even obviously very poor decisions.

So if, in fact, you want to live a life free of regret,

I think you need to learn to live, not without regret, but with it.

So let's start off by defining some terms.

if we had done something different in the past.

So in other words, regret requires two things.

It requires, first of all, agency -- we had to make a decision in the first place.

And second of all, it requires imagination.

We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice,

and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward

and imagine how things would be playing out in our present.

And in fact, the more we have of either of these things --

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Kathryn Schulz: Don't regret regret (Kathryn Schulz: Don't regret regret)

experience

basically

incredibly

life