I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you could do that back then!) and would have basically won the lottery if I hadn't basically just given it away to a friend of mine who was trying to do something (Which ended up being getting scammed by that butterfly labs scheme)... That friend ended up probably one of the most anxious people I have ever seen, ended up threatening to hit me over some petty shit, doesn't talk to me nor a bunch of our old mutual friends because he dragged them into the scam, and all this drama that I probably would have been subject to in some way had I been the one to blow that cash. Hell - I likely would have been dead if I was in my early 20s with that much money. Reflecting on who I am now vs who I would have been if I had done the "less regrettable" thing and been way too rich way too fast is fine, I think I just paid for having everything in life put into perspective and that's invaluable. I'm doing fine these days which is good enough for me.
I don't mean to pry but I often see people make statements along the lines of 'if Id been rich when I was younger I wouldve died' and I never quite get it. Just drugs stuff?
Early 20s is when people peak at risk taking behavior. Add a large amount of money into the mix and the types of risks can go way up. Think go from sitting around playing beer pong, to doing coke and speeding around in a Ferrari.
Even later in life, large amounts of money can cause people to do stupid things (see many famous people), but maturity has a chance then.
I dunno you can always drink beer and speed around in a Ford Fiesta. Irresponsibly is free.
Sure but that's has a somewhat less consistent feedback loop..
When I was new to driving I tended to drive around the ex-highways in the outer burbs and end up in little drag races at each light in the beater I could afford.. One time I looked over at the guy with the aggressively gunning the engine in his VW rabbit(?) and realized how utterly sad that was.
Plenty of Ferrari drivers, when they get negative feedback, probably get feedback that seems cool to rebel against instead of people exhibiting utter shame of association.
You can drink a lot more beer if you don't have to show up for work.
The story of lottery winners is sometimes an unhappy one. A windfall can ruin relationships, lead to a loss of normalcy, make one a target for crime, and as you say, enable vices.
If you win the lottery put it in a living trust. If you don't have experience managing large sums of cash the likelihood of you navigating that challenge correctly is basically zero.
Living a healthy life requires discipline and a certain amount of humility. Both of those traits are hard to maintain after a financial windfall IMO.
Elon Musk is living proof of this.
I have no idea. Likely just a combination of complete hyperbole and extrapolating a few poor decisions when young.
money leading to drugs, riskier behavior, suicide, etc.
The BFL scam was where they were mining on equipment before sending it out, right? It's too bad they went that way. I bought two BFL Jalapenos with BTC I'd mined, and the hardware was pretty nice.
dusty circuit boards, broken hardware, delayed shipments, taking money and delivering nothing. The equipment would be pre-used and then delivered late, when it was much less useful due to the BTC difficulty increase.
Me and a friend also mined a ton of bitcoin around the same time on his PC. We forgot about the whole thing when it turned out that you couldn't do anything useful with it. I wonder if the keys are still somewhere on a disk on landfill.
this is why I never thrown out old computers or wipe out disks. They just sit around. Never know when you might need something on there
That's what I used to say, until I ran out of spare bedrooms, and the tunnel of carefully stacked old computers collapsed on me. Luckily I escaped and was able to buy a 32 TB NAS which is now 1% full of early 2000s disk images. Now it's just me, a NAS, and a mattress on the floor. I'm never going back.
but what do you do for heating now?
/r/neckbeardNests
lol
A very healthy life perspective, one you can't just get without walking the proverbial line and looking back. At the end, probably the best path for you, but greed can be a powerful emotion even for strongest personalities.
how much is huge? thousands? I know it was easy back then to generate btc. You probably would have sold them at $10 or something ,congratulated yourself, and then felt massive regret anyway
This was my experience with litecoin. I bought some back in the day when it was < $1 from my minimum wage job and sold it all when it "skyrocketed" to somewhere above $1. In the end I made a few thousand dollars and thought pretty good about it. Only a couple years later when it touched (if I recall correctly) close to $300 did I have regrets. Oh well.
This is partly why I don’t feel bad about not buying bitcoin at $12. I did the math, and given my general investing strategies, where I rebalance periodically, I doubt I’d have made more than couple hundred thousand. It’s real money, but not the millions I once imagined I’d have made. Also, it felt risky at the time, so the money I might have lost would have been real to me at the time.
I never even saw it as a speculative investment. I had my eye on it at the same $12/coin price and thought "this is great, it will be the ultimate PayPal killer for online shopping". This was at the height of PayPals evil ages where they were enabling scammers and shutting down and blocking legitimate businesses. 12 years later PayPal has gotten a lot better, less relevant, and almost no one uses BTC for online retail shopping.
There's almost no way to make really good decisions with crypto anyway. The people who held on to early gains often think themselves geniuses but they were acting entirely on unfounded faith, like everyone else.
That's how I rationalize it. I had an early Bitcoin opportunity I missed out on but realized I'd have cashed out the second I could make a quick $1000 or something. Now my strategy with stuff like that is to keep a tiny "FOMO" amount even after selling the majority.
easy back then to generate btc
Was it? I ran a mining program for weeks with no results and finally deleted it because a) it was trashing my CPU the whole time and b) I was worried that Ihad been fooled and it was using my machine as a node for distributing CSAM or something.
Reminds me of "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang. It's part of his 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories.
In this story, people use a device called a *Prism*, which allows them to communicate with alternate versions of themselves in different quantum realities. The Prisms create a split in reality when activated, connecting two timelines that diverge from the moment the device is used. People can talk to their alternate selves in these parallel universes, and this communication brings up complex philosophical questions about free will, decision-making, and identity.
Chiang explores the emotional and ethical implications of interacting with alternate versions of one's life, focusing on how people cope with the knowledge of the different paths their lives might have taken.
-> thanx Chat.
Has the overbearing tone of painfully detailed world building with very little narrative power I've come to expect from Chiang. Guy has cool ideas but really likes to describe how cool his ideas are in detriment of telling a compelling story.
The best advice I've read about avoiding regrets was in “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” by William B. Irvine. William B. Irvine has an entire chapter dedicated to it titled; Fatalism. The basic approach of the Stoics was that the past (and present) should be viewed fatalistically; fate would have it so, and therefore there is no rational (again a key word for the Stoics) reason to regret this or that. Have you spent years coming to one realization or another? Lived too long in one place? Worked too long in the same workplace? It was fated to take so long. The same goes for the present; enjoy it because you can't change it. The future, on the other hand, you must influence to the extent you can.
William B. Irvine starts chapter six with:
> “ONE WAY TO PRESERVE our tranquility, the Stoics thought, is to take a fatalistic attitude toward the things that happen to us. According to Seneca, we should offer ourselves to fate, inasmuch as “it is a great consolation that it is together with the universe we are swept along.”
My wife grew up in the Cultural Revolution. I grew up in an unsafe and disordered environment. When I made peak money we spent a lot on awesome experiences, then saved a good chunk. Instead of making payments on a house in the kind of enclave where pro athletes lived, we paid cash in a FAANG neighborhood. Both of us have zero expectations about the future. We have no debt and I retired comfortably but not too lavishly. Our farmhouse is not beautiful but we can afford a good health plan.
We both understood sunk costs from the beginning. We know governments love to take things. Of course we could have saved more. But the people I grew up with are dead or homeless addicts. Many of the people she grew up with were destroyed or disappeared by the government. If catastrophe strikes, and we have to move to a shoebox outside of Cleveland, that’s what we’ll do.
Fatalism has worked out well for us. We are exceptionally fortunate to think congruently on those matters.
> Fatalism has worked out well for us.
Why didn't she stay in China ? Why did you leave that unsafe and disordered environment ?
She had no choice. She and many of her peers were sent here to work. At least half of them, wife included , defected. I left my neighborhood because I would have killed myself otherwise.
I almost wrote this:
> I disagree. The best thing to do to avoid regrets is to act, to take the step forward. Not to resign ourselves and diminish ourselves hoping to soften the nastiness the world is sending us.
> Stoicism is good when you are being tortured (hello John McCain), when you are in the final stage of incurable illness, when you are a slave (hello Seneca) and have no agency.
But upon re-reading the advice is about the past, not the future and it's not an endorsement of the whole of stoicism and I think I could agree with it. I just don't follow through with the whole Stoic ethos.
Especially in these days and age where it's being promoted by ex-marketing executives feeding off of people who are lost. It's Tony Robbins's exploitation of people in bad places all over again. It's mindfulness meditation training for employees instead of raising wages and getting rid of monthly quotas.
> when you are a slave (hello Seneca) and have no agency.
It seemed to serve Marcus Aurelius (hello Emperor) quite well. Stoicism is strongly tied to duty, to ones self, to ones family, and to ones nation.
Study was a bit silly. Losing $10 in a game of chance is one type of regret but real regret is normally several shades darker, or at least more embarrassing. Could make an anecdotal argument that losing a small stakes game of chance is one of the easiest levels of regret to move on from. Anyone whos seen a casino on tv could tell you this. (EMPHASIS: SMALL STAKES. Yes, gambling at advanced levels is as dark as anything i can conjure.)
The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move on without a mental breakdown.
Totally agree. For the 'Portfolio' strategy to be effective you need all the bets to be of a comparable size. If I place 20 $1 bets and 1 $10,000 bet, winning the $1 ones is going to be cold comfort to losing the $10,000 one.
Similarly if I regret a 10 year relationship that ends in divorce, something like finding a great new restaurant isn't going to even that out.
> The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move on without a mental breakdown.
Thanks, I didn't want to watch that movie because even though I was interested by the setting I was not interested in the drama (and headlines I read in my feeds made it clear it was about drama). But your comment makes me reconsider.
Yeah, regrets like not telling "I love you" or telling it or "let's wait a bit before becoming parents" or "let's go for this career" or "don't call that friend back", etc. Those regrets.
Try not to make up too many regrets, people.
A related mental trick I use to move on from some mistake I'm stuck on is to think the following:
In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this. So I should focus on the present and the future, and try to identify and avoid that mistake (pick a different future!), rather than obsessing over the past.
It's incredibly obvious, of course, but going through the exercise of thinking it out explicitly really helps.
> In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this.
Why not regret all of them? I'm yet to see my capacity for regrets get saturated
This was Mark Twain-level funny
Attention is the real bottleneck
My issue is i regret rather non-issues. Which makes it difficult to avoid because A. they're often small, stupid things that are difficult to avoid imo. And B. i'm sure i'd just find something else. The small things are objectively not reasons to be obsessing and regretting.. yet i do. So i think it's a problem in my frame of mind, not the action in focus.
The biological purpose of regretting past actions is to avoid them in the future, though.
Are we sure about that?
Do you have an alternative explanation to offer?
Our brains are machines for trying to avoid future mistakes, and doubling down on focusing on them isn't ideal. It's good that at least you're not also tying them to the past, which is doomed, but that's not what the future has to be. It's better not to focus on fears and let the possibility of the future open up instead.
I think I could make a good argument that our brains are machines for repeating past mistakes. Interesting to think about the opposite sides of the argument.
I've got a pretty solid case that it's both
Curious. I think this applies less to me than I had hoped. I don’t feel regrets over these „you win some, you loose some“ coin toss decisions. Looking back, I clearly made avoidable mistakes but they where the obvious one (for me, back then, in that context) and I can clearly learn from them. But the ones I truly regret don’t fit in that scheme for me. They are just pure loss, no reasoning whatsoever, just stupid. Most of them socially. Not finishing my bachelor but instead canceling and going to work due to financial pressure I can deal with easily. I can „sell that“ to myself. Threading people poorly and loosing good friends that? No way I’m ever forgiving myself that. But these don’t fit in that „portfolio“ framework. They where just stupid decision. I still learn from that and know what to work on. But I cannot reason them away.
My whole life is regret and I found the article very insightful. I heard a religious quote that I wish I could remember: it's better to earn gold along the way by investing in relationships than to bet it all on a gold mine.
As a hacker trying to win the internet lottery since.. 1992-ish, I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's like flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which feels like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent. My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage. I only have the smallest bandwidth now to get anything at all done, and 90% of that is a waste of time due to conceptual flaws in languages, frameworks, operating systems, hardware, etc. In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning, but I chose poorly or lost, so now it's too expensive to get back the sunk cost that I've invested. Making it ever-harder to keep going. Sometimes it feels like regret is all I have.
Unfortunately the winners usually don't have this experience. They don't have the gumption to lose for a lifetime. So they don't go through the same healing and growth process. Vanishingly few wealthy people can step back and use their money for social wellness altruistically.
Meanwhile some of us stumble onto concepts like duality and see through the matrix. We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation. Then we look around and wonder why everyone is acting so strangely, having strong attachments to materialism in the 3D. The more we have, the more we cling to our ego and accomplishments, eventually living in fear of losing it all. While the people with nothing are more likely to lose their risk aversion and live in service to others.
Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality. Which works out well for the rich, while the poor suffer under systems of control they have little say in.
Zen Buddhism and Taoism touch on the idea that life is suffering, and suffering comes from attachments. So something that helps me is to go into situations knowing that I'll likely fail, but trying anyway, without expectation of outcome or regret.
So that one day if/when the win comes, I don't waste it like so many others. And maybe, just maybe, we can change the world.
I am just a stranger on the Internet, so I apologize in advance if my comments/questions are irrelevant.
> In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning, but I chose poorly or lost
Specifically in relation to picking up technologies. Unless you are working on something highly specialized, I am not sure your situation calls for such desperation. Learning new languages is not hard (as you are aware, as far as I can tell), and switching to a more agile stack like e.g. React/JavaScript could unlock new opportunities, considering how in demand it is across the industry.
> We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation.
Hm. That's a personal belief, right? It seems like you are convinced in it as a fact of life, and that might not be the most change encouraging strategy. Similar to fatalism in a sense.
> Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality.
You are romanticizing the poor. Certain societies have more family and community oriented lifestyles. Not because they are poor but because they have a cultural predisposition and a tradition. Poverty is not full of love, financial abundance is not full of fear.
> I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's like flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which feels like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent.
But it's not. It's more like playing the lottery over and over. The chance of succeeding even once is pretty low.
> My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage.
Bit of an odd choice. Not only is C++ still being used, as far as I know, but even if it weren't: If you know C++, you know C, and that is definitely very relevant. If you know C, you have vastly more low-level knowledge than the average programmer nowadays. C is not my favorite language by far (I like rust, or Haskell, depending), but just being proficient in it means I can program a lot of different things.
Anyway, to the rest of your point: I never wanted to get rich or anything like that, I always just did what interested me on a technical level. I fared very well with that.
> My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore
Strange -- I'm actively considering learning C++ to help with CUDA programming for ML.
"For some, regret might be slow-brewing indecision that amounts to loss, like not having children."
Or ... having children!
I try to follow a 'butterfly flaps its wings' mindset. In the alt universe where I had done the 'right' thing, other tragedies might have befallen me.
In the alt universe where I aced the interview and gotten my dream job, I might have died in a car crash.
In the alt universe where I didn't say something stupid and alienate a friend, my husband might have been stricken by cancer.
We just don't know and can't know. Every night, whatever happened, I try to feel a moment of gratitude. My family is here and secure and happy and that is not true of everyone and not to be taken for granted.
I realized in my late 30s that I have almost no sense of dread when I think back on all of the cringey or embarrassing things I've done.
I think this was a huge super power for me early in my career. I embarrassed myself over and over again and didn't care or even think about it. Right back at it the next day.
can you explain the part about your success?
Faith and religion also work well.
Read about the notion of “spiritual bypass”.
Yes, people turn to faith and religion. But this often amounts to a complete bypass of actually processing/reframing difficult feelings (like regret) and instead of learning to use those feelings to learn/grow and make your future less regretful, they’re offloaded onto some entity who is supposed to carry the load for you.
It works for some people for a period of time because they feel like they have permission to let go. Until it stops working because letting go isn’t enough. Actually processing these feelings is necessary but gets ignored, and eventually this build up and leads to burnout/breakdown.
(I was steeped in the church from a young age, and have watched countless people find the limits of this approach).
Better to confront things head-on.
I can speak about Christianity, because I'm a Christian.
> they’re offloaded onto some entity who is supposed to carry the load for you
This isn't supposed to happen, and in fact can be considered sinful. Christians are supposed to pick up their cross and carry it.
I was raised in a Christian church. Spiritual bypass was alive and well. The notion of "carrying one's cross" was more about finding virtue in suffering than it was about actually gaining practical tools to navigate life's difficulties or learning how to process them in a psychologically healthy way.
> This isn't supposed to happen, and in fact can be considered sinful
And this highlights the problem with turning to religion as a primary solution for dealing with life's major emotional challenges. If you don't happen to find the "true" Christians, you're out of luck. There's a wide variety of opinions and interpretations.
Unfortunately not a single one of the dozen or so churches my family bounced around while I was growing up had an enlightened view of this.
And I still have fundamental problems with "bearing one's cross" (the "correct" way) in terms of the actual psychological benefit. It personalizes things that happen in life that need not be personalized. Instead of establishing a rational reason for acceptance that can actually bring psychological freedom, it attaches the idea that it's your lot in life to suffer these specific things, which is a deeply harmful idea psychologically in the long run.
e.g. if I do something that I later regret deeply, the church says "you fucked up, and now you must feel bad about it". A more reasonable mindset is to use the regret as a signal that change is needed. To choose how to live differently in the future based on that regret. And then to leave that regret behind since the past can't be undone.
It took me until I was 19 to understand this and accept it. The reason for my failure wasn't because some higher was displeased with my lack of piety or because of some deep mysterious plan the universe had.
I failed for a much more mundane reason - I didn't work hard enough, or I didn't have the right tactics/strategy or the dice roll simply didn't go my way. In the first two cases I know what I need to fix and I can fix that. In the third case, I simply must shrug my shoulders and move on.
But I was no longer sitting there unhappy about some extra terrestrial being not giving me the help I asked for. The religious mindset was making me unhappy because it made me think I had no control over my life, someone else did.
Once I accepted that I had control of my life I was much happier and also more successful.
I witnessed spiritual bypass many times in the context of people becoming "spiritual" as an emotional avoidance strategy. It's even more tragic in my experience because at least traditional religions have very strong and developed frameworks for addressing various types of grief - both individually and as a group.
Modern-day spiritualism is dominated by shallow inspiration masquerading as profound psychological and medical insight. Courses on "raising vibrational frequency", literal belief in astrology, crystal healing, etc.
[Citation needed.]
Excellent satire on Hacker News participants.
That WAS what you intended, right?
Does it? Or is it just shifting responsibility?
It's a kind of narcissistic wound to accept that we make bad decisions.
To learn to let go such regret is a big achievement for our further life.
Somewhat connected to the approach proposed in this article is something I've found that really helps when I've taken a hit:
Reframe the loss as a learning experience that will save you much more in the long term.
Example: You can read and listen to all the advice in the world, say, about being careful who you lend money to, but when you get stung for $100 by a "friend" that is going to register very, very much more strongly and will possibly save you $1000s in the future as your antenna will be much more effective.
It isn't something that can always be used but being able to see seemingly painful hits as cheap lessons can be quite empowering.
I just rewatched Drive My Car. The director has a new movie that's quite different, but if you want to watch a deep exploration of grief and regret, that's your movie.
Now I wish I knew Uncle Vanya better.
Haven't watched Drive My Car yet, but just from the trailer it looks like it's exploring loss and grief rather than the most poignant type of regret of losing something due to own action (or inaction). I.e. having agency and being directly responsible for loss.
I'd say watch it and then decide. No spoilers.
What people experienced during a trivial, 1 hour study doesn't really compare to regret over decades of someones life.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
It’s not obvious to me why this experiment induced regret specifically. Are we sure the participants didn’t feel some other emotion like annoyance at losing?
Regret comes from a sense of loss or embarrassment typically. You missed a job, a partner and opportunity. You flubbed a social event, you missed a signal or you messed up at work.
Each has a strategy to deal with specifically. Typical ways are gratitude, acceptance, understanding and more. You just need to change your perspective on the event and it should minimize its impact. Extreme events excluded.
tl;dr Focus forward. Backward is the direction of blame, forward is the direction of improvement.
“Boy that sucked, I’m sure gunna remember not to do that again” Read the SRE book on blameless postmortems for more blindingly obvious and wildly underused psychological and institutional hacks.