Future Regret: Deciding Not to Grow
Living and working generate an unending stream of decisions. Some are relatively miniscule (“When will I find time to work on this project?”) while others overshadow one’s waking hours (“How can I tolerate this work environment for much longer?”). Decisions crowd each other within the mind, jostling for position, feeding on the resulting stress. Is it any wonder we try to mechanize many of our day-to-day decisions? Let the watch give you a little pinch when it’s time to exercise, follow the car computer’s prompting that it’s time for a coffee break, allow an AI investment app to manage your portfolio, and on and on. Habits work the same way. I ride my bike to work when it’s at least 70 degrees and the threat of rain is less than 15%. I read my email in a particular order. I always wear jeans on Friday. Making all these decisions can feel overwhelming, so we “outsource” them to machines and mental habits. Why?
Part of the answer lies in the uncertain nature of decisions. No decision is “clean.” Even toasting a piece of bread for breakfast is an uncertain event, holding a potential cost. Does that cause us to recoil from pushing the lever and sinking the bread into the machine’s red-hot interior? Never. And yet, toasters routinely show-up on lists of the most dangerous kitchen appliances due to incidents of fire and electrical shock. We never consider our future burns and the awful regret they will produce; we just make toast. How come we can’t do that so easily for decisions about life and work?
I teach a college class about using evidence to make personal and professional decisions. Students learn that all decisions are relatively risky, even those about making toast. Over the past few years, I’ve begun to notice a pattern in assigning risk probabilities to decisions; a pattern I call “future regret.” People seem increasingly anxious about the future pay-off of risk-taking in life and professional decisions and they often articulate this fear as one of “future regret.” When questioned, they are likely to explain that, in a choice between A & B, they might wish to choose B, but are afraid they will regret choosing B at some unspecified time in the future-- so they decide to stay with A. One of my recent students wrote movingly of wanting to relocate, giving details and evidence that it was going to be in her best interest to do so. Then, she finished the essay by saying her fear of future regret was going to rule the decision. It was hard for me to refrain from saying “Do it anyway!”
Notice that her decision to remain with A is not free of risks and uncertainties. It’s kind of like staying with the hand you’ve been dealt in a poker game. Consider the perspective of Jeff Yass founder of Susquehanna International group (as quoted in Annie Duke’s TEDxGeorgetown) who says: “The biggest risk is that you have a losing strategy when you think you have a winning one.” The fear of regretting something in the future may be increasingly driving us to back-away from opportunities to grow. We wait for the low-risk, high-payoff, zero-regret scenario all the while ignoring the risky cards we’re holding.
Some form of regret is implicit in any decision-making scenario. There’s always the possibility we’ll decide to do something bold or interesting, but find ourselves looking back from some future vantage point, whining “What was I thinking?!” Published studies in this area conceptualize “decision regret,” but keep it in the present tense. By the time you regret something, it’s already done. The idea of “future regret” is that it paralyzes us from making the decision in the first place. I do find “future regret” as a recognized concept in purchasing decisions, and maybe it took root in consumer economics early on. In my experience, this may be spreading to other decision arenas, and stifling the urge to grow, to change.
If this pattern resonates with you, try examining some of your recent decisions. They could be everyday life decisions like what you typically cook for breakfast, or they could be professional, work-related decisions such as contributing to team projects, questioning industry leadership, or pursuing new job and training opportunities. Are you making any of these decisions with a sense of “future regret?” Are you tempted to? If so, it’s worth noticing—and remembering that neither the future nor the experience of regret are actually real. They’re simply ideas, just thoughts. The kinds of thoughts that can stymie our most interesting (and risky) decisions to change and grow. Obviously, we should be careful of making random swerves in our work and personal choices. Look for connections; are the decision-points linked to each other, even tenuously? If you find connections, they’re not random choices. Through coaching, learning and mentoring, we can think about the bridges linking our decisions and use them to scaffold our future-focused choices. That’s what smart leaders do.