Regret in sentence

715 examples of Regret in a sentence

And as the saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

And the Canadian Minister of the Interior wrote this at the time: "Thousands of pack horses lie dead along the way, sometimes in bunches under the cliffs, with pack saddles and packs where they've fallen from the rock above, sometimes in tangled masses, filling the mud holes and furnishing the only footing for our poor pack animals on the march, often, I regret to say, exhausted, but still alive, a fact we were unaware of, until after the miserable wretches turned beneath the hooves of our cavalcade.

In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, 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.

Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths.

So people who have damage to their orbital frontal cortex seem to be unable to feel regret in the face of even obviously very poor decisions.

So if, in fact, you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you.

But if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live, not without regret, but with it.

What is regret?

Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past.

So in other words, regret requires two things.

You're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20.

These are the classic conditions that create regret.

We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly, but almost came out well.

Now within that framework, we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things.

And most of what we know about regret comes to us out of that domain.

But then finally, it occurred to some researchers to step back and say, well okay, but overall, what do we regret most in life?

So in other words, we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance.

But it turns out, when you look overall at what people regret in life, you know what, our financial decisions don't even rank.

But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around, what does that experience feel like?

Regret feels awful.

But it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways.

So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial.

The second characteristic component of regret is a sense of bewilderment.

This real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret.

That's why, in the face of our regret, the thing we consistently say is, "I could have kicked myself."

The fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative.

Now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop.

So if you look at the psychological literature, these are the four consistent defining components of regret.

But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we're feeling regretful about.

So for instance, here's one of my favorite automatic generators of regret in modern life.

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