Regrets

They say it's better to regret something you did, rather than something you didn't do.

I find that very debatable. It depends very much on what you're doing. The truth is that the size of the regret depends on its effects - how powerful and how long-term they are.

Once you've done something, you can't take it back. You can just do what you can with the consequences of your actions. Does that mean that you should pull a Frank Sinatra and just say you did it your way?

The purpose of regret is to make sure that you don't repeat a bad thing. That you learn from your mistakes and make sure they don't happen again. As long as you keep it at that, it's a positive thing in your life. The "No Regrets" mantra is a piece of crap: we all do bad things, but if we are not aware that we're doing them, we simply won't stop.

But there's a limit to where you can go with regrets. When regrets start dominating your life and you can't stop thinking about how you should have or shouldn't have, that's when it's time to actively stop them.

"Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s". There hardly ever is a situation where you can completely and correctly evaluate the consequences of your actions before performing those actions. When you choose to do something, it could go good or bad. Sometimes the likeliest outcome is predictable, but it's never certain. As long as you did what you thought was best, the only thing you can do is deal with it, no matter what the outcome is.

No regrets is crap. Too many regrets is bad. What we need to do is find the middle ground.