Ctrl Z Culture

This post is in response to Kathryn Schulz's TED talk (posted).  An interesting one for certain about living with regret.

Living with regret is the HUMANE alternative to rejecting it.  Regretting Regret.

When we regret, we tend to think our present situation can be happier if we had done something different in past. 

This requires: 

1. agency 

2. imagination (tracing your steps back and making a different choice, then creating a possible scenario out of that--a story). 

The more agency and imagination with given regret, the more acute that regret will be.

Miss flight by 3 minutes rather than by 20.  We feel responsible when experience came out badly but ALMOST came out well.  We can almost just imagine it.

top regrets, gathered data

1. Education 2. Career 3. Romance 4. Parenting 5. Self 6. Leisure, family health, friends, spirituality, community.  

We know most of what we know by regret by the study of finance.  

Financial decisions don't even rank. Count for less than 3% of total regrets within this pool.

Components of regret:

1. denial  

2. bewilderment - we can no longer understand that part that led us to some action we regret

3. punishment - i could kick myself!

4. perseveration - to focus obsessively & repeatedly on same thing, which puts regret on INFINITE LOOP.

She refers to our generation (the present new youngsters of 20s and whatever else) as the Ctrl+z generation.  Focused on undo.  Unfriend.  Unfollow.  Quick undo fixes.


I know when I played Solitaire growing up, hell yeah I abused the Ctrl Z button.  And with Dope Wars (remember that awesome fucking game?!).

Throwing money at problems to make them go away.
Throwing ourselves into work to undo the thoughts in-head.
Throwing our minds back and forth between extremes to distract.


All so violent.  Ctrl Z is an upright rejection of the reality of the situation.
  
Ctrl Z culture: Drink to forget, think to forget, work to forego, lie to forfeit.




Summary of the last 5 minutes or so of this talk, BRILLIANT:

Make peace w regret: 

1. take comfort in universality.

2. laugh at selves.

3. time heals wounds.  

some of own regrets aren't as ugly as you think they are.

we should feel pain.

 the point is to not live without any regrets. 

the point is to not hate ourselves for having them.

we need to learn to love the flaws imperfect things we create and forgive ourselves for creating them.

regret doesn't remind us that we did badly.  reminds us that we know we can do better. 

humor, even balck humor plays role in survival.