Avi TV

This week I’ve been thinking about the inevitable trade-offs you have to make in life. The things you need to put down in order to pick something else up. The life paths you have to kill so you can pursue others. Christopher Hitchens once said: “In life, we must choose our regrets.” I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about that over the last few weeks. In life we must choose our regrets. I’d never considered things that way. I’d gone through life with this assumption that it’s somehow possible to have no regrets at all if you get things right. If you make precisely the right choices at the right moments then maybe you can totally avoid regrets. I’d presumed that any regret is essentially the side-effect of a sub-optimal decision. I never considered that regrets could be unavoidably baked into the fabric of life. They’re features, not bugs. Upon reflection, this seems obvious. Opportunity cost demands that we sacrifice one thing in order to do another. You can make the absolute best choice, and yet still regret not making some other one. Plus, we don’t get to run life twice, so you never know whether the decisions you made were right. So, regrets are unavoidable. What does it mean that in life we must CHOOSE our regrets? Well, a lot of the time we’re going to incur some pain no matter what decision we make. We need to choose between a relationship and a new job. Either decision is going to cause regret, and given the fact that regrets are unavoidable, which regret do you WANT? I think this adds a lot of clarity to big, difficult decisions. Rather than working out which decision you want to live with, imagine which decision you couldn’t bare living without. Which regrets could you put up with having chosen, and which could you never forgive yourself for? In life, we must choose our regrets.