Choose Your Regrets: A Few Notions from Kierkegaard
“There’s an impeccable, precise, and brilliant idea that’ll solve this problem, you just haven’t thought hard enough, long enough, or beaten yourself enough to come up with it.”
Do you feel that? To your core?
Ok fine, guess it’s just me. Wink.
Anxiety is a bitch, and we all KNOW it. I’m looking at you, past week of unintended and sometimes intended doom-scrolling. Therapists dun goof things up too, if far less than you mere mortals. Double wink.
But seriously, with the persistence of images, videos, and other screen oriented stimuli buzzing at us 24/7, there’s a notion we are all unfortunately buying into, hook, line, and sinker, that if we just think, think, think enough, solutions to our problems will arise.
Truly, this approach does have merit. A genuine, deep, and cautious appraisal often helps us attain answers to our problems that knee-jerk reactions rarely do.
Yet what if the notion of above, about this unattainable and unsolvable quandary that just eludes the hell out of you, is, in fact, unattainable and unsolvable? What if the perfect answer can’t exist for a nuanced and vexing issue? What if the truth is that any choice you make will have some unfortunate and detrimental consequences? Enter the Danish guy.
This Danish fellow of course is Soren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism. You know, that deep way of talking and thinking that likely feels pretentious, doesn’t yield answers, and more than 50% of the time brings on more confusion?
That’s his jam; that’s his whole spiel. Here’s his summary:
Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.
If you read this and think “this sounds bleak,” “isn’t therapy about hope,” and “this doesn’t clarify anything,” you’d sound just like my wife and most folks when they first hear this quote. It, in fact, can, if held in the way Kierkegaard and myself would hope it not to be held, lead to a bleak form of despair simply boiled down to “well, why bother then?”
Fair, but that’s not what I surmise he’s saying. Simply put, I’d say my summary of what he’s saying here is choose your regrets.
Choices paralyze us due to their implications. As the quote hints, if I marry, what if it’s the wrong person? What if we divorce; what if we want to split after having children? On the flip side, what if I don’t marry AND it was the right person? I’ll see them on the gram with some hunk or some hottie, when I should be on their arm?
Again then, the choice seems clear; do nothing. Choose neither option. But indecision itself isn’t deciding; rather, it’s deciding poorly. What matters, as Kierkegaard says here, is doing something.
If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
We can’t know whether we made the right decision. At least about most things. What we can often know is what will bring on the most wrong. This isn’t my implying that on the pros/cons list of comparison, pick the one with the least cons.
However, I AM saying that sometimes a better place to wonder is through which things will bring on the least regret.
Some say regret is a dirty and not useful word; that’s fair. Regret can paralyze our indecisiveness as much as anything else. However, regret when properly assessed often brings a deep clarity where there was none.
Regret and our healthy fear and concern around it can be a catalyst for growth, joy, and confidence.
Let’s boil it all down to this; what’s a better regret; to have lived life too fully, too abundantly, too fervently? Or to have lived life too conservatively, too cautiously, too apprehensively?
Choose one, knowing you aren’t choosing the other. It’s that simple. Here, one more from Soren:
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!