Why do some regrets fade, while others persist and grow? | Aeon Essays

is a doctoral candidate researching intergenerational trauma at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London, UK. Her writing has appeared in The Independent, Condé Nast Traveller and Prospect magazine. Edited byPam Weintraub Listen to this essay 17 minute listen Little is more paralysing than the fear of making the wrong choice. I see this in my clients, many of whom feel stuck in cycles of indecision and procrastination. And I recognise it in my own life, which, until recently, meandered noncommitally between possible futures, preferring the safety of uncertainty over the risk of decisively forging a path that I may one day live to regret. Regret is so frightening because it confronts us with our most fundamental anxieties. It reminds us of our finitude: that we can do this thing only once. It speaks to the responsibility we bear as architects of our lives, and what the 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) as our ‘dizzying

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