3020 Twisted

Monday, July 12, 2010

"Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth."
-- Lillian Hellman --

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I've mentioned that the green quotes that start these entries are bits I have saved because they amuse me or make me think - whether or not I agree with them is immaterial.

About a month ago I used this one:

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;
it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."
-- Sydney J. Harris --

Sounds good, eh? But did you really think about what it's saying?

The first sentence is easy. If you did something you regret, after a while the regret lessens.

The second sentence is not so easy. The top level meaning is that if you did not do something that you later realize you should have done, you will never get over the regret.

But go deeper.

You don't regret the failure to act - you regret the decision not to act. At the time, you considered it and decided that the financial, temporal, social, or psychological cost was too high. If there was no decision, there is no regret.

For example, you didn't invest in Microsoft's 1986 IPO. There's no regret because you'd never heard of the company. No decision, nothing to regret. But then after you had heard of it in 1990 and decided not to invest, then you have something to regret. Wrong decision, you fool.

So what's the lesson?

You should always do everything it crosses your mind to do, the decision should always be to act, in fact you shouldn't analyze it at all, shouldn't subject it to the decision process at all, because if you act and are wrong, you'll eventually get over it, but if your decision is not to act and you are wrong, you'll never get over it. So to avoid a life filled with regret, always act. Do it, whatever it is.

Um, there's something wrong with that. That's taking the governor off. Mr. Harris is telling me to be a psychopath.

See what I mean about thinking about the quotes? A lot of them don't say what you think they say. Sometimes things aren't as good as they sound.
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