The trouble with regret minimization
I&#x27;m reading &quot;Four Thousand Weeks&quot; by Oliver Burkeman. His central thesis is that you will do almost none of the things that you might have done—you only get 4000 weeks give or take. You&#x27;ll have almost none of the experiences you might have had. A human life is incredibly constrained and you just have to accept that—there&#x27;s no getting around it.<p>Once you do accept it, regret doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense: you did this instead of that, but so what? There&#x27;s an infinity of other things you didn&#x27;t do and never could have done. Instead, focus on the life you have and living it as best as you possibly can. It doesn&#x27;t last, and the real waste would be to spend your time regretting the past or using every moment to prepare for a future which might not come and won&#x27;t be what you expected if it does (real life never matches the expectations we create in our fantasy version of the future).