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Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

latimes.com

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Re: Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

#71

Post by namaria »

teekert wrote: post #61
jamal-kumar wrote: post #10

I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you could do that back then!) and would have basically won the lottery if I hadn't basically just given it away to a friend of mine who was trying to do something (Which ended up being getting scammed by that butterfly labs scheme)... That friend ended up probably one of the most anxious people I…

Reminds me of "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang. It's part of his 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories . In this story, people use a device called a *Prism*, which allows them to communicate with alternate versions of themselves in different quantum realities. The Prisms create a split in reality when activated, connecting two timelines that diverge from the moment the device is used. People can talk…

Has the overbearing tone of painfully detailed world building with very little narrative power I've come to expect from Chiang. Guy has cool ideas but really likes to describe how cool his ideas are in detriment of telling a compelling story.

Re: Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

#72

Post by petercooper »

paulpauper wrote: post #19
jamal-kumar wrote: post #10

I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you could do that back then!) and would have basically won the lottery if I hadn't basically just given it away to a friend of mine who was trying to do something (Which ended up being getting scammed by that butterfly labs scheme)... That friend ended up probably one of the most anxious people I…

how much is huge? thousands? I know it was easy back then to generate btc. You probably would have sold them at $10 or something ,congratulated yourself, and then felt massive regret anyway

That's how I rationalize it. I had an early Bitcoin opportunity I missed out on but realized I'd have cashed out the second I could make a quick $1000 or something. Now my strategy with stuff like that is to keep a tiny "FOMO" amount even after selling the majority.

Re: Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

#73

Post by johnchristopher »

l5870uoo9y wrote: post #45

The best advice I've read about avoiding regrets was in “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” by William B. Irvine. William B. Irvine has an entire chapter dedicated to it titled; Fatalism. The basic approach of the Stoics was that the past (and present) should be viewed fatalistically; fate would have it so, and therefore there is no rational (again a key word for the Stoics) reason to regret this…

I almost wrote this:

> I disagree. The best thing to do to avoid regrets is to act, to take the step forward. Not to resign ourselves and diminish ourselves hoping to soften the nastiness the world is sending us.

> Stoicism is good when you are being tortured (hello John McCain), when you are in the final stage of incurable illness, when you are a slave (hello Epictetus edit: oops, I meant Epictus) and have no agency.

But upon re-reading the advice is about the past, not the future and it's not an endorsement of the whole of stoicism and I think I could agree with it. I just don't follow through with the whole Stoic ethos.

Especially in these days and age where it's being promoted by ex-marketing executives feeding off of people who are lost. It's Tony Robbins's exploitation of people in bad places all over again. It's mindfulness meditation training for employees instead of raising wages and getting rid of monthly quotas.

Re: Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

#75

Post by dullcrisp »

matwood wrote: post #46
Fraterkes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to pry but I often see people make statements along the lines of 'if Id been rich when I was younger I wouldve died' and I never quite get it. Just drugs stuff?

Early 20s is when people peak at risk taking behavior. Add a large amount of money into the mix and the types of risks can go way up. Think go from sitting around playing beer pong, to doing coke and speeding around in a Ferrari. Even later in life, large amounts of money can cause people to do stupid things (see many famous people), but maturity has a chance then.

I dunno you can always drink beer and speed around in a Ford Fiesta. Irresponsibly is free.

Re: Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

#76

Post by layer8 »

anthonyrstevens wrote: post #66
layer8 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biological purpose of regretting past actions is to avoid them in the future, though.

Are we sure about that?

Do you have an alternative explanation to offer?

Re: Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

#77

Post by gosub100 »

geor9e wrote: post #43
paulpauper wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is why I never thrown out old computers or wipe out disks. They just sit around. Never know when you might need something on there

That's what I used to say, until I ran out of spare bedrooms, and the tunnel of carefully stacked old computers collapsed on me. Luckily I escaped and was able to buy a 32 TB NAS which is now 1% full of early 2000s disk images. Now it's just me, a NAS, and a mattress on the floor. I'm never going back.

/r/neckbeardNests

Re: Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

#78

Post by gosub100 »

milesvp wrote: post #56
hunter-gatherer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my experience with litecoin. I bought some back in the day when it was < $1 from my minimum wage job and sold it all when it "skyrocketed" to somewhere above $1. In the end I made a few thousand dollars and thought pretty good about it. Only a couple years later when it touched (if I recall correctly) close to $300 did I have regrets. Oh well.

This is partly why I don’t feel bad about not buying bitcoin at $12. I did the math, and given my general investing strategies, where I rebalance periodically, I doubt I’d have made more than couple hundred thousand. It’s real money, but not the millions I once imagined I’d have made. Also, it felt risky at the time, so the money I might have lost would have been real to me at the time.

I never even saw it as a speculative investment. I had my eye on it at the same $12/coin price and thought "this is great, it will be the ultimate PayPal killer for online shopping". This was at the height of PayPals evil ages where they were enabling scammers and shutting down and blocking legitimate businesses. 12 years later PayPal has gotten a lot better, less relevant, and almost no one uses BTC for online retail shopping.

Re: Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

#79

Post by tough »

tomcam wrote: post #63
alexey-salmin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this. Why not regret all of them? I'm yet to see my capacity for regrets get saturated

This was Mark Twain-level funny

Attention is the real bottleneck

Re: Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them

#80

Post by more_corn »

tl;dr Focus forward. Backward is the direction of blame, forward is the direction of improvement.

“Boy that sucked, I’m sure gunna remember not to do that again” Read the SRE book on blameless postmortems for more blindingly obvious and wildly underused psychological and institutional hacks.

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