Life With Regrets: Why the Ones That Last Are the Things You Never Did
A life with regrets is the normal one, and the research is specific about which regrets stay: the things you did tend to hurt less as the years pass, and the things you did not do tend to hurt more. The Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his co-author Victoria Medvec named that pattern in 1995, and it has held up since. The mistake you made at 28 has probably shrunk. The thing you never started has not.
That single asymmetry is the most useful piece of information a man in his forties can have about his own regrets, because it tells him which pile is still costing him and which pile has already paid itself down.
Last reviewed August 22, 2026. Every figure below comes from a peer reviewed paper linked inline so you can check it yourself. Population level patterns describe groups rather than individuals, and none of the studies cited here were designed to predict what any single person should do. This is general information about published psychology research, not therapy and not individual advice. Persistent low mood, hopelessness or rumination that does not lift is a medical matter and deserves a doctor. If you are in crisis in the United States, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock by calling or texting 988, or at 988lifeline.org.
The short answer
Regret is a signal about where you still see room to move. It points at the parts of your life you have not yet written off.
Three findings carry the argument. Actions generate more regret in the short term and inactions generate more in the long run, so the regrets you are still carrying at 45 are disproportionately the ones about roads not taken. The domains that produce the most regret are the ones where people perceive the most opportunity, which is why education tops the ranking. And regret intensity was linked to a worse quality of life among older adults, whose chances to undo things had narrowed, rather than among younger ones.
Put those together and a regret whose opportunity is still live is a different object from one whose opportunity has closed. While the option remains, the regret is still information rather than damage. The job is sorting the ones you can act on from the ones you need to put down.
Why the mistake fades and the missed chance does not
The 1995 paper in Psychological Review reviewed the evidence on how regret behaves over time and reported a consistent shape. Errors of commission, meaning the things you actually did, generate more regret in the short term. Errors of omission, meaning the things you failed to do, produce more regret in the long run.
The authors argue the pattern is driven by several mechanisms at once, and the three they name are worth reading slowly, because each one describes something you can probably feel in your own history.
The first is that the pain of a regrettable action decreases over time. You did the thing, it went badly, and then you did the repair work: you explained it to yourself, you found the silver lining, you noticed what it taught you. A completed action gives your mind something concrete to work with.
The second is that the pain of a regrettable inaction increases over time. Nothing happened, so there is nothing to repair, and the imagined version stays perfect because it was never allowed to disappoint you. The business you never started never had a bad quarter.
The third is that the two kinds of regret differ in how easily they come to mind. Some regrets stay available for recall in a way others do not, which shapes which ones you find yourself replaying at two in the morning.
| Type of regret | Peaks when | Why the paper says it behaves that way |
|---|---|---|
| Action, the thing you did | Short term | Psychological processes decrease the pain of regrettable action as time passes |
| Inaction, the thing you skipped | Long run | Psychological processes bolster the pain of regrettable inaction as time passes |
| Both | Whenever they surface | The two types differ in cognitive availability, so they are not recalled at equal rates |
If you are somewhere between 40 and 55, you are standing at the far end of that chart for most of your early decisions. The regrets that are still loud are, by the shape of the pattern, weighted toward the omissions.
What people actually regret, ranked
In 2005 Neal Roese and Amy Summerville ran a meta analysis of 11 regret ranking studies and published the result in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Pooled across those studies, the six biggest regrets in life, in descending order, are education, career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure.
| Rank | Domain | What sits inside it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Education | Schooling started, stopped, skipped or chosen badly, and training never taken up |
| 2 | Career | Jobs taken, jobs turned down, the move not made, the line of work never tried |
| 3 | Romance | Relationships entered, ended, avoided or left running long past their point |
| 4 | Parenting | Time, attention and presence with children, and the choice to have them or not |
| 5 | The self | Health, character, habits, and the person you meant to become |
| 6 | Leisure | Interests, friendships and time not spent on the things that were actually yours |
Read that list next to the previous section and something uncomfortable appears. The ranking paper sorts domains by opportunity rather than by whether the regret came from acting or failing to act, so the following is this site's reading rather than a result the authors report: most of these six are domains where the classic regret is something skipped. Most men do not lie awake about the degree they finished. They lie awake about the one they did not.
Why education tops a list that is not really about school
The explanation Roese and Summerville give is the part most people skip, and it is the part that matters at 45.
Their finding is that greater perceived opportunity within a life domain evokes more intense regret. People's biggest regrets reflect where in life they see their largest opportunities, meaning where they see tangible prospects for change, growth and renewal. Education ranks first not because school is the most important thing in a life, but because for most people it still feels like the option that has not closed.
That flips the usual reading of a regret. A loud regret is a reading off your own sense of what is still available to you, rather than proof you wrecked something permanently. The domains that go quiet are the ones you have privately written off.
Which is why it is worth noticing what you do not regret. A man who feels nothing about his career has either made peace with it or stopped believing it can change. Those two states feel identical from the inside and are completely different from the outside. Our article on changing career at 40 deals with the second one directly.
The regret that will not close
Thirteen years after the ranking paper, Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich asked a different question in Emotion, the American Psychological Association journal. Not whether a regret came from acting or failing to act, but how it connects to your idea of yourself.
Across six studies they found that people's most enduring regrets stem more often from discrepancies between their actual and ideal selves than between their actual and ought selves. The ought self is duty: the obligations, the responsibilities, the things you were supposed to handle. The ideal self is aspiration: the goals, the hopes, the person you intended to become.
The mechanism they propose is the sharp part. People are quicker to take steps to cope with failures to live up to their duties and responsibilities than with failures to live up to their goals and aspirations. The authors present that coping difference as at least part of the explanation rather than the whole of it, and the everyday version is easy to recognise: duty tends to come with somebody applying pressure, and aspiration usually does not. The authors put the conclusion in a sentence worth carrying: people are more likely to regret not being all they could have been than all they should have been.
For a man at 45 this explains a lot about what is actually keeping him up. Obligations get discharged because somebody is waiting on them. The private ambition has nobody waiting on it, which is exactly why it is still sitting there twenty years later, undisturbed and unresolved. Our piece on finding purpose after 40 is about the same gap approached from the other side.
The finding that changes what to do at 45
In the same year as the ranking study, Carsten Wrosch, Isabelle Bauer and Michael Scheier published two studies in Psychology and Aging on how regret and quality of life relate across the adult life span. Their starting premise is blunt: opportunities to undo regrets decline with age.
What they found across both studies is that older adults perceived reduced opportunities to undo the consequences of their regrets, and that regret intensity predicted a reduced quality of life only among older adults. Among younger adults that link did not hold.
Then they looked for what protects the older group, and reported two things. Being disengaged from trying to undo the consequences of a regret, and having many future goals available, were both associated with lower regret intensity and with better quality of life.
Read that carefully, because it does not say what a motivational poster would say. It does not say keep fighting every regret forever. It says the intensity of a regret becomes corrosive specifically when the opportunity to act on it has closed, and that the two things that defuse it in that situation are letting go of the undoing and having somewhere else to aim.
The paper never names the age at which somebody becomes an older adult, so nothing here says a man of 45 sits on one side of that line rather than the other. What it does say is that the damage tracks lost opportunity rather than age itself. If your options have not actually closed, acting is still the move and disengagement is premature. That is the practical difference between a regret at 45 and a regret at 80, and it is also why midlife regret gets mistaken for a midlife crisis when it is often an accurate reading of something still available.
What to actually do with a regret at 45
Nothing below is a treatment protocol and none of it came from a clinical trial. It is the practical reading of the four papers above, and it is labelled as an editorial reading rather than a finding.
Sort by whether the opportunity is actually gone. The Wrosch result splits regrets into two operational piles, and the working test is whether you could take one concrete step toward it in the next thirty days without anyone's permission but your own: an application sent, a message written, an appointment booked. If such a step exists, the opportunity exists, the regret is information, and the answer is action. If the honest answer is that no step exists at all, rather than that the step is merely uncomfortable, the evidence points toward disengagement and toward building out other goals rather than toward more replaying.
Give the aspiration a deadline, because duty already has one. The Davidai and Gilovich mechanism is that ought related regrets get acted on because something external is pushing. Nothing external pushes an ideal self regret. If you want it closed, you have to manufacture the pressure that duty gets for free: a date, a payment, a person who is expecting it.
Watch which regrets have gone quiet. Under the Roese and Summerville result, silence in a domain means you no longer see opportunity there. The way to tell peace from denial is to picture the option again deliberately, the old line of work, the unstarted thing, the conversation never had. If picturing it produces nothing, that is peace. If it produces a flinch, that is something you closed without noticing rather than something that actually shut.
Expect the arithmetic to keep favouring action. The Gilovich and Medvec pattern says a new regrettable action will probably hurt less in ten years than a new regrettable inaction. That is a note about which bill arrives sooner, and not permission to be reckless.
Treat a loud regret as a location, not a verdict. It marks the part of your life where you still believe change is possible. That is a strange thing to call good news, and it is still good news. Starting over at 40 covers what the data says about acting on it. Where the regret is about what you meant to pass on rather than what you meant to acquire, what is my legacy treats that question directly.
The trap in wanting a life with no regrets
Living a life of no regrets is sold as the goal, and as a target it fails on its own terms.
The four papers here describe regret as a normal output of a mind that compares what happened with what could have happened. That comparison is how people learn. A person who never generated it would not be free, they would be someone who had stopped noticing alternatives.
There is also a quieter problem with the slogan. Under the opportunity principle, the fastest route to a life with no regrets runs through giving up on the idea that anything is still available to you. Perceived opportunity tracks regret intensity, so shrinking your sense of what is possible would presumably shrink your regret by the same logic, though no study cited here tested that direction. It is a genuinely awful way to buy peace, and it is roughly what resignation looks like from the inside.
The better target is a shorter omissions column. Under the Gilovich and Medvec pattern, that is the column that grows. We take that replacement target apart on its own terms in live life with no regrets, including what the maximiser research says about chasing a clean sheet.
FAQ
How do you deal with regrets in life?
Sort them by whether the opportunity is still open, because the research treats those two cases differently. Wrosch, Bauer and Scheier found that regret intensity predicted a reduced quality of life only among older adults, whose chances to undo things had narrowed, and that two things helped that group: disengaging from the attempt to undo the consequences, and having many future goals available. The practical test, which is this site's reading rather than a measure from the study, is whether one concrete step toward it still exists in the next thirty days. If it does, treat the regret as information and act on it. If no step exists at all, the evidence points toward putting the undoing down and building other goals rather than replaying it. The paper does not name an age at which that switch happens.
Is it normal to have regrets in your 40s?
Yes, and the shape of them is predictable. Gilovich and Medvec documented that regret from things you did fades over time while regret from things you did not do grows, so by your forties the surviving regrets are weighted toward omissions. Roese and Summerville add that the domains producing the most regret are the ones where people see the most opportunity, and midlife is when many men take an honest inventory of what is still available. Persistent low mood or rumination that does not lift is a separate matter and is worth raising with a doctor.
What do most people regret in life?
A meta analysis of 11 regret ranking studies, published by Roese and Summerville in 2005, put the top six domains in this order: education, career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure. Note what the ranking is not. It is not a ranking of how much each domain matters, and the authors are explicit that the driver is perceived opportunity: greater perceived opportunity within a life domain evokes more intense regret. Education heads the list because it reads to most people as the thing they could still go back and change.
Can you live a life without regrets?
Not usefully, and the reason is uncomfortable. Roese and Summerville found that regret intensity rises with perceived opportunity, which means the quantity you would be minimising is your own sense that anything is still open to you. A man who has genuinely stopped regretting anything has usually stopped expecting anything, and those two states are hard to tell apart from the inside. Aim at the second column instead: under the Gilovich and Medvec pattern, regrets from things you skipped are the ones that grow, so keeping that list short is the target that survives contact with the evidence.
Why do I regret things I did not do more than things I did?
Because one of them gives your mind something to work with and the other does not. Gilovich and Medvec organise the effect around three processes: some psychological processes decrease the pain of regrettable action over time, others bolster the pain of regrettable inaction over time, and the two types of regret differ in cognitive availability, meaning they are not recalled at equal rates. The practical consequence is that a bad decision gets explained, absorbed and filed, while an untaken option is never tested and so never gets the chance to turn out badly.
What is the difference between regret and a midlife crisis?
Regret is a specific comparison between a real outcome and an imagined one, and the papers cited here treat it as a normal cognitive output rather than a disorder. A midlife crisis, as the term is popularly used, describes a broader disruption in identity and behaviour. Regret can sit inside one without constituting one. The distinction matters because the response differs: a regret about an open door calls for a decision, while an unravelling calls for help.
Does regret get worse with age?
The evidence points at a change in effect rather than a simple increase. Wrosch, Bauer and Scheier reported that older adults perceived reduced opportunities to undo the consequences of their regrets, and that regret intensity predicted a reduced quality of life among older adults but not among younger ones. Separately, Gilovich and Medvec's pattern means the composition shifts with age, toward omissions. So it is less that regret grows and more that closed doors change what regret costs you.
Sources
Gilovich T, Medvec VH. The experience of regret: what, when, and why. Psychological Review. 1995 Apr;102(2):379 to 395. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7740094/
Roese NJ, Summerville A. What we regret most, and why. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 2005 Sep;31(9):1273 to 1285. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16055646/
Davidai S, Gilovich T. The ideal road not taken: the self-discrepancies involved in people's most enduring regrets. Emotion. 2018 Apr;18(3):439 to 452. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28493750/
Wrosch C, Bauer I, Scheier MF. Regret and quality of life across the adult life span: the influence of disengagement and available future goals. Psychology and Aging. 2005 Dec;20(4):657 to 670. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16420140/