All The Things I Didn't Do
How to manage the annual existential crisis...
Mid-December is my annual existential crisis. I used to have it over the holidays, but it damaged Christmas, making me absent in mind even if present for presents.
So a few years ago I decided not to avoid it entirely – that seemed too optimistic – but to simply schedule it. Hence, the couple of weeks at the beginning of December are usually spent tying up loose ends, reflecting on lessons learned, deciding what will help in the coming year… with the occasional dip into self-pity (this used to be a wallow, these days it’s more a paddle).
In one of many productivity books recently read – and Instagram reels watched – I’ve heard repeated this idea: that we regret the things we didn’t do more than those we did.
This is apparently backed up by research (which I haven’t bothered to try and find), but google also tells me it echoes a Mark Twain quote: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”
This seems to echo the notion of the sweatshop shoe manufacturers, that we should just do it… but it seems somewhat flawed. Of course we can regret what we didn’t do… because we don’t know what the consequences would have been.
If you’d zigged instead of zagged, bobbed instead of weaved etc… Yeah, maybe things would be ‘better’… but chances are there would be some other unintended, or unforeseen, consequence. You know the consequences of what you did, so there’s evidence to dissect.
Over the last few years I’ve developed a few feature films as director, a couple have been cast, some even scheduled and locations scouted, and then they haven’t been made… Which seems disappointing, except… if they had gone ahead then it’s unlikely I’d currently have such a positive, close relationship to my children. In that sense, my failures have led to what feels like my biggest success.
All of which is to say, if you’re sitting in self-doubt, wondering about the path you didn’t take… give yourself a break. I heard another quote recently, from Peter Crone (which was useful enough for me to forgive him describing himself as “the mind architect”):
“What happened happened, and couldn’t have happened any other way… because it didn’t.”
I like that. It reminds me of something else I heard, perhaps in church, perhaps from a friend – I forget (again): “Sometimes the answer to a prayer is ‘No’”.
Thank God for that.
