🥀 Module 4 — Regrets of Action and Regrets of Inaction | Deathbed Regrets Course
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Death and Dying Series
Module 4 — Regrets of Action and Regrets of Inaction
Listen closely to the regrets of the dying and a strange pattern emerges. Almost everything Bronnie Ware heard at the bedside begins the same way: I wish I had. Lived truer, spoken up, stayed in touch, let myself be happy. Hardly anyone's final regrets begin I wish I hadn't, even though every long life is full of genuine mistakes, bad decisions, and things done that should never have been done. Why do the errors fade while the omissions grow louder? It turns out science knows the answer, and it is one of the best-documented findings in the entire psychology of regret. This lesson teaches that finding and the research family around it, because together they explain why deathbed regrets sound the way they sound, in country after country, life after life.
The Two Species of Regret
Every regret a person can carry belongs to one of two species, and the split is simple to see once it is named.
A regret of action is about something done. The cruel sentence said at the dinner table. The marriage entered in haste. The money sunk into the scheme a wiser hour would have refused. When Priya thinks about the vicious thing she said to her sister at a wedding twenty years ago, she is carrying a regret of action: the event happened, she made it happen, and she wishes she had not.
A regret of inaction is about something left undone. The feeling never voiced. The trip never taken. The degree never finished, the business never started, the door never knocked on. When Priya thinks about the man she loved at twenty-five and never told, she is carrying a regret of inaction: nothing happened, and the nothing is the wound.
Pair them up and the species stand out clearly. The job taken and hated is action; the dream job never applied for is inaction. The argument that ended the friendship is action; the thirty years of never reaching back out is inaction. Most lives carry plenty of both. The question that opened a famous line of research is which species hurts more, and the answer turned out to depend entirely on one thing: how much time has passed.
The Temporal Pattern
In the 1990s at Cornell University, psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec ran a series of studies on what people regret and discovered what is now called the temporal pattern of regret, one of the field's landmark findings. It says this: in the short run, people regret their actions more, and in the long run, people regret their inactions more.
Fresh mistakes burn. In the days after a blunder, the regret of action is the loud one; ask people about last week and the things they did wrong dominate the list. But ask people to look back over their whole lives, at what they regret most across the decades, and the list flips. The regrets that survive, deepen, and dominate a long view are overwhelmingly the things left undone. The road not taken outlasts the wrong turn, by a wide margin.
The reasons why are as illuminating as the finding itself, and they come down to what each species of regret can and cannot do over time.
Action regrets close. A thing done is a finished event with edges, and finished events can be worked on. People apologize for them and repair them. They explain them to themselves: I was young, I was grieving, everyone told me it was a good investment. They extract the lesson and bank it, and a mistake that taught something stops being pure loss. They even find the silver linings: the bad marriage produced the beloved children. Year by year, the mind sands the action regret down.
Inaction regrets stay open. A thing never done has no edges, no event to repair, no concrete outcome to learn from, and crucially, no bad ending to point at. The unlived road exists only in imagination, and imagination is generous: the untold love would have been requited, the unstarted business would have flourished, the unfinished degree would have changed everything. Reality never gets to file its correction. So while the action regret shrinks under the sandpaper of explanation, the inaction regret quietly grows, polished by every passing year into something more golden and more lost. The road not taken never ends, which is exactly why the ache of it never does either.
Watch the pattern run in one life. At thirty, Dev's loudest regret is the house he bought, a money pit he curses monthly. The business idea he shelved that same year barely registers. At seventy, the house is an anecdote he laughs about; it was sold, the losses were absorbed, the lesson was learned. The shelved business is no longer an anecdote. It has become the quiet question of his whole working life, because it never got an ending, and so it never got smaller.
A Human Pattern, Not a Western One
A fair question about any psychology finding is whether it describes human beings or merely describes Americans. This one has been put to the test. Researchers, including Gilovich's own team, carried the studies abroad and examined long-term regrets in China, Japan, and Russia alongside the United States, cultures with deeply different attitudes toward duty, individual choice, and self-expression. The long-run dominance of inaction regret showed up everywhere. People in collectivist cultures and individualist ones alike, looking back over their lives, regret what they did not do more than what they did.
That matters for this course for a simple reason. The regrets of the dying are sometimes dismissed as a Western artifact, the predictable complaints of cultures obsessed with self-fulfillment. The cross-cultural evidence says otherwise. The way regret ages, errors closing while omissions stay open, appears to be built into human minds, not into any one culture's values. The dying of many nations are reading from the same book.
The Ideal Self and the Ought Self
Decades after the original temporal pattern work, Gilovich returned to the question with psychologist Shai Davidai and dug one level deeper: not just whether the deepest regrets are inactions, but what those inactions are about. Their answer requires one elegant distinction.
Every person carries two imagined versions of themselves. The ought self is the person made of duties and obligations: the responsible one, the one who should pay the bills, care for the parents, keep the promises, do right. The ideal self is the person made of hopes and dreams: the one who would have written the novel, seen the world, taken the leap, become what the heart kept proposing. Falling short of the ought self produces one kind of regret; falling short of the ideal self produces another.
Davidai and Gilovich found the two do not haunt equally. When people named their deepest, most enduring life regrets, roughly three in four pointed at the ideal self, the person they dreamed of becoming and did not, rather than at duties they failed. And the reason connects straight back to the temporal pattern. Failures of the ought self are concrete and pressing; the world enforces duties, other people notice when they slip, and the guilt pushes hard enough that people tend to act, repair, and resolve. Failures of the ideal self enforce nothing. No one sends a notice when a dream goes unattempted. The cost is invisible, the deadline is always later, and so these failures are almost always inactions, the species of regret that never closes. The dream deferred becomes the regret that endures, not because dreams matter more than duties, but because nothing in life forces a reckoning with them until the reckoning arrives on its own.
The Opportunity Principle
One more finding completes the backbone, and it answers a question the others leave open: why do some regrets roar while others, seemingly just as large, sit quietly? Regret researchers call the answer the opportunity principle: regret runs loudest where opportunity once stood open, and quietest where there truly was no door.
The mind, it turns out, does not waste much regret on the genuinely impossible. Where there was never a real choice, the feeling that forms is closer to sorrow than to regret; the counterfactual engine, the comparison machinery this course's anatomy lesson taught, has nothing to grip. But where a door stood open, where the person can look back and see the exact hallway, the exact year, the exact moment the other life was available, regret has everything it needs. This is why, in American surveys, education is the single most regretted domain of life: schooling is the door the culture holds open longest and widest, so its unwalked hallways generate the most regret. And it is why regrets sharpen around remembered moments of real choice: the offer declined, the ring not bought, the application never sent.
The principle has a sharper edge still: regret stays loudest of all where the door remains ajar. A possibility that is still technically alive keeps the regret fully awake, nagging, because the steering function of regret has something to steer toward. Which raises the obvious, enormous question: what happens to all of this when a person can see every door beginning to close at once?
Why This Matters at a Deathbed
Now stand at the bedside with all four findings in hand and listen again to Bronnie Ware's famous five, each of which has its own lesson ahead in this course. A life lived to others' expectations instead of one's own: an inaction toward the ideal self, the truest version of the species there is. Feelings never expressed: inaction. Friendships never maintained: inaction. Happiness never permitted: inaction. Even the working too hard, the only one dressed as an action, is at its core a story of withheld presence, the evenings and childhoods not attended; the providing was done, and the living was left undone.
This is no coincidence, and it is not because the dying forget their mistakes. It is the signature of how regret ages, written across an entire lifespan and read out at the end. The action regrets of a long life have had decades to close: repaired, explained, learned from, sanded down. The inaction regrets have had the same decades to stay open and grow golden. A deathbed is simply the place where the longest possible long run gets totaled, and the temporal pattern says exactly what the totals will show. The dying say I wish I had because that is what survives.
And the opportunity principle explains the anguish in their voices. For an entire lifetime, every inaction regret carried a built-in mercy: the door was still ajar, the word was still yet. The end of life is the season when the doors close in plain view, and an emotion designed to steer toward open doors finds itself at full volume in a narrowing hallway. What can still be done in that hallway, and the answer is far more than most people have ever been told, is where this course is headed.
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