Why Do I Make Decisions I Later Regret?
A decision made in the moment and the same decision reviewed afterward are evaluated by two very different versions of the same person — one operating with whatever information, mood, and pressure were present at the time, and one operating in hindsight, with the outcome already known and the original pressure long gone. Regret is what that second version concludes, and it's concluding from a position the first version never had.
This asymmetry makes regret a poor guide to what actually went wrong. It's easy, after the fact, to see the better option clearly — but that clarity is a function of already knowing how things turned out, not evidence that the original decision was made carelessly or that a wiser version of the same person would have chosen differently under the same conditions.
The decisions that produce the most regret usually share a structural feature: they were made quickly, under some version of pressure, by whichever pattern was already primed to respond — not by careful deliberation that simply reached the wrong conclusion. The regret shows up later; the actual mechanism ran earlier, and mostly ran on its own.
Reducing regret isn't really about deciding more carefully in the moment — the moment rarely allows for that. It's about recognizing, ahead of time, which pattern tends to be doing the deciding under which conditions, so the decision that gets made is less often the fast, familiar one and more often an actual choice.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai