Could

Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual — the ultimate If Only. Its very purpose is to make us feel worse — because by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow. 
— Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret (2022)

No regrets. We say it at funerals. We put it on t-shirts. We offer it as hard-won advice to people younger than us, as if the goal of a life well lived is to arrive at the end having felt nothing about any of it. Daniel Pink opens The Power of Regretby taking this philosophy apart. The no-regrets posture, he argues, is not wisdom. It is avoidance with better branding.

Regret, Pink found, is the most common negative emotion human beings experience. More common than anger, sadness, fear, or jealousy. In study after study, across cultures and decades, the only emotion people report feeling more often than regret is love. It is not a sign of weakness or poor character. It is a sign of a functioning mind. Pink argues that people who cannot feel regret are not paragons of emotional health. Research links the absence of regret to lesions on the orbitofrontal cortex and serious psychiatric illness. It is a deficit, not an achievement.

Yesterday we examined the should—the voice that compares us to an imagined ideal self, a standard always slightly beyond reach. Could, on the other hand, does not look forward. It looks back. It does not ask who we ought to become. It asks why what already happened did not go another way. I could have said something. I could have stayed. I could have stopped sooner. Where should imagines a better self, could imagines a better past.

Of all the regrets Pink’s research uncovered, the ones that persist longest are the coulds rooted in inaction. Not the things we did badly, but the things we didn’t do at all. The words left unspoken. The risk not taken. The relationship allowed to lapse. Action regrets fade because we know their outcome; the wound is specific and can heal. Inaction regrets stay open because we can never know what could have happened. The mind keeps returning to revise them because they are, in a strange way, still unresolved. The past we didn’t choose remains available to the imagination indefinitely.

Pink identifies the core mistake as treating regret as something to eliminate rather than something to use. He offers three responses. We can bury it, wave it off, insist the past is past and pay the price in self-deception. We can wallow in it, returning to the same scene endlessly, rehearsing the pain without extracting anything useful, which research links directly to depression and anxiety. Or we can do the harder thing: treat regret as information. Ask what it is pointing at. Ask what it reveals about what we value. Let it instruct rather than indict.

Many of us spent years using as a way of not feeling the coulds. Substances are efficient at that. They quiet the voice that asks what might have been different. Getting well does not erase the catalogue. It surfaces it. The coulds are still there, sometimes larger now, more numerous, harder to face without the buffer we used to reach for. This is not a reason to despair. It is the beginning of the work. The could examined honestly, without cruelty, tells us something true about who we are and what we still care about.

Pink’s argument, at its core, is simple. Regret is not the opposite of a good life. It is often evidence of one. The ache of could means something was real—a relationship, a value, a version of ourselves we were still reaching toward. The could that hurts longest is often pointing at what matters most.