In his book Out of Control, Kevin Kelly wrote:
To evolve is to surrender choices. To become something new is to accumulate all the things you can no longer be.
(Another take on this is the advice to a first-year college student that I once heard: You can take any classes you want, but you can’t take every class you want.)
So even the luckiest lives are going to contain some paths not taken. Everyone’s life contains the ghosts of different selves that might have been developed, given another set of choices and different opportunities. Some recent research investigated the ways that people deal with their regrets, particularly in the face of a serious loss or change of course. It turns out that the people who cope the best have a higher capacity for something called complexity, the ability to see multiple facets of your own experience (e.g., the good along with the bad) and to gain meaning from even negative experiences. This capability develops over the course of a lifetime, so apparently we pick it up as we go along, if we’re lucky and/or disposed to do so.
This New York Times article describes this research in the context of a discussion on regrets. This article from Science Daily is more focused on the recent research.
