What people repeatedly tell us, and what we generally find true, is that we tend to regret about things we didn't do instead of things we did do. So let's take a moment to think about what this really means - when we say we only regret about things that we didn't do and not about the things that we did do. We rarely do nothing at all. And how many times in life have we been faced with exactly one possible course of action? Then we would have taken that course of action since there were no other possibilities. When we say we didn't do something, we most likely don't mean that we were in an absolute state of inaction, but rather that we didn't do this one particular thing. Most likely, we didn't do A because we did B (A and B are things... obviously), or we didn't do A so that we could do B. In either case, we can not separate not doing A from doing B. If our premise remains that we only regret about things we didn't do and never about things we did do, then we regret that we didn't do A but in the meantime we don't regret that we did B. Since not doing A is the precondition of us being able to do B, we should not regret not doing A as well. Of course, in the usual context it's always a new thing versus an old thing: starting a startup versus staying at the old job, traveling the world versus staying at home, so on and so forth. But carrying forward what one has been doing does not necessarily yield less exciting results as taking on a new challenge. Not staying on is also a form of not doing something. But by not staying on we got to do something else. Just like by not doing a new thing we got to stay on.
So regret is inevitable and by all means justifiable, but no regret should always be the final attitude.
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