In 60 years I’ll wish I hadn’t written this
February 2024
I get asked a lot about the tattoo on my forearm. This isn’t a complaint – it’s my favorite tattoo, and I love getting to explain that it’s for my wife (and goddamn do I love telling people about my wife (see my last post, for example)). But this usually pretty routine conversation took an odd turn last time I had it.
“Do you think you’ll regret it?”
I was more than a bit thrown, and my face must’ve shown it, because she cited that statistic about half of marriages ending in divorce. The implication, of course, was that if my marriage doesn’t last forever, surely I wouldn’t want a permanent reminder of past love hanging around.
I think people with tattoos are used to this sort of talk.
“It won’t look good when you’re eighty.”
“I can’t think of anything I like enough to get permanently on my body.”
“Why not just get it on a t-shirt or a poster, so you can change it out when you get bored?”
“Won’t you regret it?”
“Won’t you regret it?”
“Won’t you regret it?”
Y’all. Y’all. We need to have a serious conversation about our relationship with regret.
It’s obviously beyond just tattoos. It’s every permanent and semi-permanent decision we make. We (Americans) have this weird obsession with the idea that anything that doesn’t 100% perpetuate to the end of our lives is a waste of our time. If you spend a few years dating someone who you don’t marry, you’re wasting your time and theirs. If you decide to take a gap year and travel, you’re wasting time you could be spending building a career. If you get elbow deep in a hobby, only to abandon it in six months when it’s not fun anymore, you’re wasting both your time and your money. You’re going to regret painting your house any color brighter than Depression Gray when it comes time to sell, never mind that that yellow kitchen made you so damn happy. And always with the implication that some future version of you is going to resent your choices. Like everything you do now is an investment in future you, who, I guess, is the version that will finally be allowed to do things that bring them joy.
Here's my first question: why is future you the only one allowed to be happy?
Why are we (because I’m definitely not immune to this) so ready to deny ourselves joy on behalf of someone we don’t even know? Because that’s what we’re doing when we stop ourselves from pursuing maximum happiness right immediately now. If I look at my marriage, my relationship, the absolutely disgusting amount of love I have for Rachel and say, “Ah, but perhaps 50 year old me will not love them, and so let me act like that’s already true, just in case” – I’m no longer living in the world where I do love them. I’ve robbed myself of that. I’ve decided that my current, verifiable happiness doesn’t matter as much as my possible future unhappiness.
That’s unhinged.
I think we think we can tuck away happiness, like it’s a high yield savings account. That if we deny ourselves now, we can squirrel away those scraps of joy and find them multiplied when we’re old. Like we should be living our lives such that on our last day, we’ve achieved maximum happiness. And honestly? Fuck what 90-year-old me wants. Why is that day the most important one?
Here's my second question: why are you assuming future you is boring?
Let’s duck back up to my tattoo example. If you have tattoos, you’ve probably been asked – no, told – that you’ll hate them when you’re old. There’s a weird, unfounded assumption that we become inherently different people when we get old. And listen, I’m pretty young yet, and it could be that I’m just not in the know. Maybe you hit 75 and they hand you your complimentary house slippers and swap you over to the retirement-age operating system, where the things you loved as a younger person are now offensive to you. You listen to one of your old playlists and complain whenever a song curses. Maybe that’s how it works.
But somehow I fucking doubt it. I think me at 70, 80, 90 is going to be an iteration of who I am now. I think I’ll still love the things I love, and if not, I’ll have compassion for the version of me that did love those things. I think 90 year old me would hate to look back and see all the things I avoided because I didn’t want to disappoint myself when I reached that age.
Last question. More of a statement.
I can list off a dozen major regrets without thinking about it. All of them boil down to:
Not going for something I really wanted because I was scared
Of disappointing someone else
Of failing
Of not having enough money to make it work
Of other people not understanding/liking/respecting what I was doing
I was going to add another bullet point, but that’s honestly it. The only things I regret – and I mean really regret, years later – are things I didn’t do, or things I stopped doing because I got in my own head about it.
Parting thought: being scared of regret is self-defeating. You’re never, ever going to live a live without regret. You can avoid any experience with even a 1% chance of regret, and all that gets you is a cupful of regret that you didn’t get more out of life. Do the things that make you happy now. Tell future you to piss off.
