Everything in this course has centred on trying to help us minimise error and subsequent regret. There is an enormous amount we can do to clarify our thinking and reduce our chances of acting blindly and against our deeper interests. But at a certain moment, there is also a need to face up to a reality that, once we have embraced it fully, may also prove remarkably cheering: that whatever we do will, in some ways, be slightly wrong.
Any step we take will end up with certain regrets. We might leave and suffer; we might stay and suffer. We might even invent a new arrangement – and suffer still. Wholly suffering-free choices don’t exist. We simply don’t have the luxury of never losing out when we make a choice.
The person who understood this bracing truth best was the nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, whose thought revolved around the idea of a fundamental incompleteness to all our lives. Any one choice, asserted Kierkegaard, will cut us off from other choices in which certain forms of happiness could have been found; we are condemned to an occasional and true feeling of having missed out on our best opportunities. In a bleakly comedic passage in his Either/Or, Kierkegaard tried to shake us from our attachment to the idea of being able to make choices without suffering any penalties:
"Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it…. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy."
It may sound brutal, but it is in fact very kind (and, like many true and dark things, very funny).We should not torture ourselves with an idea of an idyll we might miss out on. Whatever we do will, in the nicest and kindest possible way, leave us a bit unhappy, feeling that we should have acted in another way and beset with sadness for something we have (genuinely) missed out on. This won’t be a sign that we have made the ‘wrong’ choice (there is often no such thing in these matters, and no fully ‘right’ one either) – just that we are, in all our glory and idiocy, enduring the actual conditions of existence. The lesson is to lower our expectations of being able to choose with perfect wisdom or to inoculate ourselves against all regret. Of course we’ll get this one slightly wrong, but it needn’t be just a tragedy. In the right mood it might also be a subject for laughter, consoling friendship and the best sort of despairing humility in the face of the thorny dilemmas life reliably puts in our way.
