Benedict Carey's New Year's Day piece in the New York Times, Regret with a Dash of Bitters, ruminates on the nature of lost possible selves, the person you might have been or could have been.
Surprisingly, or maybe not depending on how old you are, what people most regret is not what they did but what they didn't do.
In a series of studies, Laura A. King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, has had people write down a description of their future as they imagined it before a life-altering event, like divorce. She has found that those who are able to talk or write about this lost future without sinking into despair or losing hope tend to have developed another quality, called complexity.
Complexity reflects an ability to incorporate various points of view into a recollection, to vividly describe the circumstances, context and other dimensions. It is the sort of trait that would probably get you killed instantly in a firefight; but in the mental war of attrition through middle age and after, its value only increases.
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“To elaborate on loss, to look for some insight in it, is not just what a psychologically mature person does,” Dr. King said. “It’s how a person matures.
My favorite Swiss critic, Henri Frederik Amiel was unsuccessful and unnoticed during his life. After he died, a friend published his Intimate Diary, Journal Intime, to great acclaim because of its "scrupulous self observation" such as
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.