How to get over your Regrets + Announcement

New Reddit article, plus a big announcement 🙂

Hey there, happy new year to you and your family.

I have some good stuff for you today. First, I have a new article to share which you might find interesting and useful, if, like me, you often find yourself overwhelmed by regret.

From there, I’ll have a big announcement. This includes news about a new website/brand I’m launching, as well as a new short and fun eBook I wrote. Scroll down pass the divider if you're curious about that.

Your past isn’t the problem. It’s your regrets about the past that’s holding you back.

Here's a compassion focused way to break free of your regrets.

Note, this was also posted to Reddit. Check it out and leave a comment or upvote if you’re so inclined. ✌️

You decide to head out to do some groceries. It’s a nice day out, you’re feeling alright, when—bam. You get hit by a bus.

RIP

A moment later, you find yourself unharmed, staring up at a giant, majestic-looking building.

Confused and curious, you get up to crack open the door and peer inside. After taking in the splendor of what appears to be an infinite arrangement of bookshelves, you spot a pre-canceled Morgan Freeman type individual sitting behind a service desk. He’s just there. Waiting, smiling.

“Hello” you say as you slide in through the heavy door. “Am I…. am I dead?”

Let’s fast-forward this part of the movie; the part where the God avatar librarian explains everything to you.

TL;DR: you died—but not to worry cause you’re only dead in your “root life”. Now… now, you get to jump into another life of your choosing. And your choices are infinite, with each book of the library containing a possible life—a life that would have been had you made different choices.

There’s one for the life you’d be leading now had you not procrastinated so much in College.

There’s one for the your life had you actually gone through with that creative dream of yours.

There’s even one for your life had you picked different socks 11 minutes prior to leaving the house.

Your job is to pick one, any one, and you’ll just appear there, in that exact life, at the exact instant you got bammed by the bus.

“But how do I know which one to pick?” you say. “How do I know which is best?”

“First, you don’t have to get it right the first time—no-one ever does. If, in the course of living your alternate life, you feel even a tinge of disappointment, you’ll simply fade away and return back to this library for another go.

“Second, and, hold on a sec,” Pre-Canceled Morgan Freeman starts fishing around beneath the desk for something. He struggles but manages to pull out a worn-out, encyclopedia-sized book.

“To help you get started, you’re free to use this. This, my friend... this is your book of regrets. Go ahead, have a look.”

You hesitate before opening the book mid-way. The page contains an illustration of you at the spot you used to sit at to work on assignments or study. It reads, I regret wasting the entire work-session watching videos about—then it hits you. Like a foul odor, except it’s not an odor.

It’s a sensation.

A feeling. A very familiar feeling.

Regret.

Regret.

You’re compelled to flip through the rest of the book, despite the discomfort. You’re met with all the shameful memories of your life. Terrible life decisions. Months and months of utter inertia from self-doubt, fear and insecurity. Moment after moment of you taking an action—or more commonly, not taking an action—which you’d come to painfully regret later.

You reach the end of the book. You feel utterly spent, but it’s clear what you need to do. Where you need to go. What life you need to try on first.

Pre-Canceled Morgan Freeman nods. He takes out a slip of paper and jots down a number before handing it to you.

“There. That’s the one to take. Go that way, 5th row to your left then 4th shelf from the bottom.“

Weary, you give your thanks before setting off towards the book; towards your new, hopefully better, life.

…

So that’s how the plot unfolds in the 2020 book “Midnight Library” by Matthew Haig.

Of course, I took many artistic liberties—it’s not, for example, written in the second person, nor does it feature a character lifted from Bruce Almighty—but that’s the gist of it. That’s how it starts.

Anyway, I suggest you take a moment to reflect on this scenario.

What would it be like to go through your big book of regrets? How long would it take? What pages would you get stuck on—what action would cause the biggest sting? Or would it be the multitude of near-identical pages showing repeated inaction that would cause the most, well, regret.

And what “alternate life” would you pick first?

Maybe it’s the one where, on reaching your last major milestone—maybe you moved somewhere new, maybe you started a new career, maybe you met that special someone—you actually followed-through on your plans, resolutions and commitments to be better. Maybe it’s a life where you said “no” when you should have said “yes”, or “yes” when you should have said “no".

Whatever life you’d choose, there’s one little thing you ought to know. It’s what the Midnight Library—and this is a quasi spoiler—aims to teach you:

If you were to jump into any one of those “better” lives, you’d still find something to be disappointed in. Things wouldn’t be as flashy or glamorous or gratifying as you now imagine. You’d have new problems. New stresses. New worries. New let downs.

And experiencing that disappointment, however subtle, would lead to an erasure—an erasure of the regret you’re currently carrying, removing it from the pages of your big book of regrets.

Do that enough times and, poof, all your regrets would be gone.

In other words, your regrets really shouldn’t be regrets... if only you could know what it would actually be like to live a life of "better choices", beyond the romantic fantasies and idealized assumptions.

As Nora, the book’s protagonists, reflects:

It is easy to mourn the lives we are living. Easy to wish we developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular… done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have.

It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be.

It is easy to regret and keep regretting ad infinitum until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that is the real problem. It is the regret itself that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

In short, you need to find your way to process, eliminate and/or minimize your regrets. They are the problem you are experiencing; not all the shameful stuff of your past they point to.

If you don’t, you’ll forever stay stuck. Stuck in your rut of “what ifs” and “I should haves”.

I know this because I’ve lived it.

I have soooo much to be regretful about for 2023. Same for 2022 and 2021. But I can’t let romantic notions about "all that could have been" contaminate my one precious 2024—a year that still has yet to be written.

At least I ought not to. I try my best.

So how do I do this? How can you move beyond your regret about your many yesterdays so they don’t stifle you as you try to make the best of your one and only today?

Well, chances are, you won’t be given the opportunity to try out all your alternate lives like in the book (but, do consider reading it to see what it might be like). So you need to do some work for that happen.

It won’t be fast or easy. There is no pill to take; no capsule that promises the quieting of the ruminative mind.

The only thing we can do is observe regret.

Just like with the sadness that comes with depression, or the panic that comes with anxiety, or the self-recrimination that comes with ADHD, the best way to deal with regret is through detached observation. Through looking at it dispassionately. Like it’s a thing that’s happening outside you.

hmm… there it is again. That feeling of regret. Hello regret. It’s been a while. Yeah yeah, I remember. I should’ve asked that girl in the coffee shop for her number. I know.

This is called mindfulness.

I suggest you find a therapist skilled in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to teach you mindfulness. This is, I fully believe, an essential practice for the modern era. It's a skill our entire generation needs to learn to function—not unlike cooking or driving—so please, do yourself a favor and take the initiative to learn it and practice it until it ‘clicks’ for you and becomes habit.

From there, find a way to come to acceptance. This too is essential if you don’t want regret to contaminate your entire existence.

No matter what life you’re in, whether it’s your current life of mediocrity, or the hypothetical one where you did everything right, regret will find always find it’s way in.

Regret is a gas that wiggles through even the most air-tight “perfect-life” containers.

So, it’s what you do with that regret that truly matters.

Do you rush to relieve it through your vices? Do you doom-scroll or Netflix-binge or zombie-snack your way to forgetting?

Do you stare at it with a fancy new mindfulness technique, only to let it fester and grow and mutate into resentment, self-hate, envy and cynicism?

Or… do you interpret regret as bits of immaterial data? Bits of junk information your subconscious is feeding you because—and bless the little bugger—it’s naïvely just trying to get you to survive in a world it simply wasn’t made for?

Do all you can to find a way to accept yourself entirely: your past, your present, your failings, your all.

…

I truly hope you find your way to a better relationship with regret.

I truly hope (and know) you can come to a place where regret is no longer the dead-weight you need to carry around, but a shitty-compass you can sometimes use as a guide. It’s from the Dollar Store so it can’t always be trusted, but it was rest assured it was always made to be a life navigating tool, just like pain and worry. Regret was never made to be a relentless burden, again like pain and worry.

I hope, in this fresh new year of ours, you can find your way out of the shadows of all your 'what ifs' and into the light of 'what can be'. It’s just better there.

With a little help, plus some some good mindfulness and acceptance stuff, I know you will find your way there.

Want to leave a comment? Please do so on Reddit. I reply to all messages. ✌️

---

New Brand, New Website, New Beginnings

So, I wasn’t planning on writing out a giant story like that. I recently finished the Midnight Library book and I just started writing and kept going. Funny how that happens sometimes (and how it very much doesn’t other times).

I hope you took something out of it—especially if, like me, regret and remorse has been pervasive themes of your life.

Anyway, what I was planning on sharing with you today was an announcement.

I’m launching a new website and brand. Check it out at techsober.org, and feel free to browse around the subsections.

Some notes/thoughts about it:

• It took a while, but I uploaded all my past articles. I’m hoping new readers will find these useful.

• There’s a Resource page where I’ve added links to The Habit Reframe Method, as well as a brand new eBook I wrote over the holidays. It’s called “Out of My Rut: How five unconventional books got me to stop procrastinating, build better habits, live a happier life, and how they can do the same for you”.
  The initial idea was to create a generic book-recommendation list, but well, I got a bit carried away and ended up writing out how much of my progress came to be. I talk about the five most influential books in my journey and how each book fits into the puzzle. If you feel like checking it out and supporting the project at the same time, check it out here.

• For the About section of the website, I wasn't sure what to put, so I had AI help flesh it out. Am I missing something important? If I create an FAQ section, is there anything you’d want me to address?

• The website template I found has the ability to host an interactive eBook (head to the “The Book” section where you’ll see it in action with some placeholder text). There are many advantages to this over a PDF or Kindle self-publishing release, but the main one is that I can keep updating it without the hassle of distributing new versions. This will hopefully relieve a lot of the pressure I experienced during my first go at writing a book in 2022. The book can evolve and expand freely as I get feedback from readers. No need for it to be perfect off the bat.

• My intention is to keep The Book section open through the entire writing process. I heard that Andy Weir did something similar with The Martian, where he posted it in serial form, chapter by chapter to his website. Maybe that’ll keep me accountable, while also keeping the perfectionist monster at bay. Feedback is, of course, more than welcome. Once a solid draft is done—and my deadline is the end of March—I’ll put it behind a 30$ or so paywall.

• The homepage will serve as the main sales page for the book. Since it hasn't been officially released yet, I decided to let the Call-To-Action button lead to a “pre-order” page. This is for those of you who want to support us in this endeavor, and who might also want to take advantage of the perks.

All in all, I’m super stoked about this new endeavor, and eager to take in feedback, criticism, suggestions and ideas. Starting, not just a brand, but a social movement won’t be easy. But I’m up for it… and I’ll take all the help I can get. :)

In the coming months I'll be sharing with you regular updates of my progress. If you'd rather not hear about this, just let me know, and I'll set aside your e-mail.

That’s it for today,

All the best,

Simon ㋛