TLI: Why Holding Back Leads to Lifelong Regret
You’ve got a person in your life who you’d tag as TMI. We all do. Far more commonplace, though, are the TLI people. The shrinking violets who hold their opinions back, parrot talking points from others and shy away from adding substance.
We learn from our mistakes, that’s a given. What’s a lot harder to extract value from is omission. It’s easy to blame ourselves when we do something and it goes wrong. Where we don’t apportion enough responsibility is all of the times where we do nothing.
When we hold back, when we’re the TLI person, the infinite opportunities that could emerge are a lot easier to ignore. “We don’t see the friendships that don’t blossom, or the relationships that don’t deepen,” to quote Leslie John, who wrote a whole book on this entitled Revealing: The Power of Oversharing.
Top Five Regrets of the Dying
Another remarkable book by Bronnie Ware, a former palliative nurse, expanded on the five biggest regrets she heard from people at the end of life over the span of eight years. Four of the five most common were essentially either a frustration with omission or being too reserved.
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
If any of these apply to you right now, might we suggest you take it as a wake-up call. What are character frustrations right now can end up as searing regrets if you don’t treat them with the gravitas they deserve.
Omission v Commission
This idea of not doing being comparable to doing has been fleshed out by researchers. In the early ‘90s a series of experiments were run with University students to find out how people viewed action (commission) vs inaction (omission). Across six thought experiments, the findings revealed an “omission bias”, essentially highlighting how roughly ⅔ of respondents thought not doing anything was better than doing something, even if the outcome didn’t change.
To quote the paper directly, it “allows people to feel righteous by abstaining from sins of commission, even while they neglect (through omission) the suffering of others, which they could ameliorate at a small cost… by this view, the distinction is usually not admirable but rather convenient for those who want to be irresponsible without guilt feelings or regret.”
It’s easier for us to make peace with the outcome of a situation if we don’t act. The ‘Trolley Problem’ is the most famous example, where we are hypothetically watching a train hurtle towards five people, but have a lever at our disposal to redirect the train to another track, where it only kills one person. In doing nothing, we permit more destruction; in doing something, we become directly entangled in the scenario.
The Phantom Load
The understanding that our omission, or reticence, leads to regret, is driven by a miscalculation called affective forecasting.
Research into how we predict our future emotional states found that humans are consistently inaccurate. When we consider acting, or taking a risk, we anticipate a level of strain that exceeds our capacity. The sting of rejection or awkwardness is hyperinflated. In our overprediction, we tend to choose the safety of less rather than more.
Wilson & Gilbert, in 2003, describe how “people…fail to anticipate how much their psychological immune systems will hasten their recovery.” They also highlight how uncertainty prolongs our distress, something enhanced by omission or inaction.
When we act, we gain data necessary for us to make sense of a situation. When we do nothing, we remain in a state of theoretical fear. Doing something and understanding it as a mistake is temporary. Doing nothing and not knowing the outcome is a permanent stain on our potential.
The Sweet Spot
There’s a general frustration in the air at the moment that we’re missing out on connection. This is something intensified by our own reluctance to lean in, share and be vulnerable more often. On balance, the quick sting of a social blunder is always preferable to a life-long ache of a “what-if.”
If the research proves anything, it’s that we are far more robust than our fears lead us to believe. Omission, choosing inaction, has infinite negative possibilities that we never see.
To avoid the regrets that Bronnie Ware chronicled at the end of so many lives, we must lean a little more towards TMI than TLI, to deepen our unique experience while we still have the guts to.
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