Is there any point in regretting the past?

Zsolt Hermann
1 min readFeb 20, 2022

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Question from the Internet:

“How does one live life despite having many regrets? How does one minimize the regrets moving forward?”

There are different ways of dealing with regret regarding the past.

The most obvious is to accept that the past has already happened, there is nothing we can do to change it, so we have to look forward. can we learn from the past and adjust, and then try to progress, develop consciously.

There is a deeper way of looking at it after we started to understand our inherent nature. Inherently we constantly think, decide and act instinctively, blindly following our original self-centered, self-serving, subjective, and individualistic inner program, nature. This makes it even more futile to be regretful about the past since we had absolutely no free choice in whatever we did since we acted following our instinctive program, constantly making automatic calculations based on our subjective “pleasure/pain” principle.

Regret, “reward and punishment” makes sense only from the point that we recognize how our inherent nature controls us 100% and we also receive an ability to free ourselves from blind, instinctive existence, behavior and we can choose between blind actions and consciously chosen ones above and against our instincts.

Only when we have received these two reins into our hands and can decide fully consciously, proactively if we go with or against our instinctive program, only then there is point in regret or feeling satisfied with our actions.

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Zsolt Hermann

I am a Hungarian-born Orthopedic surgeon presently living in New Zealand, with a profound interest in how mutually integrated living systems work.