Gargi Bhattacharyya rightly connects the impulse to “self-improvement” with coming face-to-face with our own mortality:

The secular religions of self-help, self-care, and self-improvement are devised to meet this horror. The central tenet of each circles around regret and the avoidance of regret, all of which could be summarized as an injunction against mourning your own life. At the same time, the differently constituted anxiety of the age of social media pushes home the uncomfortable knowledge that none of us can in fact do it all, and also that however much we are doing, it will come to an end.

Living a life well lived must surely include coming to an acceptance of your own finitude. Including an acceptance of what cannot be and what cannot be done. Of the time that there will not be to fill. Of the countless paths that can never be taken. Serenity must include an ability to register the ever-spiralling possibilities and snippets of other not-yet-imagined lives and to be at ease in our connectedness to what others have been and done but that we will never do ourselves.

Bhattacharyya, We, the Heartbroken, page 96

I think here of how difficult it can be to make a decision, the agony in wanting to make the right choice, knowing all the while that “right” is impossible. There’s an oft-unspoken effort to avoid regret in that agonizing. But that effort represents a kind of paradox: the anguish exists because regret is inevitable. To live is to regret.

More than that, to live well is to care for your regrets, to accept their role as teacher and guide. In Madeline Miller’s Circe, the witch-goddess speaks one evening with Telemachus, son of Odysseus. They have confessed their sins to each other: he of the murders he committed at Odysseus’s command, she of how she created Scylla, the monster who torments sailors. Telemachus says:

“Her name…Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.”

“Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?”

It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.”

“It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said.

“Yes.” His voice was sharp.

“It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.”

He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said.

“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”

Miller, Circe, page 373

Wisdom arises from foolishness, from errors and wrongs. From regret. Do not let anyone take your regret from you! Do not dishonor it by flinching when it shows its face. It is both what made you who you are, and a tool for weaving a different world.