Regret Minimization

"After your death, you will be what you were before your birth."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

I had a girlfriend for a few years in my mid-20s who believed in heaven, who used the word for comfort upon occasions of loss, or uncertainty, such as when my grandmother died, or when we talked about what happened to the baby - if fertilization had, indeed, taken place - the time she took the 'morning after' pill and sat, forlorn, for days in her room afterwards, thinking about our future children, who she couldn't have then known we would never have.

We had talked about having children - about what they'd look like, and how we'd raise them. And, she said she would teach them about heaven, too. I didn't believe in heaven - I even wanted to, for the certainty and the comfort of my soul. The problem was, I had been infected by a self-sustaining process of reason and pattern-matching, which had discredited the idea. There was no way to fit the idea of heaven into our universe - it would have been an insult to the rest of it.¹ I had even hung onto the idea long after this realization had first occurred, but time did me in. It's amazing how slowly the gap between rote knowledge and true internalization (or, 'feeling it in our bones') can be in closing.

The metaphor for our lives that has long resonated best with me is that we have been propelled (I picture a cannon, but that's just me) into a foggy sky. At any given time, we can see only the most proximate of our vast surroundings. By our expectations, and our intuition, we know that we will rise, slowly level out, and then begin descending. We don't know where the ground is, but we know once the descent starts what is coming. We cannot change the nature of our end, though while we are airborne, we can manipulate our trajectory some small amount. Maybe we even have a guess as to whether one trajectory is better than another - although that sounds like a more difficult matter, epistemologically, to me.

Years of the traditional business problem-solving mindset have taken their toll on me - when I face any life problem now, big or small, the first thing I ask is, 'what am I solving for?' And, I seek an answer in the specific form of one or two goals (any more than that and it starts to muddy what the real priority is). Then I look for one or two things that can be measured for each - things for which optimization would tractably help achieve that goal. It's a simple process that can be used for virtually anything, so long as you define each goal and its representative measures properly. Along came my daughter, who I want to have a good life. Well, how do you define that as a goal? And what do you measure to know you're on the right track?

My mind went to some ideas I've since rejected - "total happiness" being the first, but also the most nebulous and useless of all, I suspect. Happiness may be the most obvious facet of a good life, but it's far from the only one.

I had a dream that my daughter was old - and I knew at once that I must be old, too. I knew that my wife - her mother - was already passed away. My daughter had no friends, and I was afraid that I would die before her, and that she would be left to die alone. But, dying alone was, for a long time, something I was afraid of - was I just projecting my own past fears?²

I used to be afraid of it. I got over it when I realized that my fear of dying alone was really my fear of dying too soon - which is to say, dying with regrets. Nobody has to die with regrets - they can forgive themselves for anything that has happened in their past (which is not to say it's easy), and they can be mindful of the present. I only have a problem with those two things because I'm not good at either of them.

But I want to be. I want to spend time with my parents while I can. I want to spend time with Signe while she's this age that she will, of course, never be again. And I have the means to do so, if I can only get A connected to B, whether by a straight line or not.

I don't know what I need to do for my daughter to have the best life she can. But the best hunch I have right now is for both of us to learn regret minimization - to identify regrets as early as possible, and minimize or eliminate them whenever possible. I'll learn to do this, and as she grows, I'll teach her to do this, by words and my own examples.

Then again, maybe I think all of this because I'm just over-compensating for myself. That's what parents do, right?

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1) For what it's worth, the closest I can come today to a notion of heaven is by Simulation Theory, which begs the question, what are the characteristics of the world in which the simulation is running? That is, to me, one of the most interesting philosophical questions.
2) There was a period of a few years when I was quite literally afraid of Antony and the Johnson's song, "Hope There's Someone," because of the nerve it touched.