Regret, remorse or repentance

There is a vast difference between regret, remorse and repentance.

Regret is what we feel when we realize that we’ve hurt ourselves—damaged our careers, tarnished our reputations, or limited our options. Regret is not remorse, which is what we feel when we’ve hurt others. Remorse—from the Latin mordere, to bite—implies the nip of conscience.

Most public shows of regret come off as cringe-worthy because they fall short of being an apology and stink of self-justification. It’s remorse that we want from our public figures after they misbehave, not regret.

First, regret hurts because we venerate competence. Personal success is as much an American fetish as freedom of choice, so we feel duty-bound to make the kinds of decisions that lead to the best possible outcomes—to maximize our utility, as the economists say. If you subscribe to the cult of competence, it will feel like a bigger sin to sabotage yourself than others. The shame you suffer when caught doing something wrong will have less to do with having violated someone’s trust than with knowing you now look stupid or crazy.

Second, regret is the product of a simple but discomfiting contradiction. Though we have near-infinite options, we have a finite amount of time to sort through them. Given how much we prize proficient decision-making, this puts us in a bind: We can never obtain enough information to choose wisely. And that leads to a paralysis akin to the learned helplessness that experimental psychologists like to induce in dogs and rats through the administration of random, unavoidable shocks.

In other findings, they found that one, we deplore loss more than we enjoy gain, just as we remember unhappy experiences more vividly than happy ones. And two, in the heat of the moment, we brood more obsessively about the dumb things we did, and as we age, we grieve more about all the things we failed to do. But the regret we endure when we look back at everything we didn’t do, perhaps because we wasted so much time not being stupid, is the stuff of despair. If you do something to yourself, you’re doomed to stew in gall for, well, however long you stew about such things. As Sydney Harris said "Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable." 

Regrets are typically amoral—there is no right or wrong associated with the actions; it's the consequences that matter. In most of these cases the expression of regret through an apology is really secondary. Remorse, on the other hand, takes on a bitter, deeper form that elicits much stronger personal and emotional reactions to personal guilt, societal shame, humiliation, resentment and anger. While regret is amoral and concerned with good versus bad consequences, remorse has more to do with right versus wrong actions. Feelings of remorse are often caused by actions that constitute serious and painful errors of judgment and often draws out powerful compulsions to fix the mistakes through personal change and sacrifice.

People talk about “buyer’s remorse,” but the phrase gets it wrong writes Judith Shulevitz in her article " Regret is the Perfect Emotion for Our Self-Absorbed Times". According to her what most suffer from is “buyer’s regret”, because the bulk of our choices affect us more than other people. Buyer’s regret has much less moral import than buyer’s remorse but is more mortifying. If you do something to somebody, it’s awful, but there’s a chance that you can make amends. 

Psychologists suspect that we regret more than we used to, because we make more choices than we used to as shown in the famous experiment about the effect of too much choice. When psychologists set up a booth in an upscale food store offering samples of different high-end jams, the percentage of tasters they converted into buyers was ten times higher when they put out six jars than when they put out 24. Variations on this experiment have been conducted over the years with Godiva chocolates, microwave ovens, and various other products, and the message is always the same: more choice, less action. Economists spend a great deal of time nowadays trying to quantify both regret and “regret aversion,” because second thoughts, and the fear of having them, can have a volatile effect on markets.

French novelist Michel Houellebecq likens our floundering in the face of proliferating goods and services to purgatory, “an endless wandering between eternally modified product lines.” So maybe the cold liberty of individual choice is God’s judgment upon our insatiable culture. But more effable causes have also wrought this brave new world. There’s the deregulation of utilities and media; the supposedly empowering transfer of decision-making from experts to ignorant laypeople, the vast proliferation of goods from competing brands. 

Remorse, on the other hand is an emotional expression of personal regret felt by a person after they have committed an act which they deem to be shameful, hurtful, or violent. Remorse is closely allied to guilt and self-directed resentment. When a person regrets an earlier action or failure to act, it may be because of remorse or in response to various other consequences. And as George Moore puts it "Remorse is beholding heaven and feeling hell."

And often remorse is only part of the problem and a distinction should be made between regret, remorse and repentance. Regret is that activity of the mind that causes us to say, “Why did I do that?” Remorse touches us a little deeper causing us to feel disgust and pain (involving both the intellect and the heart), but not causing us to change our ways. Repentance brings in the third aspect of our minds – our will. To truly repent one must have a change of will. For if you are going to change, you better start changing your mind.

In our personal lives, we rue our actions even when we don’t have to apologize for them. Perhaps regret is the dark counterpart to American optimism and is as widespread and characteristic. But, alas, repentance is often confined to the church.

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