What has been your biggest mistake in life so far?

[raisins]

God help me I agree with Peachy, somewhat.

Like she (he?) said, 'mistake' in this context is typically associated with regret. I don't regret very much at all and when there is something from the past that I have some emotion (jealousy, anger, whatever) over I generally accept that it was what I was capable of and that I now have more experience to make better choices. I've certainly done things that made me sad when I saw how the consequences of my actions effected other people and myself and I guess these are the sorts of things people are calling mistakes. I think there's a real difference between being sad about some of my past actions and regretting them. I don't know if Peachy is making this distinction but I think it's an important one. Sad is an emotional response and many times an appropriate one. Regret is building a fantasy that the past could somehow have been different. I'm not sure that it could. I don't know that the person I was at those moments could have made a different decision. I have no evidence to support that notion.

At the moment I made those choices I wasn't the person who had the knowledge or the foresight or the emotional depth to recognize that another alternative was superior. People generally make the best decisions for themselves according to the knowledge and beliefs they have. This doesn't make everyone "guilt-free", consequences surely follow. It just means that there is no point in constructing some fantasy about having perfect knowledge at an earlier point in life and imagining how great things would be. For whatever it's worth I'm not a particularly optimistic person.

Certainly one problem with the above is that it downplays free will, which I believe in. That being said it tends to keep me focused and responsive in the present and not stuck in the past so I'll let the issue with free will slide.

Anyway, to play along with this game, instead of spending so much time with the humanities I would have devoted more energy to math and physics. I would have been more respectful of the confidences that people placed in me and been more willing to listen than talk. I would have kept a journal and taken more pictures. Spent more time outside. Read less crap genre fiction. Watch less TV. blah blah blah

You could sum it all up by saying I would have paid more attention from the get go and spent less time zoning out.

regards,

raisins