What Would I Tell My Younger Self About Life and Regret?

What’s one thing you know now that would have saved your younger self a lot of pain?

Most of us assume that knowing more would have spared us pain. Hindsight suggests otherwise. Much of what hurt us was not what we failed to know, but the certainty we demanded before acting, and the blame we heaped on ourselves afterwards for what we could not have foreseen. Learning to choose with the light we have, and to release what lay beyond our sight, can turn regret into wisdom.

Discover why hindsight is a teacher and not a judge, and how that one lesson can help us live more purposefully today, on Rise & Inspire.

What Would Have Spared My Younger Self So Much Pain?

WordPress Daily Writing Prompt: What’s one thing you know now that would have saved your younger self a lot of pain?

If I could sit beside my younger self today, I would not begin by listing his mistakes. I would first listen to him: the hopes he carried, the fears he concealed, and the future he imagined so confidently.

Then I would tell him one thing. It is not the thing he would expect.

1. The Wish Behind the Question

Today’s prompt rests on a familiar wish: if only I had known then what I know now. It assumes that my younger self suffered because he did not know enough. For a long time I believed that too. So my first instinct would be to advise him to read more, ask more, and wait for one more sign before he moved.

2. The One Thing

What I know now is the opposite. Knowing more would not have saved him. Much of what he needed to know could only be learned by choosing, and then living with the choice. The pain he could have been spared was not the pain of not knowing. It was the pain of demanding certainty before acting, and then condemning himself afterwards for what he could not have known.

Hindsight is not a verdict. It is a view from a hill he had not yet climbed.

3. Understood Backwards, Lived Forwards

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his journal that life must be understood backwards but lived forwards.¹ Every real decision is made facing forward, in fog. To judge yesterday’s choice by today’s clarity is like blaming a traveller for ignoring a map that was drawn only after his journey ended. My younger self did not need more information. He needed permission to choose without it.

4. Who Knows What a Loss Means?

An old Chinese tale in the Huainanzi tells of a farmer on the frontier whose horse runs away.² His neighbours console him; he asks how they know it is bad luck. The horse returns with a fine stallion from beyond the border; they congratulate him; he asks how they know it is good luck. His son falls from the new horse and breaks his leg. Then war comes, and the lame son is spared. The story does not claim that every loss is a hidden gain. It says something humbler: in the moment of loss, we are rarely able to read what it means. I would tell him that some doors will close on him that are not the tragedies he takes them to be.

5. The Second Arrow

An early Buddhist discourse, the Sallatha Sutta, describes a person struck by an arrow who is then struck by a second.³ The first arrow is the pain itself. The second is the grief, resentment and self-blame we add to it. Life fires the first arrow; we usually fire the second ourselves. This is exactly where my younger self could be spared. The people who will disappoint him and the opportunities that will vanish are first arrows. The nights spent replaying them, asking why he did not see it coming, are second arrows, and he will be the archer.

6. Fear Must Not Sign the Decision

The demand for certainty is often fear dressed as prudence. The Tamil poet Subramania Bharathi, writing under colonial rule, built one of his best-known songs on a single refrain: Achamillai, achamillai, achamenbathillaiye (there is no fear, no fear, no such thing as fear).⁴ Even if the whole world stood against him, he sang, fear would find no place. He was not denying danger. He was refusing to let fear make his choices. I would tell my younger self the same: fear may sit in the room, but it must never sign the decision.

7. A Necessary Concession

This is not a licence for carelessness. Some pain is earned. Some choices go wrong not because the future was hidden but because we ignored what was plainly in front of us: a warning we did not want to hear, a duty we kept postponing. Hindsight is not a verdict, but it is a teacher, and refusing its lessons would be another kind of foolishness. Wisdom lies in telling the two apart: learning from what we could have known, and releasing what we could not.

So this is what I would tell him. You cannot control everything that happens to you, but you must never surrender responsibility for the choices that remain yours. Make them with the light you have. Then forgive yourself for the light you did not have.

Perhaps growing older is not about learning how to avoid all pain. It is about learning which pain teaches us, which suffering we can prevent, and which burdens we no longer need to carry.

Notes

¹ Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher and theologian. The remark comes from his journals for 1843, where he grants the philosophers that life is understood backwards, but adds that they forget it must be lived forwards.

² The Huainanzi is a Chinese compendium of philosophy compiled at the court of Liu An, King of Huainan, in the second century BCE. The story of the old man at the frontier (Sai Weng) appears in its eighteenth chapter and lives on as a Chinese proverb: when the old man lost his horse, who could tell it was not a blessing?

³ The Sallatha Sutta (“The Arrow”) is found in the Samyutta Nikaya (36.6) of the Pali Canon, among the earliest collections of the Buddha’s teachings. It contrasts the untrained person, who meets bodily pain with mental anguish and so feels two arrows, with the trained disciple, who feels only one.

⁴ Subramania Bharathi (1882–1921), honoured as Mahakavi (“great poet”) Bharathiyar, was a poet, journalist and freedom fighter from Ettayapuram in present-day Tamil Nadu, and a pioneer of modern Tamil verse. The refrain அச்சமில்லை அச்சமில்லை அச்சமென்பதில்லையே opens a song he wrote during the independence struggle; its later lines insist there is no fear even if all the people of the world stand opposed. The scholar R. P. Sethu Pillai, in Tamil Inbam, observed that the song echoes the seventh-century Saiva saint Thirunavukkarasar (Appar), who sang that there is nothing to fear and nothing coming that need be feared.

John Britto KurusumuthuRise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 11 October 2026

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