In the early 2000s, an Australian woman named Bronnie Ware spent several years working in palliative care — the specific kind of nursing that cares for people who are dying, usually at home, in their final weeks. Over those years she had many hundreds of conversations with people whose remaining time was measured in days, and she started noticing patterns in what they talked about. When people who knew they were dying looked back across their lives, what came up wasn’t what popular culture might suggest. Nobody wished they’d made more money. Nobody wished they’d bought a nicer car. The regrets clustered consistently around a small set of themes, and those themes were remarkably similar from person to person.
In 2009, Ware wrote a blog post summarising what she’d observed. The post went viral, eventually became a book titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. The five regrets, in her summary, were these:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Ware’s book is a nursing memoir, not a research study. The observations are honest but the methodology is informal — she was listening to conversations, not running a systematic study, and the sample is specifically people in palliative care, which is not quite the same as everyone who will die. It would be reasonable to wonder whether the specific themes she identified would hold up under more careful examination.
The interesting thing is that they largely do. A reasonably substantial body of academic research on regret has converged on findings that overlap significantly with what Ware reported. The pattern is real enough that it probably tells us something worth knowing, particularly for people at the beginning of adult life rather than the end.
What the research converges on
The most systematic research on what people actually regret comes from the American social psychologist Tom Gilovich, whose work on regret has spanned four decades. Gilovich’s central finding, developed across many studies, is that the pattern of regret changes as time passes.
In the short term, people tend to regret their actions — things they did, decisions they made, words they said. The immediate sting of doing something wrong is sharp. The person who snapped at their colleague regrets it that afternoon. The person who made a bad purchase regrets it that evening. These action-regrets are vivid and focused.
In the long term, the pattern shifts. As years pass, the things that stay painful aren’t primarily the actions people took. They’re the inactions — the things people didn’t do that they wish they had. The career not pursued. The relationship not started, or not mended. The trip never taken. The words never said. Gilovich and his collaborator Victoria Medvec documented this pattern in a series of studies beginning in the 1990s. The finding has replicated robustly: short-term regrets are mostly about actions; long-term regrets are mostly about inactions.
The asymmetry appears to be produced by a specific mechanism. Actions produce finite consequences — you did the thing, something happened, you can measure the damage. Over time, you can often see how the damage has been absorbed, compensated for, or repaired. The regret loses its power. Inactions produce potentially infinite consequences — you didn’t do the thing, so you don’t know what would have happened, and imagination can populate the missing space with increasingly elaborate possibilities for what your life might have been. These imagined possibilities don’t get falsified by reality. They can grow richer with each passing year.
A related line of research, from the American psychologists Shai Davidai and Tom Gilovich, has examined whether people regret the gap between their actual lives and their ideal self (who they wished they’d become) or between their actual lives and their ought self (who they felt obligated to become — who others expected them to be). Their finding: the regrets that dominate at the end of life tend to be about the ideal self, not the ought self. People regret not becoming who they privately aspired to be far more than they regret not fulfilling others’ expectations of them.
This is significant. It means the expectations people most worry about during their lives — meeting family expectations, professional expectations, social expectations — are not the source of their eventual regrets. The regrets come from somewhere more internal: from the parts of themselves they never developed, the directions they never pursued, the people they never became despite knowing, in some private way, they could have.
This aligns with Ware’s first and most emphasised regret: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. The academic research and the hospice observations are pointing at the same thing.
What this means in practical terms
The research doesn’t tell anyone exactly what their life should look like. It does, however, flag some specific patterns that have recurred across many lives and that are worth knowing about early rather than late.
Work, in the regret literature, comes up repeatedly — not in the sense that people wish they’d accomplished more, but in the sense that they wish they’d let it take less of their life. Ware’s second regret captures this: people at the end rarely wish they’d put in more hours. They often wish they’d spent more of those hours with specific people, on specific things, that they let work displace. Modern research on the same phenomenon comes up consistent. The hours that feel necessary at the time, that feel like the obvious choice given career pressures and professional norms, look different from the end. The evidence suggests most people end up wishing they’d had the courage to work somewhat less than their professional culture expected of them.
Relationships, particularly friendships, come up across almost every version of the research. Ware noted that many of her patients, in their final weeks, realised they’d lost touch with specific friends and couldn’t now do anything about it. The friendships hadn’t ended dramatically — they’d faded through inattention, through the accumulating pressure of other commitments, through the assumption that there would always be more time. This maps cleanly onto the inaction-regret finding. The action of contacting an old friend is small and easy; the inaction of not doing it is costly over time. Most people, accumulating small inactions across years, end up with losses they can’t retroactively repair.
Emotional expression — the willingness to tell people what you actually think, feel, want — comes up both in Ware’s observations and in research on what people wish they’d done differently. Many people get to the end of their lives having spent them managing other people’s impressions of them rather than actually communicating with them. The energy that goes into strategic self-presentation, relationship maintenance through pleasantness, and avoiding conflict has substantial costs that aren’t always visible in the moment. People who’ve spent decades in this mode often report, near the end, a specific regret about the conversations they didn’t have — the love they didn’t express, the disagreements they didn’t voice, the truths they softened past the point of recognition.
Permission to be happy — Ware’s fifth regret, and the one that might sound strangest — also has research support. Many people treat happiness as contingent on specific future achievements: I’ll be happy when I’ve finished this project, when I’ve reached that income, when the children are grown, when the mortgage is paid. The research suggests that this conditional frame often doesn’t resolve itself. The happiness remains postponed. The conditions that would supposedly trigger it keep shifting. At the end, many people realise they had more capacity for happiness throughout their lives than they exercised — that happiness, for many people, is substantially a decision rather than a reward.
The counter-thread worth naming
Before treating this body of research as definitive, some honest qualifications.
Hospice populations are a specific sample. People who are dying in palliative care tend to have specific demographic features — they’re usually older, often in specific health-service systems, often from particular cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Generalising from their reported regrets to the likely regrets of everyone is a reasonable first-pass move, but it shouldn’t be overstated. Some of the regret themes that emerge from hospice samples may reflect the specific kinds of lives that end up in hospice care rather than universal patterns.
And the pattern of common regrets doesn’t mean these are the regrets you specifically will have. Lives are diverse. The average pattern across many people is informative but not prescriptive. Someone who has spent their life working intensely on work they genuinely loved may look back with a different set of reflections than the aggregate pattern predicts. Someone whose relationships have been structured differently from the popular pattern may have different regrets — or none of them. The research describes tendencies across many lives; it doesn’t dictate what any specific life should contain.
The research is also shaped by the specific question being asked. People interviewed about their regrets at the end of life are being prompted to remember regrets; this isn’t the same as being asked to describe their lives overall. Many of the people Ware and other researchers talked with reported, alongside their regrets, substantial satisfactions and relationships they valued. Reading only the regrets produces a selective picture of what their lives actually contained. The lives weren’t primarily tragic; they had specific elements the people at the end wished had been different, alongside much else.
So the honest version of what to take from this research is: there are specific patterns in what people commonly wish they had done differently, those patterns are probably real, and they’re worth knowing about when making choices earlier in life. But the research is a guide, not a prescription, and your own life will have its own specific shape that may or may not fit the aggregate pattern.
The curriculum you’ve just finished
This article is the last in a long sequence. Over the past two years, the articles in this curriculum have covered what a library of traditions — scientific, philosophical, practical — has found out about how human beings live well and live badly.
The first year examined foundations. How bodies and minds work. How emotions operate and what to do with them. How identity forms in adolescence. How relationships function. What the research on resilience and wellbeing actually says. The second year took that foundation and applied it outward — to productive work, to hard thinking, to communication with others, to citizenship, to economic understanding, to ethics, to leadership. The articles have argued, repeatedly, against simple takeaways. Almost every topic turned out to have counter-threads, important qualifications, cases where the intuitive answer was right and cases where it wasn’t.
What the curriculum has implicitly argued, across all of this, is that living well is not primarily a matter of following rules or applying principles cleanly. It’s a matter of paying close attention — to the actual situations you’re in, the actual people you’re with, the actual capacities you’re developing, the actual consequences of your actions. The research is useful because it sharpens what you pay attention to. It surfaces patterns that intuition would miss. It names forces that operate on you whether or not you notice them. But it doesn’t substitute for the specific judgements you’ll have to make in specific moments, with incomplete information, about your own specific life.
The regret research is a kind of capstone for this, because it’s where the question what does living well actually look like? gets asked by people who have most of their lives behind them rather than ahead of them. What they report, with impressive consistency, is something close to what the rest of the curriculum has been arguing for in different forms: the threads that turn out to matter are not the ones our culture emphasises most. Not accumulation. Not status. Not productivity. The threads that matter are, approximately, the ones that the articles in this series have kept coming back to: relationships tended carefully, authentic engagement with your own life, honest communication with people you care about, a willingness to accept your own happiness when it’s available rather than deferring it indefinitely, the courage to live by your own lights rather than others’ expectations.
These themes recur because they’re what has held up across centuries of serious reflection on how to live — in Stoic and Buddhist and Christian and Aristotelian traditions, in modern psychology, in the reports of people who have watched their own lives from the vantage point of their end. The convergence isn’t proof. It’s evidence. The evidence has a specific shape, and the shape is worth knowing as you start making the choices that will determine what you’ll look back on.
The question that remains, for the last time
You’re about to finish formal schooling. Some of what you’ve learned across these two years will stay; much will fade. What stays isn’t usually the specific content. It’s a set of dispositions — ways of approaching questions, habits of attention, sensitivities to specific patterns — that shape how you’ll encounter whatever comes next.
The research on regret suggests that the specific dispositions that matter most, across long time horizons, are probably these: the willingness to choose your own life rather than defaulting to expectations; the courage to tell people what you actually think and feel; the discipline to maintain relationships through the years when it’s easier to let them fade; the capacity to notice that happiness is often available now, not only in some imagined future; the restraint to let work take its share of your life but not more than its share.
These are not dramatic instructions. They’re quiet ones, the kind that work through thousands of small daily decisions rather than a few large ones. That’s part of why they’re so hard. The person who fails at them doesn’t usually fail in a single visible moment. They fail by not doing specific small things, repeatedly, over decades, until the cumulative inaction becomes the shape of their life.
The question worth carrying into whatever comes next — worth carrying, really, for the rest of your life:
Decades from now, looking back at the life you’re about to build — what do you hope you’ll find when you look? And, given that the research suggests you probably already know much of what you’ll hope to find, what will you do, starting now, to make finding it more likely?
Key research referenced: Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (2011); Tom Gilovich and Victoria Medvec’s research on regret, beginning with “The Experience of Regret: What, When, and Why” (1995); Shai Davidai and Tom Gilovich, “The Ideal Road Not Taken: The Self-Discrepancies Involved in People’s Most Enduring Regrets” (2018); the broader psychological research on regret and on what people report about meaning at the end of life.