Instagram video transcript

Why does regret exist? Regret exists because time is limited. That's obvious, right? If you had infinite time, no choice would be permanent. You pick wrong, you try again. Whether if it's the relationship that got away, or the career that you didn't pursue, or the country that you didn't move, or the city, whatever. None of it matters if you've got forever.

You'd get to all of it eventually. regret is a product of scarcity the scarcity of years and why are your years scars because you're going to die that's the bottom of the chain pull on any thread of regret long enough and you end up holding your own mortality uh you have a palliative nurse her name is bronie wear and she spent years

sitting at deathbeds holding the hands of people as the light left their eyes. She kept a record of their final words, and the most common regret she heard, nearly word for word, over and over again, was this. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me Look at the shape of that grief It an inaction a void

Nobody on their deathbed was tormented by the mistakes they made or the risks that blew up in their faces. They didn't care about the metrics or the expectations of people who wouldn't even be there to watch them die. They were tormented by the permissions they never gave themselves. They were mourning the versions of themselves they starved to death.

When I read her book, The Top 5 Regrets of Dying, it completely broke me. It made me so fucking emotional because I realized I was doing it too. I realized how terrifyingly easy it is to let your one brief, beautiful life slip right through your fingers while you are busy trying to optimize your way out of pain.