The Fear of Life Regret

FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). YOLO (You Only Live Once). Live with no regrets. These slogans are related to a common yet profound fear, viz., the fear that on our deathbeds, we’ll look back and regret how we’ve lived our lives. Put in existential terms, this amounts to FOMO about a meaningful life. The fear I discuss in this chapter—what I’ll call the fear of existential regret, or more colloquially, the fear of life regret—doesn’t so much amount to the fear of death, but rather to the fear of not having lived well. In Sections 2-4, I explore the fear of life regret via a discussion of Leo Tolstoy’s classic The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I defend three main claims: (1) that the fear of life regret constitutes a genuine practical reason to take, or refrain from taking, certain courses of action; (2) that it’s a second-order or ‘meta-emotion’ – that is, an emotion (viz., fear) about another emotion (viz., potential regret) – related with self-regulation; and (3) that it involves a kind of striking ‘double’ mental time travel. In Section 5, I discuss two main skeptical worries about the fear of life regret. On the one hand, our future ‘deathbed’ self may be a fundamentally different person from our current self. So why think that our future self has any normative authority to dictate how we should be living now? On the other hand, is it possible for us to know what the viewpoint of our future self will be? In particular, we might need to undergo certain epistemically and personally transformative experiences to be even able to grasp why our present actions will lead to deep existential regrets. In sum, the fear of life regret might be neither normatively authoritative for nor even practically available to our present selves. If so, then why should we care about this fear in the first place? In addressing these worries, I’ll show how the fear of life regret can still play a significant role in our lives, at least in certain limited respects.