We can know some things about life in advance. Truisms and cliches. But steeped in truth nonetheless. It might be wise to try and draw up a list of the most qualitatively important ones and then build a worldview around obviating them that wouldn’t cost a culture its fitness for extreme long term survival.
A quick example is the notion that hindsight is 20/20. The lesson there is not to shrug and endure, but to think about the future, but to try and see the world in such a way that it’s ok to go back and admit you made mistakes, if that’s all that’s keeping you from being happy or better off.
We have this misguided intolerance of mistakes where we share the impossible effort of never making them. Instead we should be honest with ourselves that mistakes will inevitably be made and try to profit from them.
They can be compensated for. Not erased, but at least leveraged towards the future. Don’t try to avoid them wholesale, as that’s a fool’s errand, but to embrace the utility they may provide. Embrace the liberation that brings.
This doesn’t make you devoid of culpability for lousy choices, but it prevents you from doubling down on bad bets trying to pretend you never bet in the first place. (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy)
If your intentions were good from the beginning, if you at no point were trying to hurt or exploit anyone, if you made the best and kindest decision available to you at the time, then why should you feel any regret or accept any blame?
Only if you knowingly made a decision that had to be utterly correct and could have been avoided, or was malevolent in some way, should you embrace any feeling of wrong doing.
This speaks to the lack of wisdom in vengeance. The best decisions more or less are in my opinion the ones that permit adaptation up to and including being rescinded.
So don’t hurt people, because you can’t unhurt them later if you’re wrong. Don’t disable anything you can’t repair if needed.
