[3261] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: Mistakes.
celine@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (celine@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Jul 27 23:46:48 1992
It's always possible to be dissatisfied with any previous action. When I look
back on things I've done, there are actions that resulted in consequences that
turned out badly for both myself and others. But I can't comfortably predict
the outcome of other likely actions I might have taken well enough to choose
an alternative. I couldn't predict the future then, I still can't predict
possible futures based on actions I might have taken, now. To do so based on
how things actually turned out would be to effectively ignore myself as an
agent acting on the outcome.
People seem to do this a lot, but almost always in the negative sense (that
is, they focus on ways might have been primarily in thinking about how they
might have been better). It can lead to some serious seeming reasons for
depression. I think it's ill founded. I'd think that if one were going to be
depressed about something, they should depressed about the fact that things
turned out badly, and not because a "mistake" was made, which implies there
was a verifyably better action.
