This last round of food poisoning was either my fourth or fifth. In any case, it felt superfluous (in both directions.) But it did free up 48 hours in my pressing holiday schedule of baby dandling, book browsing, baby browsing and book dandling to think about the power of regret.
Food poisoning goes from 0 to 60 in about sixty seconds. One minute, I was bouncing a new colleague on my knee and the next I was sick in the gutter outside Powell's books, which was particularly galling (see what I did there?) because I'd been just about to start looking for a particular book I regretted not buying last year, a book about regret and how "people often create alternatives to reality and imagine how events might have turned out 'if only' something had been different."
If only I hadn't eaten...what was it? Food poisoning always lets you know. During the first wave of nausea you always get a mystical off-Broadway musical vision of exactly what made you sick:
It was me
Just little me
It's obvious but now it's much too late
You say you knew
You always knew
Yet you didn't hesitate to clean your plate
When we first met I made you blink
Now you're leaning over a sink
Or so you think
Why does it stink
Here on the brink of your despair
If only you'd skipped the
Palm Hearts of O'Hare
A few days later I returned to Powell's and found The Rational Imagination right where I'd left it in 2007. Ruth Byrne doesn't mention food poisoning, but outlines the kinds of places we tend to stick mental forks in the road and imagine what might have happened, if only. The incidents that trigger "if only" thoughts and the pitifully small set of factors we identify as significant variables show some regularities which are nicely visualized as "fault lines of reality." Where do we see cracks in the world that might be usefully widened into an imagined alternate reality? Why, when we hear that someone died in a car crash after he stopped for a beer, do we think, "If only he hadn't stopped for that beer" and not "If only he'd had a lot more to drink, passed out, and driven home later when the roads were a bit more clear"? Why do we think, "If only I'd ordered the salmon" rather than "If only I'd flown through a different airport"?
Byrne concludes that we regret actions, especially socially unacceptable actions, more than inactions (unless prompted to take a long term perspective). We're more likely to regret the latter elements in a perceived chain of causality. We tend to re-imagine events by changing the factors we see as controllable and that enabled the final outcome even if we know they weren't the actual cause. As an example, Byrne wonders why there was so much post-9/11 focus on the failures of security ("if only the baggage handlers had stopped the hijackers from getting on board...") rather than more direct causes ("If only Al-Qaeda didn't exist..."). She believes that some kinds of causative, if/then statements about reality immediately bring to mind more possible cause and effect combinations than others and that these are the statement/situations/factors that we tend to focus our counterfactual imagination on. We see fault lines where we are most conscious of multiple possible routes for reality to take.
Which all seems true enough, but abstracted to logical tautology: We mentally change those things we see as changeable. We focus on actions rather than inactions, unless we don't. The visceral turmoil of regret and its interaction with cognition is missing in this analysis, visible only in the real-life examples (including this concise debate over the existence of souls) and occasionally, obliquely, in the Aspergian understatement of Byrne's writing style which sometimes sounds like Mork reporting to Orson:
Cognitive differences may exist in how people think about possibilities. For example, people may differ in their ability to think about true possibilities.
Counterfactual thoughts can amplify emotions, and the emotions people experience may be affected by the sorts of counterfactual alternatives they create.
Some people seem to focus on the facts, whereas others seem to focus on the imagined alternative.
I'm a fact person myself. In keeping with the spirit of CHANGE, I'm making an effort to focus more on the imagined alternative, but I'm not making a fetish of it.
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