TED演讲 | 可以后悔，但不可以一悔再悔

So that's Johnny Depp, of course. And that's Johnny Depp's shoulder.

这是强尼·德普，很显然，这是他的肩膀。

And that's Johnny Depp's famous shoulder tattoo. Some of you might know that, in 1990, Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder, and he had tattooed on his right shoulder "Winona forever."

这是他肩膀上著名的纹身。也许有人知道，在1990年德普和薇诺娜·赖德订婚，他的右肩上就有了这个纹身 “永远的薇诺娜”。

And then three years later-which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards-they broke up, and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done.

然而3年后—这个依照好莱坞的标准来说算得上永远了—他俩各奔东西，强尼一蹶不振，做了些小修纹。

And now his shoulder says, "Wino forever."

现在他肩膀的纹身是“永远的酒鬼”。

So like Johnny Depp, and like 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 50, I have a tattoo.

我喜欢强尼·德普，就像16岁到50岁美国人中的百分之二十五的人一样，我有纹身。

I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s, but I deliberately waited a really long time.

大概是25岁左右的时候我开始想纹一个，不过我刻意等了很久。

Because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30.

因为我知道很多人在17岁、19岁或者23岁纹了身，然后30岁就后悔了。

That didn't happen to me. I got my tattoo when I was 29, and I regretted it instantly.

我不是这样的。我29岁的时候去纹了身，然后立马后悔了。

And by "regretted it," I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place-this is just a couple miles from here down on the Lower East Side-and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street.

我说的“后悔”是我一出了纹身店的门—离这儿就几公里远，在下东区—大白天好端端地我就在东百老汇和运河街的拐角情绪崩溃了。

Which is a great place to do it because nobody cares.

那是个情绪崩溃的好地方因为别人都懒得理你。

And then I went home that night, and I had an even larger emotional meltdown, which I'll say more about in a minute.

那天晚上我回到家，情绪更加崩溃，一会儿我会再谈谈。

And this was all actually quite shocking to me, because prior to this moment, I had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets.

这让我十分震惊，因为在那之前，我告诉自己，我绝对不会后悔的。

I made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions, of course. I do that hourly.

我做过很多错事和傻事，这是当然的。

But I had always felt like, look, you know, I made the best choice I could make given who I was then, given the information I had on hand.

而且从来没间断过，但我觉得，我在当时的状况下，基于手头具有的信息作出了最好的选择。

I learned a lesson from it. It somehow got me to where I am in life right now. And okay, I wouldn't change it.

我学到了一些，这就是我成为现在的我的原因。我不会改变的。

In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret,

也就是说我深知我们对后悔的文化，

which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.

也就是为过去的事情悲伤，简直就是在浪费时间，我们应该常常向前看而不是向后看，我们最好应该做的事就是争取活在没有后悔的世界了。

This idea is nicely captured by this quote: "Things without all remedy should be without regard; what's done is done."

有句话很好地表达了这个观点：“放开无法挽回的事情；泼出去水收不回来。”

And it seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first-something we might all agree to sign onto...until I tell you who said it.

首先这个看起来是很值得赞扬的人生哲学—要是我不告诉你谁说的，大家也许会同意然后签署为……

Right, so this is Lady MacBeth basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people.

没错，就是麦克白夫人告诉她丈夫别像个懦夫一样，害怕杀了人。

And as it happens, Shakespeare was onto something here, as he generally was.

这里莎士比亚其实另有所指，他总是这样。

Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths.

因为无法体会后悔，其实是反社会人格的。

It's also, by the way, a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage.

诊断特征之一，它也是一种脑损伤的表象。

So people who have damage to their orbital frontal cortex seem to be unable to feel regret in the face of even obviously very poor decisions.

如果有人的眼窝前额皮质受到损失，就可能甚至在面对非常错误的决定时也能绝不后悔。

So if, in fact, you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy.

那么，你要是想生而无悔，那就有个办法。叫前脑叶白质切除术。

But if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live, not without regret, but with it.

但是如果你想功能正常，做正常人、有人性，那就得学着不要一悔再悔。

So let's start off by defining some terms. What is regret?

首先让我们定义一下几个词语。什么是后悔？

Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past.

后悔是我们觉得如果过去做法不同，当下的状况就会更好更幸福时的情绪表达。

So in other words, regret requires two things. It requires, first of all, agency-we had to make a decision in the first place.

也就是，后悔包含两点。首先是对象—我们曾经作出的决定。

And second of all, it requires imagination.

第二是想像。

We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice, and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present.

我们要想像如果能回到过去，作出不同的选择，那么我们就能据此想像未来，眼下的事情会如何发展。

And in fact, the more we have of either of these things-the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret, the more acute that regret will be.

这两样我们有的越多—在一种遗憾上有更多的对象和想像，这种后悔就越强烈。

So let's say for instance that you're on your way to your best friend's wedding and you're trying to get to the airport and you're stuck in terrible traffic, and you finally arrive at your gate and you've missed your flight.

比如，你在去你朋友婚礼的路上，机场的路上塞车，你最终到了登机口，却错过飞机了。

You're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20.

如果你只是迟到了3分钟会比迟到20分钟后悔得更厉害。

Why? Well because, if you miss your flight by three minutes, it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome.

为什么？因为如果你只是迟到3分钟，去想像你要是做不同的决定，事情就不会这样子，这样非常痛苦。

"I should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel. I should have gone through that yellow light."

“我本应该走大桥而不是隧道。我不应该在那个黄灯停下来。”

These are the classic conditions that create regret. We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly, but almost came out well.

这是会导致后悔的典型场景。我们对一个决定负责而其结果糟糕，但离好结果近在咫尺的时候，我们就会觉得后悔。

Now within that framework, we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things.

在这个模式下，我们显然常常后悔很多事情。

This session today is about behavioral economics. And most of what we know about regret comes to us out of that domain.

今天这个会议是关于行为经济学。我们知道的大部分“后悔”都是来自这个范围。

We have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them-buyer's remorse, basically.

我们对消费者的财政决定有大量研究，他们的决定—也就是购买者的懊悔。

Then finally, it occurred to some researchers to step back and say, well okay, but overall, what do we regret most in life?

终于有研究者想到，那么人生中我们最后悔什么？

Here's what the answers turn out to look like.

让我们看看结果。

So top six regrets-the things we regret most in life: Number one by far, education. 33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education.

六大遗憾—人生里我们最遗憾的事情：第一是教育。百分之三十三的后悔是来自对受教育的决定.

We wish we'd gotten more of it. We wish we'd taken better advantage of the education that we did have.

我们希望受更多的教育。更好地利用教育资源。

We wish we'd chosen to study a different topic.

或者学习另外一个专业。

Others very high on our list of regrets include career, romance, parenting, various decisions and choices about our sense of self and how we spend our leisure time-or actually more specifically, how we fail to spend our leisure time.

其他在遗憾单子上非常高排名的项目还有事业、爱情、子女教育、各种各样的决定和我们决定怎么度过闲暇时间的决定—或者确切地说，后悔我们怎么没好好利用闲暇时间。

The remaining regrets pertain to these things: finance, family issues unrelated to romance or parenting, health, friends, spirituality and community.

其他的遗憾还有这些：财政，家庭问题包括婚姻或子女教育、健康、朋友、精神世界和社区。

So in other words, we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance. But it turns out, when you look overall at what people regret in life, you know what, our financial decisions don't even rank.

换句话说，我们是通过金融研究了解了遗憾。但结果是当你思量人们生命中的憾事时，我们的财务决定根本就是排不上号。

They account for less than three percent of our total regrets.

理财上的遗憾都不及总的遗憾的百分之三。

So if you're sitting there stressing about large cap versus small cap, or company A versus company B, or should you buy the Subaru or the Prius, you know what, let it go.

那么如果你因为不知道选个大帽子还是小帽子苦恼，或者纠结于公司A和B，斯巴鲁还是普瑞斯，那么还是别操那个心了。

Odds are, you're not going to care in five years.

因为你五年之内都不会在意这个的。

But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around, what does that experience feel like?

而对于我们真正在乎并且会深深抱有遗憾的事物，会是什么样的感受？

We all know the short answer. It feels terrible. Regret feels awful.

不用说我们都知道。会无比地痛心后悔。但结果显示懊悔。

But it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways.

主要由四个非常特有的，连贯性的阶段组成。

So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial.

第一个就是否认。

When I went home that night after getting my tattoo, I basically stayed up all night.

当我那晚纹了身回家时，我一夜没睡。

And for the first several hours, there was exactly one thought in my head.

头几个小时，我脑子里只有一个念头。

And the thought was, "Make it go away!" This is an unbelievably primitive emotional response.

就是“我不要这样！”这是个令人难以置信的初始情绪。

I mean, it's right up there with, "I want my mommy!"

就像是心里想着“我要妈妈！”

We're not trying to solve the problem. We're not trying to understand how the problem came about. We just want it to vanish.

根本不想解决问题。不试着去了解问题的根由。就是希望错误消失。

The second characteristic component of regret is a sense of bewilderment.

后悔第二波就是困惑感。

So the other thing I thought about there in my bedroom that night was, "How could I have done that? What was I thinking?"

那天晚上我在卧室里想的就是“我怎么做出这样的事情？我到底在想什么？”

This real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret.

这是尝试把做出后悔决定的那部分自己跟自身孤立起来。

We can't identify with that part. We don't understand that part.

我们无法认同那部分自己。无法理解那部分。

And we certainly don't have any empathy for that part-which explains the third consistent component of regret, which is an intense desire to punish ourselves.

而我们绝对不喜欢那部分自己—这就带来了后悔第三波，一种强烈的自我惩罚的愿望。

That's why, in the face of our regret, the thing we consistently say is, "I could have kicked myself."

这就是我们面对悔恨的时候，总是自我责难：“真想抽自己一巴掌！”

The fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative.

第四波就是心理学家所谓的表现执拗。

To perseverate means to focus obsessively and repeatedly on the exact same thing.

表现执拗就是不断地强迫性地重复同一件事情。

Now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop.

而表现执拗的结果就是，持续不停地重复后悔的前三个阶段。

So it's not that I sat there in my bedroom that night, thinking, "Make it go away."

那天晚上我就坐在卧室里想“我不要这样！”

It's that I sat there and I thought, "Make it go away. Make it go away. Make it go away. Make it go away."

我就这么坐着一直想“不要这样，不要这样，不要这样，不要这样。”

So if you look at the psychological literature, these are the four consistent defining components of regret.

如果你查看心理学文献，这些就是悔恨的四个阶段。

But I want to suggest that there's also a fifth one.

但我想说还有第五阶段。

And I think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call.

我想这是一种自我觉醒。

That night in my apartment, after I got done kicking myself and so forth, I lay in bed for a long time, and I thought about skin grafts.

那晚我在公寓里反反复复讨伐自己后，我躺在床上很久，想着植皮。

And then I thought about how, much as travel insurance doesn't cover acts of God, probably my health insurance did not cover acts of idiocy.

然后我想到旅行保险可不保自然灾害，那么我的医疗保险自然也不包括自己干的蠢事。

In point of fact, no insurance covers acts of idiocy.

没有什么保险保自己干的蠢事。

The whole point of acts of idiocy is that they leave you totally uninsured; they leave you exposed to the world and exposed to your own vulnerability and fallibility in face of, frankly, a fairly indifferent universe.

愚蠢的结果就是自己完全无保障；你完全袒露在这个世界面前，袒露在你自身的脆弱和不可谱面前，事实上，这是个相对无情的世界。

This is obviously an incredibly painful experience.

这很明显是个十分痛苦的经历。

And I think it's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Control-Z culture-Control-Z like the computer command, undo.

我想这对于西方人来说，这种Control-Z文化是无比痛苦的—Control-Z就是电脑键盘上的命令，撤消。

We're incredibly used to not having to face life's hard realities, in a certain sense.

在某种意义上，我们曾经不用去面对残酷的现实。

We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem-we can undo and unfriend and unfollow.

我们以为用钱或者科技就能解决问题—我们能撤消，能解除好友关系，取消关注。

And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot.

但问题是生活中有很多我们迫切地期望改变，但是不行。

Sometimes instead of Control-Z, we actually have zero control.

有时候不是撤消，而是无法控制。

And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists-and I know where of I speak-this is really hard, because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right.

而对于那些控制狂和完美主义者—我知道我说自己呢—这是非常糟糕的，因为我们想亲力亲为每件事并绝对做好。

Now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos, and I'm going to return to that point in a few minutes.

那么有一点就是控制狂和完美主义者千万别纹身,一会儿我会提到这一点。

But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we're feeling regretful about.

首先是我们体验到的懊悔各阶段的强度和持久度，很显然是取决于后悔的特定对象。

So for instance, here's one of my favorite automatic generators of regret in modern life.

比如这就是一个常常导致我后悔的例子。

Right. And the amazing thing about this really insidious technological innovation is that even just with this one thing, we can experience a huge range of regret.

是的。这个狡猾的技术发明的奇特之处就是，仅仅是这样一个东西就足够让你无比后悔。

You know, you can accidentally hit "reply all" to an email and torpedo a relationship.

你知道，你可能不小心点了这个按钮，然后断送了一段恋爱。

Or you can just have an incredibly embarrassing day at work. Or you can have your last day at work.

或者就是在办公室里羞愧地想钻地洞或者被炒鱿鱼。

And this doesn't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life.

这些比起真正的生命中的遗憾完全不算什么。

Because of course, sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences,

因为有时候我们的决定会导致无可挽回的结果，

either for our own or for other people's health and happiness and livelihoods, and in the very worst case scenario, even their lives.

也许是关于自己或者别人的健康、幸福或者生活之类，最严重的是涉及到别人的生命。

Now obviously, those kinds of regrets are incredibly piercing and enduring.

很显然那些遗憾会无比痛苦且持久。

I mean, even the stupid "reply all" regrets can leave us in a fit of excruciating agony for days.

甚至仅仅是愚蠢的“恢复给所有人”就能折磨我们好几天。

So how are we supposed to live with this?

那我们怎么才能面对悔恨？

I want to suggest that there's three things that help us to make our peace with regret.

我想提三点建议来让我们平和地面对后悔。

And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality.

第一就是意识到它的普遍性。

If you Google regret and tattoo, you will get 11.5 million hits.

如果你在谷歌上搜索后悔和纹身，能有1150万条结果。

The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17 percent of us regret getting them.

品和药物管理局估计全美纹过身的人里大概有百分之十七的人都会后悔。

That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends.

包括强尼1德普、我还有七百万陌生朋友。

And that's just regret about tattoos. We are all in this together.

而这只不过是后悔纹了身而已。我们都差不多。

The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves.

第二点去平和地处理后悔就是学会自嘲 。

Now in my case, this really wasn't a problem, because it's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don't like your new tattoo.

这对我来说一点都不难，因为你要是29岁了还因为一个不喜欢的新纹身而哭着找妈妈的话，完全可以自嘲一下。

But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets.

虽然有人会觉得这个建议对于真正沉重的后悔来说有点残酷且华而不实。

I don't think that's the case though.

我不这么认为。

All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive.

几乎我们所有人都经历过十分痛苦和懊悔的情况，幽默，甚至黑色幽默能帮助我们度过难关。

It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us.

因为它能连接我们生活的两个极端，正极和负极，给我们的生活注入一点电流。

The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds-except for tattoos, which are permanent.

第三点我想就是通过时间的流逝来慢慢平和地面对遗憾，我想，时间抚平一切—除了纹身大概是永久性的。

So it's been several years since I got my own tattoo. And do you guys just want to see it? All right.

我纹身也有几年了。你们想看看吗？没问题。

Actually, you know what, I should warn you, you're going to be disappointed.

不过我得先声明一下，你们可能会失望。

Because it's actually not that hideous. I didn't tattoo Marilyn Manson's face on some indiscreet part of myself or something.

因为这个纹身并不那么糟糕。我可没把玛莉莲·曼森的脸纹到什么隐私部位。

When other people see my tattoo, for the most part they like how it looks.

别人看到我的纹身基本上都还挺喜欢。

It's just that I don't like how it looks. And as I said earlier, I'm a perfectionist. But I'll let you see it anyway.

只是我不喜欢这个图案。正如我之前所说，我是个完美主义者。不过我还是会给你们看看。

This is my tattoo. I can guess what some of you are thinking.

我的纹身。我知道你们有些人会怎么想。

So let me reassure you about something. Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are.

那么让我告诉你，有些你后悔的东西并不是你以为的那么糟糕。

I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling.

我纹这个是因为我二十来岁的时候，基本都是在其他国家旅行。

And when I came and settled in New York afterward, I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time.

后来当我到纽约定居后，我怕自己会忘记在那期间我认识到一些重要的东西。

Specifically the two things I learned about myself that I most didn't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring,

特别有两点我最不想忘记，一是不要停止探索的脚步，

simultaneously, how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north.

二是不要忘记你心中的目标。

And what I loved about this image of the compass was that I felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image.

我当初喜欢这个指南针图案，就是因为觉得这个图案将上述两点含括于内。

And I thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device.

我想这个会变成我永久的记忆。

Well it did. But it turns out, it doesn't remind me of the thing I thought it would; it reminds me constantly of something else instead.

不过确实是只是让我想起的不是我当初希望的；而常常是其他东西，它常常让我想起。

It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us, which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us.

关于遗憾的教训也是生命中最重要的教训之一。

And ironically, I think it's probably the single most important thing I possibly could have tattooed onto my body-partly as a writer, but also just as a human being.

讽刺的是，我想这可能唯一的最重要的我能把它纹到身上的东西—既是作为一名作家，也是作为一个人。

Here's the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them,

总之就是，如果我们有目标和梦想，我们想尽最大的努力或者如果我们爱一些人不希望伤害到他们或失去他们，

we should feel pain when things go wrong.

当这些出现问题的时候我们理应感到痛苦。

The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.

问题的关键不是生而无悔。而是不要因后悔而厌恨自己。

The lesson that I ultimately learned from my tattoo and that I want to leave you with today is this:

我从纹身上学到的东西，我想今天跟你们分享的就是：

We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them.

我们应该学会去爱我们制造出来的、不完美有缺陷的东西，并原谅自己导致了这样的结果。

Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.

遗憾并不是要提醒我们所做的糟糕行为，而是提醒我们可以做得更好。

Thank you.

谢谢。