Life is ultimately a search problem.

Imagine you were asked to solve the following problem. Given the points A, B, C, D, E, and F, what is the best path to go from point A to F while passing through every point exactly once. Here are the possible options:

• A → B → C → D → E → F
• A → B → D → C → E → F
• ….
• A → D → B → C → E → F

There are 24 possible paths you could take.

Now, let’s loosen the rules to say the only condition aside starting on A and ending at F is that there are no consecutive repeats. That is, you must hit a different point every time. So, we have the following possible options:

• A → B → C → D → E → B → D → C → E → B → D → C → E → B → D → C → E → B → D → C → E → B → D → C → E → B → D → C → E → B → D → C → E → B → D → F
• A → C → B → D → E → C → B → D → E → C → B → D → E → C → B → D → E → C → B → D → E → C → B → D → E → C → B → D → E → C → B → D → F
• ….
• A → E → B → C → D → E → B → C → D → E → B → C → D → E → B → C → D → E → B → C → D → E → B → C → D → E → B → C → D → E → B → C → F

With this new rule, there are $5^{34}$ possible paths you could take. That’s approximately $2.33 × 10^{23}$. Putting this into perspective, the age of the universe is $13.8$ billion years. To go through all possible paths:

• if you took 1 path per second, it would take you about $540,000$ times the age of the universe.
• If you took one 1 million paths per second, it would take about $540$ times the age of the universe.
• If you took one 1 billion paths per second, it would take about half the age of the universe.

It’s impossible for any human to solve this.

How does this apply to life and regrets?

We can loosely classify our journey in this world into two categories: individual goals and life as a whole (from birth to death).

For either category let us also say that we are now working with 12 points A to L, where the first six points are the things you can control and last six points are variables out of your control including the outcome L.

With this new set of points, there are $11^{34}$ possible paths. Mind you these are rookie numbers compared to what it looks like in reality. The number of actions in your control is definitely more than six and the number of variables outside your control are effectively infinite. Your mind cannot even comprehend it that’s one of the reasons people always say focus on what you can control but if you are curious about how many unknowns there are, go listen to a chronic complainer and watch how their brain intelligently manufactures these unknowns from the past, present and future.

Furthermore, we will denote each of these paths as realities. If each path is a reality then there is a reality for every single outcome imaginable on the surface of the Earth. From the best to the worst. It would interest you to know that there are realities where you are living your perfect dream life but It would probably scare you to know the numbers of realities where your life is exponentially worse than you can ever imagine.

What am I saying in essence? You are exponentially more luckier than the luckiest lottery winner to have breath in your lungs and be reading this right now. The odds that you are alive right is more or less zero.

I came to these conclusions after engaging in the many rituals of ruminating and replaying events and wishing I could of taken different actions. I noticed how it made me feel worse and how it was my ego sticking it’s head out after seeing everything clearly in hindsight. It’s like bragging about how you could have done better on a test after seeing the test answers. It’s fruitless.

Everyone is a genius in hindsight.

This, my friend, is why I strongly believe that regrets are useless. Mistakes are a feature, not bug and you can always make better decisions as long as you are alive.