“What if?”

Like many others, I often find myself asking this question. What if I had chosen a different major? Or a different school? What if I had never met so-and-so? It’s easy to be trapped by these questions and guilt. We are often advised to live our lives with no regrets, especially by older generations. Is it possible?

As a junior, I have begun to feel the imminent reality of graduation and the future. Admittedly, this overwhelmed me at the beginning of the year. I panicked about whether I had chosen the right major or not. This was mostly due to the fact that I had zero desire to go to graduate school (which is arguably necessary being an English major), and I also couldn’t picture being content with one job or career for which my undergraduate studies had supposedly prepared me.

Truthfully, I wanted to open a coffee shop. As great as my experience has been at Iowa State, I wanted to get out of Iowa and move somewhere new and begin a grand adventure. I had already “chosen my adventure” at Iowa State, and I needed a new one. I began to regret the time I had seemingly wasted at college when I bounced around from major to major. I tried history, Spanish, German and linguistics, and I finally decided on English. And I hit a point when I thought I thought I should simply quit “wasting time” and drop out, so I could pursue my dreams.

Luckily, I was able to take time to consider my decisions that had led me to this point, and I realized that I could have this dream and be happy with all the things I had done to get to this point in my life. My best friend Kate and I began planning on opening a coffee shop after we graduate next December. Of course, we are still figuring out the details, and making this dream happen will take a lot of work. But I am happy to look toward the future and move on.

Sharing dreams and talking through decisions is vital, and we have potential to inspire each other and help each other realize our hopes and goals for the future.

I recently read an interesting story about decision-making in college in a blog post titled “The Regret Fallacy.” The author, Dan Shipper, also happens to be a college junior, and he wrote about a conversation he had with an old teacher and mentor.

He posed the question of whether he should stay in school or drop out. He was concerned about missing opportunities and how he would live with his decisions about the future. The conversation then turned to the subject of regret. Shipper explained that he had read that you end up “regretting the things that you don’t do, rather than the things that you do.”

So regrets come from times when you decide not to do something.

His teacher and mentor countered this statement by asking, “But isn’t every decision not to do something also a decision to do something else in disguise?” With this question, the older man pointed out the meaningless distinction. Of course there are right decisions and there are wrong decisions, but we can’t always know which is which. Sometimes we simply have to decide and see where the path leads us.

The turning point of their conversation was when Shipper’s mentor explained regret is a function of hindsight. Since we can’t see into the future, we never have the benefit of hindsight, so it doesn’t make any sense to judge decisions made without the benefit of hindsight and beat yourself up emotionally.

He said all we can do is make decisions carefully — sometimes we will choose right, and sometimes we will choose wrong. If we make the wrong decision, the best thing we can do is try to learn from our mistakes and move on. It does no good to dwell on past mistakes.

The last point he made was, “regretting a pivotal decision basically means you want an entirely new life… And so the only time you ever regret a decision is if you’d rather give up every single part of your life from then [the moment of your decision] until now… that, my friend, is the regret fallacy.” These words made all of the difference to me. I realized that I can’t regret any decision that has led me to where I am today. It is the unique set of choices I have made, people I have met and places I have lived that have brought me to where I am today.

So don’t be frozen with fear or guilt. All we can do is stop asking “What if?” and try to make the best decisions we can with all of the information that is available at the time and move on.