What people regret at the end of life, and what it means for now

Few pieces of writing about life have travelled as far as a short list attributed to the dying. You may have seen it shared on social media, quoted in talks or printed on posters: the five things people most often regret at the end of their lives.

The list is moving, and it is worth taking seriously. It is also worth knowing exactly what it is, and what it is not. This piece looks at where the list comes from, what research on regret actually shows, and how to use both while you still have time to act.

Where the “five regrets” come from

The list comes from Bronnie Ware, an Australia-based writer who worked for many years in palliative care, looking after people who had gone home to die. On her website she describes being with patients during their last three to twelve weeks of life and listening to what they wished they had done differently. She went on to write a memoir, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

In her words, the five regrets she heard most often were:

1. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
2. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
3. “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
4. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
5. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

A nurse’s memory, not a study

Here is the honest part. Ware’s list is a personal account. It is based on her memories of conversations with the people she cared for, not on a survey, a set of structured interviews or any kind of statistical analysis. We do not know how many patients she spoke to, how their words were recorded, or how typical they were of dying people in general.

None of this makes the list untrue or unimportant. Careful observation by someone who sat with dying people is valuable. But it means you should read the list as wisdom, not as data. “People most often regret X” is a claim that needs research behind it, and that research has to come from elsewhere.

Fortunately, psychologists have studied regret for decades, and their findings overlap with Ware’s list in interesting ways.

What research on regret shows

Over time, we regret what we didn’t do

In the 1990s, Cornell psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec asked people about their biggest regrets through telephone surveys, questionnaires and face-to-face interviews. In a 1994 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they reported that people’s biggest regrets tended to involve things they had failed to do.

This seemed to clash with earlier lab experiments, which found that people regret bad outcomes caused by action more than those caused by inaction. Gilovich and Medvec resolved the puzzle by looking at time. Actions cause more pain in the short term, but inactions are regretted more in the long run.

In a 1995 review in Psychological Review, they argued that several processes are at work. Some ease the pain of regrettable actions as time passes. Others keep the pain of regrettable inactions alive, or even strengthen it. And the things we never tried simply tend to come to mind more readily when we look back.

A related study looked at people later in life. Researchers analysed a 1986 survey of the gifted participants in Lewis Terman’s long-running study, when their average age was 74. Asked what they would do differently if they could live again, they named far more regrets of inaction than regrets of action.

Not every long-term regret is agony

Not everyone agreed at first. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman argued that long-term regrets of inaction are mostly wistful rather than truly painful. In a 1998 paper written together, Gilovich, Medvec and Kahneman reached a partial resolution: some inaction regrets are gently wistful, and others carry real despair. That is a useful nuance. Not every “what if” is a wound.

Our deepest regrets are about our ideal self

In 2018, Gilovich and Shai Davidai published a set of six studies in the journal Emotion. They distinguished between two kinds of self you might fall short of. Your ideal self is the person you hope to be: your goals and aspirations. Your ought self is the person you feel you should be: your duties and responsibilities.

According to Cornell’s summary of the paper, participants reported regrets about their ideal self far more often than about their ought self, 72% versus 28%. When asked for their single biggest regret, 76% named a failure to live up to their ideal self. Gilovich pointed out that failing to become your ideal self is usually a failure to act.

Where the research and the nurse agree

Put Ware’s list next to the research and a pattern appears. Most of her five regrets are about not doing something: not living true to yourself, not expressing feelings, not keeping in touch with friends, not allowing yourself to be happier. Most are also about the ideal self, the person you hoped to be, rather than duties you failed to meet.

The one apparent exception, “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard”, may fit too. It is less about the work itself than about what overwork pushed aside: time with people, rest, things put off until “later”.

So while Ware’s list is not evidence on its own, its main themes line up well with what researchers have found by other means. That is a good reason to take it seriously.

An old idea in new clothes

None of this would have surprised the Stoics. Seneca opened his Letters to Lucilius with a warning about postponing: “While we are postponing, life speeds by” (Letter 1, Richard Mott Gummere’s translation). His advice was not to panic about death but to stop treating time as if it were unlimited. You can read more about this in our guide to Stoicism for everyday life.

What it means for now

The point of thinking about regrets at the end of life is not to frighten yourself. It is to borrow perspective while your choices are still open. A few gentle ways to do that:

Ask the end-of-life question. Picture yourself much older, looking back. What would you be sorry you never tried, said or repaired? Your first honest answer is worth writing down.

Look for the inaction. Research suggests the regrets that last are mostly things left undone. If something has stayed on your “someday” list for years, that is a signal, not a failure.

Start small, not dramatically. Living “true to yourself” rarely requires quitting your job tomorrow. It might mean one evening a week for the thing you love, or one honest conversation you have been avoiding. Gilovich’s own advice, quoted by Cornell, is not to wait for inspiration, because it tends to arise from doing the activity.

Separate what you can still change. Some regrets can be repaired: a friend you can call, an apology you can make. Others cannot. The dichotomy of control is a useful lens here: act on the first kind, and meet the second with understanding rather than blame.

Reach out to someone. Two of Ware’s five regrets are about people: expressing feelings and staying in touch. A short message to an old friend costs very little and is exactly the kind of thing people wish they had done. If you are feeling cut off, our guide to loneliness and health has more ideas.

Thinking about death and regret can stir up difficult feelings, especially if you are grieving or unwell. If it feels heavy rather than clarifying, it is fine to set it down and talk it through with someone you trust or a professional.

A small, wise move

You will never get through life with zero regrets, and trying to would be a regret of its own. But you can tip the balance. The research and the nurse point the same way: the choices people most wish they had made are usually small, personal and available right now. Pick one, and take the first step today.