No regrets. It’s a refrain that crops up in pop culture again and again, from Edith Piaf’s iconic ballad Non, Je Ne Rregrette Rien and Robbie Williams lyrics to inspirational quotes written in cursive and overlaid against a sunset backdrop on your Instagram feed.

The slightly cringier cousin to YOLO (you only live once), it’s a philosophy that’s about looking forward, not back – quitting that stultifying job, booking that pricey but potentially life-changing holiday or saying yes to something you’re not sure about. If we can look back on our lives, this line of thinking goes, and tell ourselves that we never missed a chance, never stayed still when we should have jumped – then we’ll truly be fulfilled.

It’s certainly an appealing credo, not least in the aftermath of a pandemic that shut us up in our homes, leaving many with a sense of time wasted and opportunities lost (and, when life returned to a semblance of normality, major FOMO). But have we lost sight of what regret actually means and how it might, counterintuitively, help us to move forward?

When the writer Daniel Pink launched the World Regret Survey in 2020, he asked more than 15,000 people about how often they looked back and wished they had done things differently. For 82% of the respondents, regret was an “occasional” part of their life, while 21% said they felt regret “all the time”. Just 1% said they never experienced it. If it’s such a big part of so many people’s lives, shouldn’t we be trying to better understand it, rather than eliminate it completely?

The psychology of regret: are we thinking about our mistakes all wrong?