The Five Regrets

For years, a palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware sat at the bedsides of the dying and listened.

Not just listened—recorded. She asked her patients what they regretted, what they wished they'd done differently, what wisdom they would offer if they could speak to their younger selves. She expected variety. Instead, she found consistency.

The same regrets emerged again and again. Across cultures, backgrounds, ages, and circumstances, the dying said remarkably similar things. Five regrets, appearing with such regularity that Ware eventually wrote a book to share them with the living.

These five regrets are a gift. The dying have paid the full price for this wisdom—a lifetime of experience, distilled into final clarity. We can learn from them for free, if we're willing to listen.

Each regret is a warning. Each is a door that's still open for those of us with time remaining.

This was the most common regret of all. Looking back at their lives, the dying saw with terrible clarity how many of their choices had been made for others—to meet expectations, maintain appearances, avoid disappointing family or society.

They had lived lives designed by committee. They had pursued careers their parents approved of, married partners their communities sanctioned, made choices that made sense to everyone except themselves. And at the end, they saw the accumulated cost: not their life, but someone else's life worn like an ill-fitting costume.

Jane Eyre declares her freedom not when it's easy, but when it's hardest—when every pressure urges her toward a safe, sanctioned path. She chooses integrity over comfort. She chooses herself over others' expectations.

Most people never make that choice. They discover at the end that they were birds who never flew because they accepted the net as reality. The net was made of other people's opinions, and it was never as strong as they believed.

The question for the living: Whose expectations are you meeting right now? Which of your choices were truly yours, and which were defaults imposed by others? What would you do if you weren't afraid of disappointing anyone?

This regret came particularly from men, though increasingly from women as well. They had spent their prime years chasing achievement, climbing ladders, building careers—and at the end, they couldn't remember why.

They missed their children growing up. They let marriages wither from neglect. They postponed living for a retirement that, for some, never came. They traded the irreplaceable—time with loved ones, experiences that mattered, presence in their own lives—for the replaceable: money, status, professional recognition.

"We are always getting ready to live but never living."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Always getting ready. The promotion that will finally bring security. The savings goal that will finally allow rest. The achievement that will finally prove worth. But the finish line keeps moving, and we keep running, and at the end we realize we were running in place while life happened elsewhere.

Seneca saw this two thousand years ago:

The question for the living: Are you trading the irreplaceable for the replaceable? What are you postponing that cannot be postponed? If you continue on your current path, will you arrive at the end with the same regret?

The words that died in throats. The feelings that stayed locked inside. The love unexpressed, the anger unprocessed, the truth unspoken—all of it creating a life of suppression.

The dying wished they had said "I love you" more often. They wished they had confronted problems instead of avoiding them. They wished they had been honest about what they wanted, what they felt, what they believed—even when that honesty was uncomfortable.

Many had developed illnesses they connected to bitterness and resentment—feelings that had been swallowed for decades, festering in silence. They had kept the peace on the surface while war raged beneath.

Darcy's first proposal fails—but not because he speaks. He speaks badly, awkwardly, with pride undermining his confession. But at least he speaks. He takes the risk of expression rather than the slow death of suppression.

His second attempt, after he has truly examined himself, succeeds precisely because he has learned to express what matters without the armor of pride. The feelings, when finally expressed cleanly, transform everything.

The question for the living: What feelings are you suppressing? What truth needs to be spoken? What words are you waiting to say that might die with you unsaid?

Deep friendships often faded not from conflict but from neglect. Life got busy. Distance grew. The intention to reconnect never became action. And at the end, the dying realized they had let slip some of the most precious connections of their lives.

They thought about friends from childhood, from college, from early career—people who had known them before the roles hardened, before life's complications accumulated. They wished they had made the call, written the letter, taken the trip. They wished they hadn't assumed there would always be more time.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."

— John Donne

We are not islands. We are connected, and those connections define us as much as our individual choices. When we let friendships die, we let parts of ourselves die with them—the parts that only existed in relationship with those particular people.

The dying often tried to reconnect in their final weeks. Some succeeded—and those reconnections brought profound comfort. Others found it was too late—the friends had died themselves, or illness prevented the reunion, or too many years had built walls too high to scale.

The question for the living: Who have you let slip away? Which friend would you call if you knew you had limited time? Why haven't you called them already?

Perhaps the most surprising regret—and the most poignant. The dying realized that happiness had been a choice they could have made all along. They had stayed in patterns of complaint, of pessimism, of sourness—not because circumstances demanded it, but because they had fallen into habits of unhappiness.

They had mistaken familiarity for necessity. They had assumed their dissatisfaction was the only possible response to their lives, when in fact they could have chosen differently. They could have focused on what they had rather than what they lacked. They could have laughed more, worried less, appreciated the simple joys that surrounded them.

The quality of your thoughts. Not the quality of your circumstances—your thoughts. Marcus wrote these words while managing an empire, fighting wars, losing children to illness. His circumstances were often dire. But he understood that the response to circumstances was a choice.

The dying saw this at last. They saw how often they had chosen misery when contentment was available. They saw how many simple pleasures they had ignored while chasing complex achievements. They wished they had laughed at themselves more, taken life less seriously, let themselves feel joy without guilt.

The question for the living: Are you choosing unhappiness out of habit? What simple joys are you ignoring? What would change if you gave yourself permission to be happy right now, exactly as things are?

Look at these five regrets together, and a pattern emerges. Each one is a failure of courage.

The courage to live authentically. The courage to stop working and start living. The courage to speak truth. The courage to maintain connection. The courage to choose happiness.

In each case, the dying had known what they should do. They had simply been afraid to do it. Afraid of judgment, failure, vulnerability, rejection, loss of security. Fear had been the deciding factor, and fear had decided wrong.

The fears that stopped them were largely imaginary. The judgment they dreaded either never came or didn't matter. The risks they avoided would have enriched rather than destroyed them. They suffered more in anticipation than they would have in action.

And now, at the end, they suffered the one thing they couldn't bear: the knowledge that they could have lived differently.

The five regrets are warnings from those who learned too late. But they're also invitations for those who still have time.

Each regret points to something we can do differently, starting today. Not perfectly—just differently. Small shifts, accumulated over time, lead to radically different endings.

The dying have given us a map of what not to do. In the next chapter, we'll look at the other side: what they wished they had done more of. What they would pursue if given another chance. What they now understood, at the end, was worth their finite time.

If the five regrets are warnings, the next chapter is a compass.