Most of us, when we imagine old age, picture the regrets as moral failures. The affair. The addiction. The year we let anger run the show. The bad thing we did that haunts us for decades afterward.
That’s not what the research actually finds. And it isn’t what I’ve heard from older people across three countries and a lot of long dinners over the years.
The deepest regrets in later life are almost never bad behaviour. They’re usually good behaviour that kept being rewarded until it quietly swallowed the parts of life that actually mattered. The cruelest regrets are the ones that spent decades dressed up as virtues.
The research finding that changes how you read regret
In the 1990s, Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his collaborator Victoria Medvec identified a pattern that’s been replicated many times since. Short-term regrets tend to be about things we did. Long-term regrets tend to be about things we didn’t do. In a Cornell Chronicle summary of Gilovich’s later work with Shai Davidai, Gilovich notes that the failure to be your ideal self is usually an inaction, and that these are the regrets that stick around longest.
That’s the first clue to why regret at 70 looks nothing like what 28-year-old you imagines.
The Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware spent years sitting with dying people. In her original blog post, which has since been read by millions, she noted the top five regrets she heard most often. Two of them, side by side, are the key to this whole piece. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” And, “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Neither of those is about doing something wrong. Both are about doing something that the world applauded at the time.
The five virtues that turn into regrets
Once you start naming them, they’re everywhere. Here are the ones I’ve heard most from older people, and the ones I hear echoing in the research.
1. Working hard
You grew up being told that hard work was the answer. And it was. Until it became the whole answer. The office hours expanded, the weekends disappeared, the kids got older while you were on calls, and your spouse became someone you lived parallel to rather than with. Everyone around you praised you for it the entire time. It wasn’t a vice. It was a virtue. And by 70, a lot of people are quietly furious at the people who told them it was enough.
2. Being responsible
Responsibility is supposed to be uncomplicated good. But when it becomes the trait that organises your whole identity, you start saying no to every chance for joy, play, risk, and change because someone in your life might be inconvenienced. The version of you that was trusted by everyone at 45 is sometimes the same version that is quietly grieving at 70 for a life that was never actually hers.
3. Keeping the peace
You didn’t say the thing. You didn’t have the argument. You didn’t disappoint your mother, or your partner, or your boss, or your church. Peace won. But peace, in this form, is often just slow self-erasure. At 70, people who have kept the peace their whole lives sometimes realise they spent five decades being liked by people who never actually met them.
4. Being productive
The modern cult of productivity treats every hour as a resource. Every meal is an optimisation, every walk a podcast, every evening an opportunity to learn or earn. It feels virtuous the whole way through. What the older people I know mourn is the slow ordinary time they never let themselves have. The afternoon spent sitting by the river doing nothing. The long conversation with a friend that had no point. The years they never learned how to waste.
5. Putting the family first
This one is the hardest to write, because it’s genuinely sacred for a lot of people. Family really does matter. But there’s a specific version of “family first” that means “myself last, every time, forever.” Mothers and fathers who disappeared inside the role and never came back out. By 70, some of them look around and realise the children they raised don’t know anything about who they were underneath the parenting, because there wasn’t anything left to show.
Why these are the cruel ones
Ordinary regrets, the ones about things you did wrong, come with a built-in exit. You can apologise. You can make amends. You can change. Your moral imagination knows what shape the path back looks like, even if it’s hard.
The regrets that spent decades disguised as virtues don’t come with an exit, because you didn’t do anything wrong. You did exactly what everyone said you should. You got praised for it. Promotions happened. People called you dependable. Nothing in the culture ever warned you that the very trait being rewarded was the one quietly eating your life.
That’s what makes these regrets so heavy at the end. You can’t blame a bad decision. You have to reckon with a long series of good-looking ones.
What I’ve noticed sitting with older people in Saigon
Vietnamese culture rewards sacrifice in a different way than Australian culture does, but the pattern ends up looking remarkably similar. The uncles and aunties I meet here who seem most peaceful in their later years are almost never the ones who worked the hardest. They’re the ones who, at some point in their forties or fifties, noticed what was happening to the shape of their life and quietly made an adjustment nobody clapped for.
They said no to the promotion. They stopped answering the phone after seven. They told their family they were going to take up painting. They made a friend outside the usual circle. They started swimming in the morning. None of it was dramatic. None of it would have looked impressive on a CV.
But those small private corrections are what they point to now when you ask them what saved their life. And the ones who didn’t make those corrections are the ones who are quietest when the topic comes up.
What the Buddhists saw about the virtue trap
When I wrote Hidden Secrets of Buddhism, one of the hardest ideas to sit with was the Buddha’s teaching that attachment to virtue can suffer the same trap as attachment to vice. The mind that clings to being a “good worker” or a “good mother” or a “responsible person” can become as rigid as the mind that clings to power or wealth. The shape of the identity changes. The clinging doesn’t.
The quiet practice of the cushion, in the early morning along the Saigon River, is often about noticing when a virtue has stopped being alive and started being a cage. Not judging it. Just seeing it. And asking gently whether this particular good behaviour is still serving the life it was supposed to serve.
The question worth asking at any age
If you’re in your thirties or forties and reading this, here’s the useful thing. You don’t have to make any dramatic decision today. You just have to ask one question honestly.
Which of my current virtues is quietly costing me something I haven’t priced yet?
The hardworking one. The responsible one. The peacekeeping one. The productive one. The family-first one. These aren’t bad things. They’re just things that can grow teeth when nobody is watching. Noticing that now is the difference between a full life and a regret that arrives too late to fix.
The ones who figure this out early are not the ones who worked less. They’re the ones who kept asking what their work was for.
