Regret Sensitivity
Regret sensitivity turns rejected options into recurring counterfactuals: after choosing, you keep imagining that another path might have produced a better result. The task is not to eliminate regret, but to choose the trade-off explicitly and stop mistaking unrealized possibilities for evidence.
A higher salary can leave you less satisfied with your career—not because the job is worse, but because you can still imagine the offer you declined paying even more. For a maximizer, the decision ends while the comparison does not.
E1The rejected option stays alive
Regret sensitivity feeds on counterfactual comparison. Once you choose, the selected option becomes concrete, complete with flaws, while the rejected options remain editable fantasies. You can rerun each alternative with its upside emphasized and its costs conveniently missing. Maximizers are especially exposed because their standard is not merely “good enough”; it is the unknowable best outcome across every path.
That creates an asymmetric contest: reality must compete with polished versions of lives never lived. More options supply more counterfactuals, and post-choice attention can migrate from what you gained to what you surrendered.
E1Regret can still carry information
Not every painful second thought is useless rumination. Regret may expose a repeated mismatch between your choices and priorities. The model applies when “maybe that would have been better” keeps reopening a settled decision without new evidence—not when consequences reveal something you genuinely need to learn.
Write the sacrifice into the choice
Before tomorrow’s consequential decision, complete this sentence: “I am choosing X over Y because I value ___, and I accept losing ___.” Keep it. When the rejected option later looks perfect, compare the decision with the trade-off you knowingly accepted, not with an upgraded imaginary alternative.
Episodes that teach this
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Why Are People With A Higher Salary Unhappy? Future IQ
· explained at 2:58
8,497 views
Maximizers are more sensitive to regret: if I had done that, maybe I would have gotten better.