The Principled Life

Regret is one of the more difficult emotions to accurately anticipate. With purviews limited to present and past experiences, consideration of what a more experienced version of us may want poses challenging. This is demonstrated amidst reflective realizations that what we want today has indeed diverged from what we thought we'd want five years ago. In the absence of psychic abilities, the only solution to our inability to accurately predict what our future selves may want (and thus what we might regret) is measuring our action or inaction against our principles. Assuming one's lived long enough to know what those are, a life lived in accordance with one's principles is a life difficult to regret.

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes about our invincibility when our decisions are rooted in "reason and careful reflection." It serves us to review the Oxford definition of invincible: "the quality of being too powerful to be defeated." It's not that we won't make mistakes, but that we'll be resilient when we do.

A result of careful reflection, one's principles are the sails that guide us both in life at large, and within any one pursuit. While values are what gets prioritized (fluctuating as seasons require), principles define who and how we'll be in any situation. In the midst of a principled life, regret is, and can only be, a decided breach of one's principles.

Determine your principles, and live by them; the rest is simply what happens.

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