Regret Nothing
I sat down with the psychotherapist today and the conversation got me thinking about one of the regrets in my life. We should of course "regret nothing" but I am actually yet to meet someone who lives this, but I have met several liars who claim it. Yet, I know I have some regrets in life and the one that I was thinking about today dates back thirty years, when I made a decision about what to study at university.
Like all decisions we make, at the time I made the decision, I thought it was the right thing to do, but I made it under duress. I was forced by circumstances, as after a few years of being incredibly ill and struggling through school to get good enough scores for university, I looked for a safe option, rather than the one I wanted to do. I chose business, when I wanted to choose psychology.
This doesn't mean I would have been a good psychologist, and saying that doesn't mean I would have been terrible at it. It is just that from a very young age and again, perhaps through circumstance, I have spent a lot of time observing human and reflecting on those observations to develop insight into why people might be behaving a certain way. This doesn't mean that I would have had to sit down and listen to people's problems all day either, as I think I would have naturally gravitated toward behavioural psychology, and looked into environment design.
From my experience, a lot of the psychologists get into their field because they are looking to find out why they themselves are suffering. I think that it is common for healthcare professionals, where oncologists often lost someone to cancer close to them, and I am yet to meet an ophthalmologist who doesn't wear glasses themselves. It makes sense that we go into areas based on our experiences, because that is where we spend a lot of our time, and we are invested.
I spent a lot of my time alone observing people when young, and then ill as a teen, so I spent a lot of my time perhaps indirectly, thinking about wellbeing. My own wellbeing, as well as that of others. Business was the unnatural choice for me, but it seemed more stable because it was positioned as being a more versatile degree. It is a Jack of all trades, master of none degree.
This is all in the past and unchangeable, making the consideration a counterfactual, but right now there is a mammoth demand for mental health professionals, as well as behavioural design experts. This might change kin the near future with AI doing a lot of the analysis work, but this is something that I would have found interesting up until at least this point, because it is always changing and the shifts in culture and technology has had massive impacts on our behaviours, and our physical and mental health over the last few decades.
Very little of it for the better.
I think working in areas that help people improve their wellbeing, would be something that I would find meaning in, something I would enjoy, and probably something I would be pretty okay at. Unfortunately, I think that ship has sailed, especially since I am in Finland. Though it would have been pretty valuable here to be a native English speaker, and a psychologist, as that is probably a pretty in demand niche at the moment.
So yeah, that is one of my regrets, because even though I have managed through professional life to some degree, I think that had I been more interested in what I was doing and I believed it had high value, I think I would have found ways to excel in at least parts of it. Instead, decades later, things are not going quite the way I had hoped they would, considering I took the safe option.
Do you have any professional regrets?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
