That’s Men: Treating life as a project may bring regret

I have never been a great one for delving into those lists of regrets that people are supposed to have expressed when they are dying.

The compiling of such lists seems to assume that the pronouncements of the dying have a greater validity or wisdom than those of people with years ahead of them, which puzzles me.

One of the headline regrets seems to be that people wished that they had been true to themselves or some such cliché, instead of trying to accommodate other people.

Those of us who believe ourselves to be hale and hearty but with a vague idea that we are not, in fact, living the life we wanted to live, read this and feel bad about ourselves. I’m not sure it achieves anything else. I’m struck by the idea that this regret seems to assume that life is a project which we must complete successfully or regret it.

I find the same sort of assumption in obituaries. By and large, obituaries seem to feature people who have completed all the projects you thought you might undertake but didn't: write great books, lead armies in battle, invent things and go where no man has gone before. In that sense, obituaries are like Facebook for the dead: everybody seems to be having, or in this case to have had, the sort of life you can only dream about. Once again, that vague feeling of unease creeps in.

But would those dying people actually do anything differently if they had their lives to live again? I’m not so sure.

Once when I was waiting for a train in Preston a random thought struck me that if I wasn't living the life I was living, I could be having some sort of better life somewhere else. Then, in a rare moment of clarity, another thought came winging in. It said, no you wouldn't. You'd be doing the equivalent of waiting for a train at Preston and for some similarly mundane reason.

That’s the trouble with treating your life as a splendid project: the ordinary gets in the way.

Where did the idea of life as a project come from? I blame the Victorians for this, and for many other things. They were full of plans, developed the application of electricity, created the beginnings of the welfare and hospital systems, and so on.

So they were very big on projects and I suspect that before the Victorian era, people didn’t think that way. They even gave us “muscular Christianity”, which invested exercise with the sort of moral approval that it still has today. And exercise could be seen as a project you conduct on your own body.

Complicated

So a teenager who invents something complicated is praised and gets his or her picture in the newspapers, while a teenager who perfects the art of doing nothing is sent for therapy.

Yet the one who has learned to do nothing just might be more adapted to the future of our society. The predictions concerning the development of robotics and artificial intelligence suggest that jobs are going to vanish on a very wide scale in the lifetime of today’s teenagers.

Assuming that we succeed in figuring out how to share resources without deadly conflict or deadly demoralisation – a very big assumption indeed – we will then face the question of what to do with our lives.

When we enter an era in which “nothing is the new something”, we might find that seeing our lives as projects is poor preparation for its challenges. In other words, in this strange and unsettling new era – the implications of which I think we are trying hard to ignore – we may have to figure out how to be human “beings”.

We may even become so baffled that we will turn eagerly to the teenager in the bedroom for advice on the art of just being.

And “I wish I had learned to do nothing” will become one of the top regrets of the dying.

Padraig O'Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.

pomorain@yahoo.com @PadraigOMorain