The Pitfalls of Hindsight

First, an alert: If you don't like self-involved navel gazing, click away now. I assure you I dislike it too, but as you'll see if you read on, it's sort of the point of today's post. Or, at least, it's an unavoidable result of it (and over every other post).

My last post was my first in a while. As such, I'd forgotten what I'd written about in the past, so I took the opportunity to read back over my previous posts.

Doing so was a big mistake.

I should have known it would be. You see, for as long as I can remember, time has had a debilitating effect on how I view my actions. That is to say that, almost without fail, anything I ever do, say, or write, I will come to hate.

It doesn't matter how much I've enjoyed something at the time - how funny I think I've been, or how well I think I've done it. Almost as soon as the action concerned is complete, I regret it. And it's bloody annoying.

There are, as you'd imagine, plenty of examples of this effect. The contents of this blog (and, soon eneough I suspect, this very post) for a start. But one of my most regrettable regrets is my brief time as a singer in a band. I absolutely loved it (and was proud of it) at the time. Now, though, I can't look back on it without painful prangs of embarrassment. One of my favourite sets of memories sullied. There are plenty of other things. Dancing like an idiot on nights out. Not dancing like an idiot on others (as you can see, the effect is indiscriminate). Pretty much any expression of strong feeling or emotion. The list goes on.

I suspect that I'm far from alone in this feeling. It seems such a nautral reaction that I can only assume it's normal. And that brings me to the point of this post. I've got a sciencey sort of brain, so I like to think there must be a logical reason for this tendency to self-hate - that it must benefit us in some sort of way.

My conclusion, having done no studies of existing research, or any futher reading (come to think of it, "hunch" would be a more appropriate word than "conclusion") is that this response must be an evolutionary thing. That over millions of years, our brains have been wired for self-betterment. We're more likely to survive to breeding and child-rearing age if we learn from our mistakes, and nothing makes us want to learn from our mistakes like fear of coming across as an idiot.

Nevertheless, I wish things were different. I wish I could be more like my cat. He climbed a ladder for the first time today, and I'm pretty sure he won't look back and wish he'd climbed it a different way, or think himself a complete bum balloon for even trying. He'll just enjoy the moment, and keep climbing it until he finds a new world to conquer.

So, after this exhaustive(sic) analysis, at least I know there's a reason for this most annoying of traits. But I'm not sure it's made me feel any better about it.

In fact, I'm almost certain that it'll be just another thing to regret.