A bloke I used to work with kept a guitar in the corner of his flat for nineteen years and never learned to play it. When he finally sold it during a move, he sat in the car park afterwards and got teary, and could not explain to his wife why. It was a cheap guitar, and he was not crying about the guitar.

Psychologists have a name for what he was grieving, and a rough measure of how widespread it is.

What the Cornell research actually asked

Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell, and his former graduate student Shai Davidai ran six studies on the shape of people’s most stubborn regrets, published in the journal Emotion as “The Ideal Road Not Taken”. Cornell’s own account of the work lays out the framework they borrowed: every person carries an actual self (who they think they are), an ought self (who duty says they should be) and an ideal self (who they hoped to become).

Then they asked hundreds of participants to place their regrets into those three boxes. As documented by the British Psychological Society’s research digest, ideal-self regrets came up more often across the studies, 72 per cent to 28 per cent. When people listed their life regrets in full, the split narrowed to 57 and 43. Asked to name the single biggest regret of their life, 76 per cent named something tied to the person they had meant to become, against 24 per cent who named a duty they had failed.

Roughly three to one, on the question that matters most.

Why obligations get closed and ambitions stay open

Why would falling short of a duty sting less than falling short of a dream? Gilovich’s answer is unglamorous: duties are specific. You know what you owe your mother, roughly when, and whether you paid. Ideals are shapeless: be a good parent, be a good mentor. “There aren’t clear guideposts,” he said, and there is always more you could have done.

He also points to repair work. People take practical and psychological steps to patch up an ought-self failure, they apologise, they make amends, they build a story in which the debt is settled, and file the whole thing as resolved. He likens those regrets to potholes, already behind you, while the ideal-self shortfalls sit in the windscreen ahead, permanently unfinished.

The older finding underneath this one

The 2018 paper had a predecessor. In 1995, Gilovich and Victoria Medvec published a review in Psychological Review arguing that regret runs on a timetable. Things you did hurt most at first. Things you failed to do overtake them later and keep growing.

Daniel Kahneman pushed back, and the disagreement that followed is where this gets interesting. He reckoned those long-run regrets of inaction were mostly wistful rather than agonising. So the three of them ran joint studies and published a partial resolution: regrets of action run hot, closer to anger, while regrets of inaction carry both wistfulness and despair. Some stay merely rueful. Others genuinely torment the people carrying them. Both sides had a piece of it.

Where regret piles up

Regret has favourite postcodes. Neal Roese and Amy Summerville pooled eleven studies that had asked people to rank their regrets, writing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that the six biggest domains were education, career, romance, parenting, the self and leisure. Their explanation was opportunity. Regret gathers where people still believe change is possible, which is why education tops the list in societies that keep insisting it is never too late.

That reframes the Cornell result a little. An ideal self is, by construction, the version of you that could still turn up. This is precisely the condition under which a regret refuses to close.

What one line of research can and cannot carry

Six studies from a single research team make a strong start, not a settled fact. Participants sorted their own regrets into categories the researchers had defined, a reasonable method and a leaky one. Larger surveys land close to the same conclusion without matching it exactly. Daniel Pink gathered more than twenty thousand regrets through his World Regret Survey and found four recurring types: foundation, boldness, moral and connection. Boldness regrets, the chances not taken, made up a big share. But in an interview with Behavioral Scientist, Pink said the largest category was connection, the relationships people had let quietly lapse. His respondents opted in rather than being sampled at random, and even he won’t claim his four categories rank cleanly by prevalence.

Connection could be filed under the ideal self if you squinted, and squinting is how a good deal of psychology gets popularised. Better to read the two datasets as pointing in a similar direction than as confirming one another.

The only part of this that is any use

What Gilovich tells people to actually do about it is almost insultingly plain. Stop waiting for inspiration and start, because inspiration tends to turn up once you’re already working. And much of what stops people is the fear of being watched doing something badly, one he thinks is wildly overpriced given how little attention anyone pays you.

Fine, sensible, and slightly maddening.

What sticks with me is the direction the finding points. If your worst regret turns out to be a version of yourself you quietly gave up on, then the result says less about your past than about your present. It is a running tally, still open, which means whatever you are not getting around to right now is the thing being counted. I have no idea whether that is encouraging or the most irritating sentence you will read today. I suspect it depends entirely on what you have been putting off.