Bronnie Ware was an Australian palliative care nurse. For eight years in the 2000s she sat with patients in the last three to twelve weeks of their lives, doing what palliative nurses do, which is mostly listening. In 2009 she published a blog post collecting the regrets she had heard most often. The post went viral in a way blog posts rarely do. In 2012 she expanded it into a book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The list is now famous enough to have become inspirational-poster material. Which is unfortunate, because the list, read carefully, is not inspirational at all. It is an indictment.
The five, listed plainly
Ware’s five, in her order:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Read them again. Notice what is not there.
Nobody on a hospice bed regretted not climbing Kilimanjaro. Nobody regretted not seeing the pyramids. Nobody regretted not having earned more money, not having owned a bigger house, not having driven a better car. Nobody regretted not having retired with a fatter portfolio. The bucket-list industry sells you a list of regrets the dying do not, in fact, have. The financial-planning industry sells you the prevention of a regret nobody has ever voiced from a deathbed.
What the list reveals
Three of the five are about relationships. One is about work. One is about an internal permission you failed to grant yourself. Zero are about money in any form. Zero are about achievements. Zero are about consumption.
This is anecdotal, and Ware says so. She is a nurse with a notebook, not a statistician. But every adjacent body of work confirms the pattern. Atul Gawande, in Being Mortal (2014), reports the same regrets from the patients he interviewed for the book — and Gawande is a Harvard surgeon collecting his data from a different country, a different healthcare system, a different demographic mix. The Stanford palliative-care literature reports the same. The hospice chaplain memoirs report the same. When the data are independently gathered from different angles by different people with different agendas and they keep landing in the same place, the anecdote begins to harden into something more durable.
What hardens is this. The things that obsess people in their forties and fifties — career trajectory, status, real-estate equity, the right schools, the right zip code — are not the things people grieve at 78. They grieve the conversation they did not have with their father before he died. They grieve the friendship that drifted because they were too busy to answer the email. They grieve having spent the only Saturday of one particular October in a meeting that no one, not even the person who scheduled it, remembers.
Re-reading number two
The second regret deserves its own section, because it is the one that should make every reader of this site sit very still for a moment.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
Ware writes that this regret came up almost universally from male patients, and increasingly often from female patients as her career progressed and more women of the working-mother generation reached hospice. She specifies what they meant. They were not talking about the dignity of labor. They were not talking about craftsmanship, or the satisfaction of building something. They were talking about hours. They were talking about the years spent in offices, in commutes, in conference rooms, in negotiations, while their children grew up in a house they came home to mostly to sleep. They were talking about jobs they had stayed in for one more bonus, one more vesting cliff, one more promotion that, viewed from the hospice bed, had paid them in a currency the bed does not accept.
This is the SuicideFire thesis. It is not being voiced by a philosopher or a finance author or a blogger. It is being voiced by people who have, on average, three weeks left, and who have nothing further to gain by being polite. They are telling you, in the plainest available language, that the trade you are making right now is the trade they regret most.
If you are 45 and your plan is to retire at 65, you are arranging, in a deliberate and documented fashion, to commit Regret #2. You will have twenty more years to work. You will, at the current American averages, sleep through about seven of them, commute through about one, sit in meetings through about three more, and recover from work-related exhaustion through whatever is left of the weekends. Then, statistically, you will have somewhere between zero and fifteen years of genuinely good health remaining, and during the early portion of that window you will be discovering that your identity, your friendships, and your relationship to your own time are in worse repair than your portfolio.
This is not a motivational point. It is arithmetic.
Re-reading number one
The first regret is the hardest, because it sounds so much like the kind of thing that gets printed on a coffee mug.
A life true to myself.
Ware’s patients meant something specific. They meant that, in retrospect, they could see the moments where they had taken the safer or more expected path against their own quieter judgment. The job they took because their parents would approve. The marriage they stayed in because leaving was uncomfortable. The city they did not leave. The work they did not attempt. The version of themselves they had visible glimpses of, in their twenties or thirties, and then put away because the visible version was not the one being rewarded.
The difficulty here is that most people, in middle life, no longer know clearly what their self would have chosen, because that self has been overwritten by twenty years of incremental compliance. The regret is partly grief at the version that was not lived and partly the harder grief of no longer being sure what it would have looked like. The hospice version of this conversation is brutally clarifying. The pre-hospice version is harder, because the noise of ordinary life drowns the signal.
The corrective, if there is one, is not “follow your bliss.” It is a quieter and more uncomfortable exercise. Sit, for one evening, with a piece of paper. Write down the moments in the last twenty years when you knew, in the same room as the choice, that you were about to make the wrong one — and made it anyway. The pattern in that list is the self Ware’s patients were referring to. It is usually visible. It is usually unwelcome.
What to do with it
The literature on regret is consistent: regret of action fades; regret of inaction does not. This is well-established in the social psychology research (Gilovich and Medvec, 1994 and onward), and it tracks exactly with what hospice nurses observe. The mistakes you made by doing something are metabolized over time. The mistakes you made by not doing something are still warm forty years later.
This has a direct planning consequence. Every year you defer the conversation, the conversation gets harder, not easier. Every year you postpone the friendship maintenance, the friendship is further from repair. Every year you stay at the job that is generating Regret #2 in real time, the regret accrues compound interest. The dying do not, in their final weeks, suddenly invent new things to be sorry about. They are sorry about the same things they have been sorry about, quietly, since their fifties. The hospice is just the place where the politeness wears off.
The list is short. It has been verified, in slightly different forms, by every honest observer who has bothered to look. You have it now. There is no version of your life in which you have not been told. The dying are not telling you to work harder on the things that did not matter. They are telling you to stop.
Recommended reading: Bronnie Ware, “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” (Hay House, 2012). Read once for the list. Read again for the case studies, which are harder than the list.
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