All of paperphone's Comments + Replies

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living This is a good book. Think about all the regrets and bad things that have happened to you, that you don't know about – the time you dropped money or missed out on a life changing opportunity or mistakes you have made that never got your attention. You probably don't or won't because you don't feel much for things that you don't know that happened to you. So it is possible to feel no emotion about negative things. You have the power to hold no opinion about things, you just need to cultivate it. Regret is much like fear, you have come to your fate by dreading your fate.

I would suggest reinterpretation of those memories into what they did for you or how you learnt to act differently in similar circumstances. Gain value from your experiences. If you would do nothing different then you own your mistakes and accept the consequences without regret.

Regret is an emotion, so standard emotion release techniques work. I have a few different one's but on LW I generally recommend Eugine Gendlin's Focusing.

It works similarly for me with programming. I love programming, except when I have a programming task assigned, and must provide reports of how long it took me to solve it, and must debate whether what I am doing now is the highest priority or whether I should be doing something else instead (such as googling for existing solutions for this or similar problems)... What you need to feel good at deep work) is: * a task that optimally fits your abilities (not boringly simple, not scarily difficult); * a meaningful context (even if the meaning is: I am playing / exploring); * a clear goal (so you have a feedback whether you are approaching it); * a working environment without distractions.