If only...

Regret is funny thing. We can anticipate it, and, more often, we can experience it after the fact.

But we feel it most when it falls within the realm of what we did or didn't do.

If only we knew better. If only we knew what we know now.

Thing is, "if only..." is not a very logical (or helpful) chain of thought.

There's no possible way you would have known beforehand what you know now (because of you did, you would have made a different choice). And because there's no reason to believe you could or would change course, there's no possible reason why you should feel bad for having made a bad decision.

The converse is to indulge in the modern fallacy of clairvoyance--that your capable of knowing more than you could, or to know what would happen before it did--which is as unreasonable as it sounds.

Certainly, you made a bad call. Certainly, you can learn from it. But feeling bad because you could have made a better choice is a mistake.