What Do People Regret Most Before They Die? The Answer That Should Change How You Live Today

The Question Nobody Asks Until It's Almost Too Late

If you found this article, something quiet is already unsettling you. Maybe it's the Sunday night dread that doesn't lift. Maybe it's the promotion you finally got and the strange flatness that followed. Maybe it's a diagnosis — yours or someone close to you — that made the calendar feel suddenly, terrifyingly finite. Whatever brought you here, you are asking the right question. You are asking it, I hope, early enough to do something with the answer.

What do people regret most before they die? The research on this is remarkably consistent, and the answer is not what most driven, ambitious people expect. Nobody lies on their deathbed wishing they had closed one more deal. Nobody looks back and wishes they had worked a longer weekend in 2009, or stayed in the office the night their kid had the school play, or skipped the vacation because Q3 numbers needed attention. The regrets are almost never about work. They are almost always about the same things: not being honest enough, not being present enough, not being brave enough to live a life that was actually theirs. I know this not just from the research. I know it because I nearly lived my way directly into that regret — and a bypass surgery and a near-death experience on a table at the Cleveland Clinic gave me the unwanted gift of clarity that most people never get until it is genuinely too late.

I was, by every external measure, winning. I was obese, diabetic, and working myself into the ground on Wall Street — and I called that success. I called the exhaustion ambition. I called the numbness drive. The day a doctor explained to me the full implications of what my body was doing under the weight of that life, I did not feel like a winner. I felt like someone who had been running so hard he had never once looked up to check where the road was actually going. That moment is the reason I eventually wrote Terminal Success by Jason Mandel. Because the question of what we regret before we die is not an abstract philosophical exercise. It is a practical, urgent, deeply personal warning — and for people who have spent their lives achieving, it is almost always the warning that arrives last.

What the Research Actually Tells Us About Regret and Dying

Bronnie Ware was a palliative care nurse in Australia who spent years sitting beside people in the final weeks of their lives. She asked them about regret. What came back was not the list you'd expect from a culture that celebrates hustle and productivity. The most common regret she recorded — the one that appeared with striking regularity — was this: I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. The second most common? I wish I hadn't worked so hard. These were not the regrets of lazy people who hadn't tried. These were the regrets of people who had tried so hard, for so long, in pursuit of something someone else defined as worth having — and arrived at the end of their lives still holding the bill.

What strikes me about those findings is not their sadness, though they are profoundly sad. What strikes me is their predictability. If you ask most burned-out, high-achieving professionals right now — not in a conference room, not on a performance review, but alone at 11 PM when the house is quiet — they will tell you, quietly, that they already feel the shape of that regret forming. They can already sense the gap between the life they are living and the life they would choose if they were being completely honest. They just haven't slowed down long enough to face it, because facing it would require changing something enormous, and change is terrifying when your identity is built entirely around a version of success that no longer fits you.

There is a third regret from Ware's research that gets less attention but matters enormously to the people I am writing for: I wish I had let myself be happier. Not "I wish I had been luckier" or "I wish I had earned more." I wish I had let myself be happier. That word — let — carries the full weight of what chronic overachievers do to themselves. Happiness is not something they lack the capacity for. It is something they have systematically denied themselves, often under the guise of discipline, delayed gratification, or the conviction that the next milestone will finally make it feel earned. The milestone never does. And by the time they understand that, there are far fewer milestones left to reach.

What the research does not fully capture is the specific texture of regret in people who built their identities around professional success. The grief is not just for lost time. It is for a version of yourself that was always there — curious, present, alive to ordinary beauty — and was slowly, systematically crowded out by urgency. That is a particular kind of loss. And it compounds every year you don't address it.

What I Was Running From When I Called It Ambition

I spent years on Wall Street in a culture that treated exhaustion as evidence of commitment. The hours were long and hard by design — not because the work required it, but because the culture demanded the performance of sacrifice as proof of worth. I bought into it completely. I was obese, I was diabetic, I was medicated for conditions that were almost entirely the product of how I was living, and I kept telling myself that once I hit the next number, once the next deal closed, once the next year wrapped — then I would slow down. Then I would deal with my health. Then I would be present for the people I loved.

The problem with "then" is that it always recedes. The goalposts move because they are designed to move. Wall Street, like most high-performance cultures, is structurally brilliant at creating the illusion of progress while keeping you in permanent dissatisfaction. You close a deal and there is already a bigger one on the table. You hit a bonus target and the new target is set before you've had time to exhale. The machine requires your hunger. It cannot function on your contentment. And so the culture does everything in its power to ensure you are never quite content — to ensure that what you have is never quite enough, that you are always one sprint away from arrival at a destination that keeps moving.

I speak about this from the inside because I was not a passive observer of that culture — I was a full participant, and a willing one. My drug, as I have said before, was not cocaine. It was food. It was work. It was the numbing comfort of being too busy to feel the distance growing between the life I was living and the life I actually wanted. By the time my body forced the issue — by the time the health consequences were severe enough that a surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic was explaining to me what happens to people who don't change — I had been running from that reckoning for a decade. The regret I nearly carried to the grave was not that I hadn't been successful enough. It was that I had been so relentlessly successful at the wrong things for so long that I had nearly missed the whole point of being alive.

That is what I mean when I talk about terminal success. It is not a metaphor. It is a literal description of where that road leads if you never take your foot off the accelerator. The achievement is real. The recognition is real. The money is real. And the cost — the cost in health, in presence, in the relationships you kept promising to show up for, in the version of yourself that never got to breathe — that cost is also real. The difference is that the achievement is visible and the cost is private. And private costs have a way of accumulating unnoticed until they become impossible to ignore.

Why High Achievers Are the Last to See It Coming

There is something almost cruel about the way burnout and accumulated regret work in high achievers. The very qualities that made you successful — the relentlessness, the ability to push through discomfort, the skill at compartmentalizing difficult feelings and keeping moving — are precisely the qualities that make you most vulnerable to arriving late at this reckoning. You are genuinely good at overriding signals. You have been rewarded your whole life for ignoring the voice that says "slow down" or "this isn't working" or "you are not okay." That voice has been the enemy of your productivity, and you have spent decades becoming expert at silencing it.

The tragedy is that the voice was not your enemy. It was the most honest thing about you. It was the part of you that knew — that always knew — that the life you were building so carefully was not quite the life you would have chosen if you had stopped long enough to actually choose. High achievers do not fail to notice the signs of accumulating regret because they are stupid or unaware. They notice them and override them, the same way they override hunger, or tiredness, or grief, or the slow erosion of the connections that matter most. The override is the skill. And the skill eventually becomes the wound.

What compounds this further is the identity problem. When your sense of self is almost entirely constructed around your professional output — your title, your income, your track record, your relentless upward trajectory — any threat to that output feels existential. Asking yourself whether the whole enterprise is pointing in the right direction is not just an uncomfortable question. It is a question that calls into doubt the coherence of who you are. That is not a question most people are equipped to sit with while they are in the middle of living it. It usually takes something external to force it: a diagnosis, a loss, a breakdown, a moment when the body or the mind simply refuses to cooperate any further. The crisis becomes the gift. But most people would rather not have needed the crisis.

My own crisis came in the form of a body that had absorbed the consequences of my choices long before my mind was ready to acknowledge them. Obesity and diabetes are not abstract health statistics. They are the physical record of a life lived in chronic override. They were my body's ledger of every meal eaten in stress, every night without sleep, every early morning at a desk when I should have been present for something that actually mattered. The surgery at the Cleveland Clinic was not the end of that story. It was the moment I finally agreed to read what the ledger said.

The Regret That Nobody Talks About: Living Someone Else's Definition of Success

Of all the regrets that surface at the end of life, the one that haunts me most — the one I came closest to carrying — is the regret of spending decades in pursuit of a version of success that was never truly yours to begin with. It is borrowed. It is inherited. It is the definition that was handed to you early — by parents who worried about security, by a culture that conflates net worth with self-worth, by a profession that had very clear metrics for what counted as winning and very little language for what it was costing you. You adopted it without examination because examining it was a luxury you never felt you could afford, and because the people around you were all running the same race in the same direction and nobody was stopping to ask where the finish line actually was.

Wall Street, as I lived it, was a particularly intense version of this problem — but it is not unique to finance. It is the story of every industry that selects for a specific kind of hunger and then feeds that hunger while systematically starving everything else. The legal profession does it. Medicine does it. Entrepreneurship does it. Technology does it. The specific currency changes — billable hours, publications, valuations, exits — but the architecture is the same. You measure success by the metrics the culture gives you, and you chase them with the discipline and ferocity that made you excellent at everything else, and somewhere along the way you forget to ask whether the game you are winning is the one you actually wanted to play.

The father in me grieves this most clearly. My father, Jack Kent Mandel, died on February 24, 2021. He was a man who expressed his love in architecture — in the buildings he cared about, in the way he could look at a structure and feel what it meant to the people who built it. In his last years, what he expressed most clearly was not pride in whatever he had accumulated or achieved. It was connection. It was presence. It was the accumulated weight of the moments he had been genuinely there. That is the inheritance I am most interested in leaving. Not a portfolio. Not a track record. The understanding, passed from one generation to the next, that your life is not the sum of what you accomplished. It is the sum of what you were actually present for.

What the Research on Near-Death Experiences Confirms

The research on what people report after near-death experiences is strikingly consistent with what palliative care nurses observe at the end of life. People who have come close to dying and returned do not typically emerge newly committed to working harder or accumulating more. They emerge with a recalibrated sense of what time is for. They become less patient with the trivial and more present with the essential. The ambition does not disappear — but it redirects. They become ambitious about presence, about connection, about the quality of the hours rather than the quantity of the accomplishments.

What they consistently describe is a kind of radical simplification. The things that seemed enormous before — the deal, the title, the rivalry, the performance review — shrink. And the things that seemed ordinary — a conversation, a walk, a meal eaten without a phone in hand — expand into something they realize they were never fully receiving. This is not a mystical transformation. It is a correction. It is the mind and the body finally aligning around the truth that the nervous system always knew but was too overridden to deliver: that you are a finite creature, that your days are countable, and that the question of how you spend them is the most consequential question you will ever face.

I did not have a near-death experience in the cinematic sense. But a surgeon standing over you explaining the statistical consequences of continuing to live the way you are living has a similar effect. It strips away the abstraction. It makes the question of how you are spending your time into a question about how much time you actually have — and whether the way you are spending it reflects anything you would actually choose if you were choosing consciously. For me, the answer to that question was mostly no. And the work of the years since has been the slow, imperfect, deeply meaningful project of changing that answer.

How to Stop Accumulating the Regrets That Haunt People at the End

The first thing worth understanding is that this is not a problem you solve in a weekend retreat or a vision-board exercise. The accumulated distance between the life you are living and the life you would choose is not corrected by a single decisive moment of clarity. It is corrected by a thousand small, consistent decisions to act on what you already know is true rather than what is convenient or comfortable or reinforced by the culture around you. That is harder and slower and less satisfying than a transformation narrative, but it is honest — and you deserve honesty more than you need a story that makes it sound easier than it is.

What compounds this further is that the corrective work requires a kind of courage that is genuinely different from the courage you have already demonstrated. The courage to build a career, to compete, to produce, to endure — that courage is real, and it is yours, and it got you somewhere. The courage required now is almost its opposite. It is the courage to stop performing. To be uncertain in public. To admit to the people you love that you have been present with them in body and absent in everything that matters. To step back from the metrics that defined you and sit in the discomfort of not yet knowing what replaces them. That is terrifying in a way that working harder never was, because working harder was always available as a response. Sitting with the truth is not a strategy. It is just an act of honesty, and honesty is the hardest discipline.

The practical dimensions of this are real, and I do not want to wave them away in favor of pure philosophy. Changing how you live costs something. It may cost income, at least in the short term. It may cost status, or the respect of a professional community that defines worth the way you used to. It may cost the comfortable numbness of being too busy to feel the gap. What it gives back — and I can tell you this from the other side of the change, from the sun-drenched life in Florida that replaced the constant chase up north — is a quality of presence, of aliveness, of actual engagement with the days of your life, that no performance metric ever captured and no bonus ever delivered. The exchange is real. And it is worth making.

The Question That Reframes Everything

I want to leave you with the question that changed everything for me, because it is simple enough to carry with you and sharp enough to cut through the noise when you most need it. The question is this: If the life you are living right now were the last five years of your life, would you live it differently? Not the abstract version of that question. Not the comfortable version where you answer "I'd spend more time with family" and then open your laptop. The real version. The version where you sit with the discomfort of the honest answer long enough for it to mean something.

Most high achievers, when they sit with that question honestly, know the answer immediately. They know which meetings they would cancel. They know which relationships they have been promising to prioritize. They know the version of themselves that got buried under urgency and performance and the relentless accumulation of more — and they know, if they are honest, that that version of themselves is still there, still waiting, still available, and that the window is not infinite. The work of not dying with regret is not a philosophical project. It is a practical, daily, imperfect practice of choosing the thing that matters over the thing that is merely urgent. You already know how to be excellent. The question is whether you can direct that excellence at a life that is actually worth excelling at.

In Terminal Success by Jason Mandel, I try to tell the truth about what it cost me to learn this late — and what I found on the other side of learning it. The title is not ironic. It is a description of where the road I was on was actually leading, and a record of the moment I finally chose a different one. If you are asking this question tonight, you are already doing the most important thing. Do not stop asking it until you have an answer you can live with — and then live with it, fully, while you still can.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do people regret most before they die?

The most consistent finding in palliative care research — including the widely cited work of nurse Bronnie Ware — is that people's deepest regrets at the end of life are not about what they failed to achieve. They are about what they failed to allow. The most commonly reported regret is not having had the courage to live a life true to oneself rather than the life others expected. The second most common is having worked too hard and sacrificed presence for productivity. These regrets are especially prevalent among high achievers, because the culture of achievement systematically trains you to defer the things that will eventually matter most.

Why do high achievers tend to accumulate regret differently than other people?

High achievers are uniquely vulnerable to a specific kind of regret because the qualities that made them successful — the ability to push through discomfort, to defer gratification, to override internal signals in service of external goals — are precisely the qualities that allow the distance between lived life and desired life to grow unnoticed for the longest. The very discipline that drives achievement also drives the suppression of the honest internal accounting that would reveal the cost of that achievement. The reckoning tends to arrive later, and when it does, it arrives with the full weight of the years that were spent in productive denial.

Can you change the direction of your life before it's too late?

Yes. And the most important thing I can tell you about that change is that it does not require a dramatic external event — though sometimes a dramatic external event is what forces it. What it requires is the sustained courage to take the honest internal accounting seriously, to stop deferring it, and to begin making the thousand small decisions that gradually close the gap between the life you are living and the life you would choose. The change is not an event. It is a practice. And it is available to you right now, regardless of how long the gap has been growing.

How does surviving a serious health crisis change your relationship to regret?

A serious health crisis has the effect of collapsing the abstraction that usually insulates people from the urgency of these questions. When your life is concretely at risk, the theoretical question of whether you are spending your time well becomes an immediate, personal, inescapable question. Most survivors describe a profound recalibration — not the elimination of ambition, but the redirection of it toward what they actually value rather than what they were trained to pursue. The crisis becomes, in the most difficult way possible, a clarifying gift. The goal of this writing is to offer some of that clarity without requiring the crisis.

What is the connection between burnout and end-of-life regret?

Burnout is often an early signal of the same misalignment that produces end-of-life regret. When you are chronically exhausted, emotionally flat, and unable to connect meaningfully with the things you ostensibly care about, your system is telling you that the life you are living is not sustainable and may not be genuinely yours. Burnout is not just a medical condition to recover from. It is information about a fundamental mismatch between how you are spending your energy and what you actually value. Addressing burnout at the level of symptoms — more sleep, better boundaries, a vacation — without addressing the underlying misalignment is how people recover from burnout only to return to it repeatedly throughout their careers.