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By Mihar Dias November 2026
Last weekend I attended an 88th birthday party for a retired Attorney General. At 70-something, I was the toddler at the table. The room held enough former Director-Generals, Datuks and "formerly of the Ministry" to staff a small government, assuming governments were still run by people who could climb a flight of stairs unaided.
There was cake. There were speeches, delivered with the confidence of men who spent careers being listened to by people with no choice. These were the movers and shakers of our society, now moving at the speed of the buffet queue and shaking mainly from the tea. Once they signed off on nation-building. Now they sign off on the sambal level.
That week, a Banksy-attributed image had landed on my Facebook: an old man gazing at the shadow of his younger self playing football. No caption. Banksy never needs one, which is more than I can say for the speeches I endured.
The man beside me was a career journalist, a byline once feared in certain corridors. Over two hours he screened his glory days in high definition: the scoops, the editors he outlasted, the ministers who used to return his calls. "Used to" did a lot of heavy lifting. Then, somewhere between the grilled fish and the second teh tarik, the confession: I wish I had lived a fuller life. I spent it chasing goals, objectives and missions that someone else set for me.
Someone else set them. Sit with that. Fifty years of KPIs, mission statements and "strategic priorities" drafted by people he would never have invited to dinner, and he executed them with the loyalty of a golden retriever. His reward: a plaque, a handshake, and a pension that doesn't cover the regret. The golden retriever, at least, gets a biscuit.
The Great Con
We are sold a tidy fairy tale. Work hard, climb the ladder, and the view from the top will justify the knees. Nobody mentions the ladder was leaning against someone else's wall. Nobody mentions that the corner office, once vacated, is reassigned before your farewell lunch is digested, and that your name on the door is scraped off by a contractor who never heard of you.
Glory days make wonderful anecdotes and terrible company. They won't drive you to the clinic. They won't remember your birthday. They certainly won't sit beside you when the room goes quiet, which, at 88, it does, frequently, and without warning. In the Banksy image the shadow is lithe, quick and still in the game. The old man can only watch. Notice that nobody is cheering for either of them.
And before the young ones nod smugly into their LinkedIn feeds: you are not exempt. Every "I'll rest after this promotion" is a down payment on a monologue at somebody's birthday party. Every "after this project" is a deposit into an account that closes without notice. Your employer's "we are a family" speech is also, I regret to report, a lie. Families don't lay you off by email.
What the Research Says (Since You Won't Take My Word for It)
Cynicism is cheap, so here is the evidence. Read it before the next quarterly review, which, incidentally, will be forgotten faster than you think.
• Regret favours the roads not taken. Psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec found that in the short term we regret what we did, but over a lifetime we regret what we didn't do. The failed venture fades into a funny story. The unwritten book, the unmade call and the unvisited place keep sending invoices.
• The dying are painfully consistent. Palliative nurse Bronnie Ware recorded the top regret she heard from patients: not having the courage to live a life true to themselves rather than the one others expected. Nobody wished for more time in meetings. My neighbour at the party could have been quoted verbatim.
• Relationships beat résumés. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked lives for over eight decades. Its clearest finding is that the quality of our relationships predicts health and happiness in old age better than wealth or status. All those dinners you skipped for the "strategic offsite" were, it turns out, the strategy.
• Time horizons rewrite priorities. Laura Carstensen's research shows that when people sense time growing short, they shift from ambition to meaning and the people they love. The tragedy is that we wait for the horizon to shrink before behaving as though it has.
• Achievement wears off. Hedonic adaptation research shows we snap back to our emotional baseline soon after each win. The promotion that felt like a summit becomes the new floor by next quarter, and the raise becomes the new rent. You are not climbing. You are on a treadmill with a nicer title.
Live By These Before the Cake Arrives
1. Audit whose goals you are chasing. If the mission statement wasn't written by you, at least negotiate your own clauses. Better still, ask who profits when you comply.
2. Act on the "someday" list now. Someday is a polite word for never, and it has an excellent track record.
3. Invest in people on purpose. Call the friend. Visit the relative. Repair the quarrel. Your organisation will send a bouquet to your funeral. Your friends will send themselves, if you were any good to them.
4. Don't confuse your title with your identity. The title retires before you do, and it takes your parking bay with it.
5. Collect experiences, not just credentials. At 88, nobody asks to see your certificates. They ask for stories, and "I attended the quarterly review" is not one.
6. Write your own life story while there is still a plot. Otherwise someone else will summarise it at the funeral in three polite minutes, and half of it will be borrowed from your LinkedIn.
At the end of the party the birthday boy blew out his candles and the room applauded as though it were a feat. Perhaps it is. Still, I drove home wondering which shadow I'd be staring at when my turn comes: the one that played the game, or the one that merely watched the scoreboard and kept the minutes.
Choose now. The shadow is faster than you think, and the cake is never as good as the speeches promise.
References:
1. Regret of action vs inaction
• Gilovich, T. & Medvec, V. H. (1995). "The experience of regret: What, when, and why." Psychological Review, 102(2), 379-395.
• Gilovich, T. & Medvec, V. H. (1994). "The temporal pattern to the experience of regret." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 357-365.
2. Regrets of the dying
• Ware, B. (2011). The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Hay House.
• Caveat: this is a nurse's anecdotal account, not a controlled study. Describe it as "recorded" or "reported", not "proven".
3. Relationships and long-term wellbeing
• Waldinger, R. & Schulz, M. (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Simon & Schuster.
• Waldinger's 2015 TED talk, “What makes a good life?”
• The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in 1938, so "over eight decades" is accurate.
4. Time horizons and priorities
• Carstensen, L. L., Isaacowitz, D. M. & Charles, S. T. (1999). "Taking time seriously: A theory of socioemotional selectivity." American Psychologist, 54(3), 165-181.
• Carstensen, L. L. (2006). "The influence of a sense of time on human development." Science, 312(5782), 1913-1915.
5. Hedonic adaptation
• Brickman, P., Coates, D. & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). "Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-927.
• Frederick, S. & Loewenstein, G. (1999). "Hedonic adaptation," in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology.
• Caveat: later work (e.g. Lucas et al., 2003) shows adaptation is often incomplete. "Snap back" is column-friendly shorthand, so "drift back toward" is safer if challenged.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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