Life & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

Regret loves a costume change, and Cooley catches it mid-quick-change. "The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past" sounds, at first, like a minor correction to a common misunderstanding. It’s nastier than that: it suggests discontent isn’t a reaction to what happened so much as a strategy for avoiding what’s happening now. The past becomes the safest place to stage a grievance because it can’t argue back, can’t demand action, can’t expose the real source of dissatisfaction.

Cooley’s line works because it flips the usual moral of regret. We tend to treat regret as backward-looking wisdom: a lesson extracted from earlier mistakes. He implies it’s often forward-looking anxiety in disguise. The discontented don’t just mourn what they did; they rehearse what they fear they’ll never do. Regret becomes a proxy for stalled desire, a way to keep longing intact while postponing the risk of change. If the problem is "then", the solution can remain hypothetical.

The phrasing is clinically tight: "believe" is doing heavy lifting, making regret less like evidence and more like a self-administered theory. And "their regrets" hints at possession, even indulgence - regrets as personal property, curated and returned to because they’re familiar.

Cooley, an aphorist in the postwar American tradition, writes from a culture saturated with self-revision: therapy-speak, reinvention myths, the pressure to optimize. His point lands like a pin in that balloon: discontent doesn’t need the past. It uses it.