For longer than I’d like to admit, my Instagram bio read, “In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take.” My 14-year-old, emo self didn’t copy Lewis Carroll’s quote just to sound smart — albeit that was 90% of the reasoning — but also, this philosophy resonated with me on a deeper level. 

I said yes to any opportunity that came my way because I was too afraid of the alternative: waking up one morning and realizing that if I had only said yes, my life would have been completely different. I wasn’t ready to deal with that regret. 

Daily headlines, sent straight to your inbox.

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the latest at and around USC.

While becoming a yes-person for clubs worked in high school (though I am not sure how being in a club promoting cycling without hosting any cycling events was beneficial), it was difficult to continue down this path in college. 

College was my oyster — full of opportunities to explore, people to meet and challenges to overcome — which can also be overwhelming. Naturally, I couldn’t try all of the opportunities, so picking and choosing became a stressful experience — what if I picked incorrectly and regretted it for the rest of my life?

I remember tackling this fear when I joined Southern California Moot Court during the fall of my sophomore year. I enjoyed the club, but with my heavy course load, it was hard for me to juggle the club’s tight commitment. Gripped with this fear of regret, I had a tough time dropping out of the club. Only after countless phone calls with my parents and three breakdowns did I call it quits. 

Today, a year later, when I reflect on the past year’s ups and downs, I was surprised to realize that I didn’t regret leaving Moot Court. My life didn’t go down a terrible path like I had hypothesized just because I left the club. I just wished that instead of realizing this in hindsight, I had realized it sooner and not wasted so much time and energy worrying about regretting my decision. 

Alas, no one has invented a time machine for me to go back and tell my younger self the outcome of the decision to save her some anxiety. So, instead, I did the next best thing — ask my friends for advice. 

“How I deal with [missing opportunities] is to keep looking forward,” said Hayley Au-Yang, a junior majoring in intelligence and cyber operations. “Instead of stressing about it and thinking about what I could have done differently, just focus on all the other events that’s going to come in the next couple weeks.”

While the downside of having access to countless opportunities is that you can’t utilize them all, the upside is that if you miss one, the next one is right around the corner. If you waste your time beating yourself up about a missed opportunity, you will miss the next one, too. We are at the point in our lives where we are constantly hustling, so we don’t really have time for regret. 

Worst-case scenario, if the opportunity you missed was the one that could have changed your life forever, it’s very rare that these are once in a lifetime. You may have closed the door on that path right now, but that doesn’t mean you have locked it away forever. One day, you may open the door to that opportunity again.

Along with these suggestions, I also think it’s important to remember that in the end, no matter where you are in life, you are only given 24 hours in a day. It’s a limited time, and you can only do so much. Sometimes, you have to let some stuff go in order to make time for other opportunities you want to prioritize. 

Maybe 10 years down the line, you realize that an opportunity you didn’t take was pretty cool, but you have to remind yourself that you made the best decision possible with all the information that was available to you back then. You prioritized another opportunity then, and that’s okay, irrespective of how it panned out. Not taking that one chance doesn’t warrant being haunted by it for the rest of your life. 

I love Lewis Carroll, but I respectfully disagree with him. I don’t need to regret the chances I didn’t take because there were a bunch that I did take, which brought me to where I am today.

Edhita Singhal is a junior writing about life lessons she has learned in college in her column, “Thinking Out Loud,” which runs every other Wednesday.