People are sharing their biggest regrets - and they're as easy to avoid as they are heartbreaking

'The majority of my regrets are about things I didn’t do rather than the things I did'

(Pixabay)

What's your biggest regret?

It's possible you may not know the answer yet.

Dozens of people have taken to Q&A website Quora to share the biggest regrets they have about their lives so far.

If you want to avoid making the same mistakes, take a look below to see what you should be avoiding.

Not having kids

“In my younger years, I foolishly assumed that unlike certain accomplishments like a career, the marriage and kids thing would just happen.

"Well, they didn't. I dated plenty of people but never even thought about making family a priority. Then, in my late 30s, a bout with ovarian cancer left me permanently infertile.

"I think about the kids I never had every day, several times a day.”

Buying a house

"Now I've got a huge, not-easily-afforded mortgage payment, a bunch of rooms which are not even used or furnished, and perhaps 10K in equity.

"And I don't care about owning a house. I don't need one, and it doesn't make me happy.

"If I hadn't made this unwise decision, I could have skipped town at the first sign of the economic downturn and spent a year traveling the world instead."

Not buying a house

“Letting little fears and anxieties about going off on my own stop me from the one of the best things that could have happened to my life so far.

"When I finally got up the nerve to call the agent for the 3rd time to place an offer I was told it already had an accepted offer.

"Now someone else lives in my house. I haven't seen anything in the year that compares to that house even in the slightest.

"Now I try to act more on intuition and impulse rather than analyzing and agonizing over every small or large detail in my life, which I now realize has really robbed me of many probably wonderful things."

Wasting time

"As I grow older, the opportunity cost of truly pointless hours piles up. What could I have accomplished instead of playing games of Freecell?"

Underestimating yourself, overestimating your goals

"All of us have a habit of putting away even the smallest of goals for that one magical day when we'll be in a better position, the perfect circumstances, all the required resources at our disposal and the right opportunities presented."

Trying to prove myself to others

“It cost me my happiness. It cost me my creativity. It cost me my GPA. It cost me my ability to explore and to find happiness out of the small things in life.

“I hid from people once I realised I couldn’t present them the picture I wanted to see in them. Even though they still would have liked me even if things didn’t ideally go in the narrow direction I ideally wanted them to go in.”

Living in the future

“When I was younger I wanted nothing more than to be at some distant point in the future, because I was certain my life would somehow be better than whatever I had going on.

"When you’re living in the future, it’s easy to overlook everything that veers off the specific script you’ve got in your head.

“I lacked the insight to appreciate oppurtunities, and accidentally inflicted suffering on others.”

Holding back

"The majority of my regrets are about the things I didn't do rather than the things I did."