Kathryn Schulz's Speech

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Pages: 3

Kathryn Schulz begins her TED talk by mentioning something that a lot of people, especially around our age, are familiar with (or have been concerned about) and that is regretting a tattoo decision. This leads into the discussion about regret and she starts off mentioning the idea that “concerning yourself with things that happened in the past is a waste of time.” Schulz talks about how there are two ways to live without regret and that is to be a sociopath or to have a front cortex injury. Which brings her into the main topic of her speech and that is learning to live with regret.
She defines regret as the emotion of when we thing the current situation could be better if we had done something different before hand. Schultz gives the situation
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Denial is the first characteristic of regret where the person just wants the problem to go away. Next is bewilderment, where the person asks what were they thinking when they made that decision. They look back and can’t understand what led them to make that choice. The third characteristic is punishment and the fourth is perseveration where they kind of obsess over the choice that they made and continuously run through the other three characteristics. But she also gives three things that help deal and make peace with …show more content…
As someone who is quite familiar with the story of Macbeth and who has also watched enough Criminal Minds and Law and Order to know about sociopaths, this part of the talk caught my attention and drew me to want to listen more. It made the beginning of her talk more entertaining and enjoyable. I also really loved her bringing up the fear of the “reply to all “ regret. All of these little jokes and examples just make her whole argument more relatable. She was also very strongly persuasive because she was talking about her own regret of a tattoo and it made her a whole case very