Somewhere in your phone is a name you have not called in a while. You think about it sometimes. You have not made the call. Here is what the largest study of regret ever done found out about people just like you.
The World's Largest Study of Regret Found One Kind Beats All the Rest: The Call You Keep Meaning to Make
Daniel Pink and psychologist Neal Roese have spent years studying what people regret most, drawing on tens of thousands of responses from more than 100 countries. One category keeps winning: connection regret, the ache of losing touch with someone. A separate study found the reason people hesitate is not the one they think.
Pink's World Regret Survey has collected more than 23,000 regrets from people in over 100 countries, alongside a formal study of nearly 4,500 Americans. **Out of that mountain of data, four core kinds of regret kept surfacing: foundation, boldness, moral, and connection.** Connection regret, the sense of a relationship that drifted and was never repaired, turned out to be the biggest of the four.
There is a pattern to when this regret shows up too. **Young adults report roughly equal numbers of regrets over things they did and things they did not do. By the thirties and forties, regrets of inaction pull ahead, and eventually outnumber regrets of action by about two to one.** Pink calls the underlying habit temporal discounting: we overvalue the call that is easy to make later and undervalue the fact that later is not guaranteed.
So why does the call not get made? **A separate line of research gives a surprisingly specific answer.** Psychologists Peggy Liu, SoYon Rim, Lauren Min, and Kate Min ran thirteen preregistered experiments with nearly 6,000 participants and found that people consistently underestimate how much a reach out, even something as small as a text checking in, is appreciated by the person on the other end.
1. The regret that outlasts all the others
In an interview about the research, Pink put it plainly: **connection regrets were the biggest category of the four deep structure regrets.** Not career, not money, not the risk never taken. The relationship that quietly faded is the one people carry the longest.
The math on inaction is part of why. **In your twenties, action and inaction regrets run about even. By your thirties and certainly your forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, the inaction regrets take over**, and Pink's team found they end up roughly twice as common. The things we did tend to resolve themselves, for better or worse. The things we never got around to just sit there.
The people we lose touch with become the calls we most wish we had made.
2. Why the call never gets made
Ask someone why they have not called an old friend and the answer is usually some version of the same worry: **it will be awkward, too much time has passed, the other person has probably moved on.** That worry feels like information. The research says it is closer to a miscalculation.
Liu, Rim, Min, and Min ran the numbers thirteen separate ways, with initiators and responders randomly assigned so neither side could just be guessing generously. **Every time, the person reaching out underestimated how appreciated it would be, whether the gesture was a two-line text or a small gift, and the effect grew stronger the more time had passed and the more surprising the contact was.** The pleasant surprise of hearing from someone does most of the work. The person calling almost never accounts for it.
The awkwardness you are bracing for mostly exists in your head, not theirs.
3. What to do with the call you finally make
None of this requires a grand gesture. **The research was built on ordinary check-ins: a text, a call, a few minutes of catching up.** That is also exactly the kind of moment that is easy to let pass without keeping anything from it.
With LifeScribe, Ari can be part of that same ordinary call, asking the kind of question that turns catching up into something worth keeping. **It does not make the call less normal. It just means the conversation you almost did not have does not disappear the moment you hang up.**
The call you keep meaning to make is also a story you have not kept yet.
I hadn't talked to my college roommate in about six years. I kept telling myself it would be weird after that long. I finally called on a Sunday for no real reason, and she said she'd been meaning to call me too. We were on the phone for almost two hours. I started recording near the end just so I wouldn't lose the parts about her grandmother.Marcus, 34, reconnecting with an old friend on an ordinary phone call
What you get with LifeScribe
- Connection regret, losing touch with someone and never repairing it, is the single biggest category in the largest study of regret ever conducted.
- The reason most people hesitate to reach out is not that the other person will not care. Research on reaching out found people are consistently, and sometimes dramatically, more appreciated than the caller expects.
- Ari helps you turn that call into something kept: a real conversation, in someone's own words, not just a memory of having talked.
- Built on documented research: Daniel Pink and Neal Roese's work on regret, and a peer reviewed study on the surprise of reaching out (Liu, Rim, Min, and Min).
Start free, with nothing to lose
Make the call you have been putting off, free. Nothing to install, nothing to schedule around. If it does not feel like it kept something worth keeping, you have lost nothing but a few minutes of a call you were already glad you made.
**Connection regret does not wait for a convenient time.** The people at the center of it are usually the ones you assume you can always call later, right up until the day that turns out not to be true, and the research is clear on how many people are living with exactly that regret right now.
Make the call you keep meaning to make. It might be the best two hours you have this year.
Let Ari help you turn an ordinary reconnecting call into something kept in someone's own voice, before it becomes one more regret on a very long list.
Questions grandparents ask us
What is connection regret?
Connection regret is one of four core categories of regret identified in Daniel Pink's research, drawn from a formal survey of nearly 4,500 Americans and a public World Regret Survey with more than 23,000 responses from over 100 countries. It describes the regret of a relationship that drifted apart and was never repaired, and it emerged as the largest of the four categories.
Why don't people reach out even when they want to?
Researchers studying regret found that people consistently overestimate how awkward reconnecting will be and underestimate how much the other person will appreciate it. A separate 2022 study (Liu, Rim, Min, and Min) confirmed this directly: across thirteen experiments with nearly 6,000 participants, people who reached out to someone consistently underestimated how much their gesture, even a brief text, would be appreciated.
What did the reaching-out study actually find?
Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the study found the underestimation held whether the reach out was a simple check-in text or a small gift, and it grew larger the more time had passed and the more socially distant the two people were. The researchers traced it to the recipient's pleasant surprise, something the person reaching out rarely factors in when predicting how it will land.
Does regret get worse with age?
The kind of regret shifts. Pink's research found that young adults report roughly equal numbers of action and inaction regrets. By the thirties and forties, inaction regrets, the things never done or never said, pull ahead and end up roughly twice as common as regrets over things people actually did.
Why does this matter for recording a family story?
The calls people put off the longest are often the ones that would matter most to keep: a parent, an old friend, a relative you have drifted from. Making the call closes the gap the research describes. Keeping what is said on that call, in the person's own words, is what LifeScribe is built to help with.
https://getlifescribeapp.com/blog/the-call-you-keep-meaning-to-make