I feel like I wasted this year

An example: Dana, a list from January, and the sentence she writes on December 29

Watch what the sentence leans on, and where the word wasted first appears. Then watch her sister's call, where something from the year comes up that was not on the list.

Dana is 33 and works in an office. On January 2 she wrote a short list in a notebook: finish a certificate, run three times a week, move out of the shared apartment, and write to her sister more. It is December 29 and she is at the kitchen table with the notebook open.

10 a.m., the notebook She reads the four lines. The certificate has two modules left. She ran in February and again in April. The apartment is the same apartment. She writes under the list: I wasted this year.

11 a.m., the phone A friend posts a year in photos: a trip, a new job, a dog. Dana looks at it for a long time. She notices the word wasted come back, and that it now covers more than the list.

6 p.m., her sister calls Her sister says, “You were really ill for most of the spring, remember?” Dana says that is an excuse. Her sister says she did not say it as one. They talk about something else.

Later that night Dana closes the notebook without crossing anything out. She is no more sure than she was at ten whether the sentence is about the list, the spring or the photos.

The sentence appears at ten, after the list and before anything else, and the photos widen it within the hour. The spring is a fact about the year that was not on the list, and Dana files it as an excuse. The story does not settle what the sentence is made of.

Several things in the story match what the research describes. The list is a set of hopes, and unmet hopes are the kind of discrepancy the 2018 studies below found to stay unresolved. The turn of the year is a landmark, and the fresh start researchers propose that landmarks lead people to take a big-picture view of their lives. A single word covering the whole year fits all-or-nothing thinking, and the spring being filed as an excuse fits discounting. None of this shows that the sentence is wrong, or right. It shows what the sentence may be built from.

A different story would point elsewhere. If Dana had finished the certificate, run weekly and still written the sentence, the list would not be the source and the question would be where the bar came from. If nothing on the list had mattered to her even in January, and food, friends and music had gone flat as well, that is closer to what this site's pages on depression describe. If the sentence came back every night and added nothing, rumination would describe it better. One day cannot settle which.

What the research shows

4 studies, each with what it doesn’t show

None of the studies below looks at the feeling that a year was wasted. They are about what people regret, why a new year draws a look back, and how a stretch of time gets judged afterward. Each looks at something near the feeling.

Regrets cluster in areas like education, career and romance, and two accounts of why compete: one says where people see the most opportunity, the other says outcomes that can no longer be changed. Regrets about hopes left unmet are more likely to stay unresolved than regrets about duties left unmet. A new year draws more goal-setting, and the authors propose a big-picture view of the stretch behind. Judgments of an episode can lean on its worst and last moments, though that was shown for 90 seconds of cold water. Nothing in this research measures the conclusion that a year was wasted.

Roese & Summerville (2005)

A meta-analysis of 11 studies that ranked people's biggest regrets found six life areas at the top, in order: education, career, romance, parenting, the self and leisure. New laboratory studies linked that ranking to how much opportunity people saw in each area.

Doesn’t show The authors read it as regret tracking where people see their largest opportunities. A 2009 paper by Beike and colleagues argues instead that regret tracks lost opportunity, outcomes that can no longer be changed. Neither paper measures a feeling that a year was wasted.

Roese & Summerville (2005). What we regret most... and why. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(9), 1273–1285.

Searches, gym visits and goal commitments rose after new weeks, months, years, semesters, birthdays and holidays

In 2014, Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis reported three archival field studies. They looked at three things around temporal landmarks: Google searches for the term “diet” (Study 1), gym visits (Study 2) and commitments to pursue goals (Study 3). The landmarks were the start of a new week, month, year or semester, a birthday, or a holiday.

All three rose after the landmarks. The authors propose that landmarks create new mental accounting periods. These relegate past imperfections to a previous period and lead people to take a big-picture view of their lives, which motivates aspirational behavior.

Doesn’t show The studies are about looking forward: diets, gym visits and goals. They did not ask how people feel about the year just ended. The big-picture view is the authors' proposal for why the rises happen and was not measured here, and the abstract does not say how long the rises last. The study does not show that a landmark causes a feeling of waste.

Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman and Jason Riis, The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior, Management Science, 2014.

Enduring regrets came more often from the gap to the self a person hoped to be than to the self they felt they ought to be

In 2018, Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich reported six studies on the structure of people's most enduring regrets. One kind of regret comes from a gap between a person's actual and ideal selves, which hold their goals and aspirations. The other comes from a gap between actual and ought selves, which hold their duties and responsibilities. The studies compared the two.

Enduring regrets stemmed more often from actual-ideal gaps than from actual-ought gaps. The authors also found evidence that people are quicker to take steps to cope with failures to meet their duties than failures to meet their goals. So ideal-related regrets are more likely to remain unresolved.

Doesn’t show The abstract does not say who took part or how many. The studies are about regrets people name as lasting, not about a feeling that a year in particular was wasted, and they do not show that unmet hopes make a year feel wasted.

Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich, The ideal road not taken: The self-discrepancies involved in people's most enduring regrets, Emotion, 2018.

People preferred to repeat a longer cold-water trial that ended slightly less painfully

In 1993, Daniel Kahneman, Barbara Fredrickson, Charles Schreiber and Donald Redelmeier exposed people to two painful experiences. In the short trial, one hand went into water at 14 degrees Celsius for 60 seconds. In the long trial, the other hand went in at 14 degrees for 60 seconds. It then stayed 30 seconds longer as the water was gradually warmed to 15 degrees, still painful but distinctly less so for most.

Asked later which trial to repeat, a significant majority chose the long one. The authors read this, with other evidence, as suggesting that duration plays a small role in how aversive experiences are judged afterward. Such judgments, they say, are often dominated by the discomfort at the worst and the final moments.

Doesn’t show This is 90 seconds of cold water, not a year, and the abstract gives no sample size. Whether a whole year is judged by its worst and last stretches has not been shown by this study. Applying it to a year is reasoning from a short episode, and the page treats it as a possibility only.

Daniel Kahneman, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Charles A. Schreiber and Donald A. Redelmeier, When more pain is preferred to less: Adding a better end, Psychological Science, 1993.

Try it: what the sentence is made of

A short exercise

Take the sentence as it first came, and write a few lines under it. Keep the notes somewhere only you can open.

• The sentence, word for word
• Each thing it leans on: a goal, a stretch of weeks, someone else's year, a feeling
• What I wanted from the year on its first day, and what I wanted by midsummer
• One ordinary day from the middle of the year, as it felt while it was happening

The second line shows how many separate things the one word is carrying. The third shows whether the goals stayed the same across the year, which the research on hopes and duties cannot answer for any one person. The fourth sets a day as it was beside the year as it looks from the end, which is a different view of the same time.

Questions people ask

Why do I feel like I wasted this year?

Several patterns could explain it. Hopes that went unmet are the kind of regret that, in a set of six studies by Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich, tended to stay unresolved. In surveys and interviews by Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec, people's biggest regrets tended to be things they had not done. A single word may be covering a year that held more than the list, which is the all-or-nothing pattern, and things that did happen may be discounted because they were not on the list. The patterns above describe each, with what points to it. Nothing in the research shows that a year was wasted or was not.

Why do I feel like I accomplished nothing this year?

The same patterns could apply, with one more possibility: what counts as an accomplishment may be set by a list written at the start of the year. In studies by Hengchen Dai and colleagues, people made more commitments to pursue goals after landmarks such as a new year, a new month or a birthday. Whether a longer list at the start makes the end of the year feel emptier has not been tested in the studies on this page.

Why does the feeling come at the end of the year?

A year's end is a temporal landmark. In three archival studies, Google searches for “diet,” gym visits and commitments to goals all rose after landmarks such as a new week, month, year or semester, a birthday or a holiday. The authors propose that landmarks lead people to take a big-picture view of their lives. Those studies are about aspiration, not about the feeling of a wasted year, so the link to this feeling is a possibility rather than a finding.

What do people regret most?

In a meta-analysis of 11 studies that ranked regrets, the top six were education, career, romance, parenting, the self and leisure, in that order. In a national telephone survey of Americans, regrets more often focused on romance than on other life domains. Those studies ask about regrets across a life, not about one year.

Is feeling that a year was wasted a sign of depression?

The feeling alone does not show it. It can come from a missed goal, from a flat stretch, or from low mood that reaches much more than the year's goals, and a single sentence cannot say which. The pages on major depression and anhedonia describe what the clinical patterns involve, and a doctor is the right person to tell if food, sleep, people or things that used to matter have changed. The care note at the top of the page has numbers if the feeling includes thoughts of not wanting to be here.