time heals wounds

In the Appendix to his book, "Meanings of Life", Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist, referred to the following study. The parents of children of various age were asked if at any point of their lives they had regretted having children. The following correlation has emerged: the older the child, the less share of parents who had experienced regret. Clearly, it is not merely counter-intuitive: it is statistically impossible. A parent who has experienced regret by the time their offspring was 2, cannot have been freed of having experienced it any amount of time later. Unless, of course, some revolution has taken place in the last few years in the department of upbringing children that made parents of each next year have exponentially more regrets, but I believe we can abandon that hypothesis. So, how do we explain this?

It is universally known that "time heals wounds". While I agree with this sentiment, I believe the exact mechanism is worth being inspected. It is not any intrinsic property of time, an object ultimately abstract. Rather it is the fact about our memory. It overwrites itself.

If it hadn't, we probably would've all caught the bus by now, due to the unbearable suffering. Luckily, we subconsciously trick ourselves into forgetting. That's the reason why you may have regretted having a child when they were 3, but by now it's not just you don't regret anymore. The mechanism is far more powerful: you are convinced you have never regretted it in the first place.

What are the general implications? You're making a fool of yourself when you claim "I know what it's like to have depression, but I'm not in that place anymore". The fact you're over it implies that while your experience at the time is undeniable, your current memory of it is at the very least distorted,

The moment you stop experiencing "what it's like", you start departing from knowing "what it's like".

So, when presented with an account of a person who has been off-and-on suicidal for the last twenty years, but at the moment is glad they haven't killed themselves, the problem becomes the most visible. Sure, we can claim that their suicide would've been a tragedy. But what I find to be really tragic is that they have suffered for twenty years, and will continue to do so for God-knows-how-long. And what is ironic, is that they are at the time happy about it.