"I couldn't bear to get it wrong"

Imagine it's the second year of the course. You're tired, the fees have gone up, and you've just understood that you don't much like designing other people's gardens. When you imagine it, it's sharp and it seems as if it would last, and it's your fault. The loop runs this scene often. It's the main reason the loop exists.

The scene has two parts. One is a guess about what might happen, and that guess may be fair. The other is a guess about how you'd feel and for how long. The research on that second kind of guess suggests it's usually wrong in one direction.

Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson and colleagues studied people's predictions about bad events, such as a break-up, a failed job application or a harsh piece of feedback. People expected to feel bad for much longer than they did. The researchers' explanation is that we're good at coming to terms with things once they've happened. We find reasons, take the lesson and move on to something else. We just don't expect to. When you picture a wrong choice, you picture yourself standing in it for good, with none of the mending that would in fact begin within days.

Then there's the longer view of regret from chapter 2. Gilovich and Medvec found that in the short term people regret what they did. Over a lifetime, the pattern turns round. Asked about their biggest regrets, people mostly name things they didn't do. The pain of a wrong action fades, partly through that same mending. The chance not taken tends to grow over the years, because you never find out how it would have gone, so you can always imagine it going well. A recent attempt to repeat those studies with nearly a thousand people found the same pattern in most of the tests, with weaker effects, and didn't find it in one. So the pattern has some support, and it isn't settled.

Here's how I'd put the two together, and this is interpretation. The loop protects you from a sharp regret that would last months. In exchange it builds the slow kind that people report carrying for decades. You're picturing the first kind every Sunday, and the second kind doesn't get pictured at all, because it has no single scene to go with it. It's made of all the Septembers that went by.

One more point, which is mine. You'd also get something from a wrong choice that the loop can't give you, and that's an answer. If you did a year of the course and found you didn't like it, you'd know, and the spreadsheet could be closed for good. People who try something and drop it generally think about it less afterwards than people who never tried.