Regret Is Tuition
A twenty-two-year-old with a signing bonus does not know what he wants a couch to do. He buys one anyway, finds out over the next two years that he actually wanted something narrower and firmer for a studio that shrank his plans, and by then the couch has already taught him what he was shopping for. The lesson didn't precede the purchase. It came out of it.
The standard account of bad spending treats this as a failure of preparation: he should have measured, researched, waited for the right one. That story assumes the missing information was sitting somewhere, available to anyone patient enough to look for it. Usually it wasn't. Taste is a pattern that becomes legible only with exposure: encountering the object, living around it, noticing what it does to your days over time. There's no version of that you can do in a showroom.
Spending power and self-knowledge run on different clocks. Money shows up on a schedule set by employers, credit limits, and age: a first job, a raise, a line of credit that finally clears underwriting. Self-knowledge follows its own, slower schedule, tied to years spent actually living with consequences. These two rarely arrive together. Most people get the money years before they get the data on how to spend it well, and the gap between the two gets filled with the couch, the bike, the guitar with the wrong neck, the SUV bought for a road-trip life that never happened.
This is exactly the situation in any process that has to act before it has enough information to act well: the outcome doesn't arrive until after the decision, and the decision is the only way to produce it. You can gather more evidence beforehand, reviews, spec sheets, other people's regrets, but none of it substitutes for the trial, because the trial is testing your life against the object, and your life is the one variable nobody else's review can hold constant.
That's why "poor planning" is usually the wrong verdict on a closet full of abandoned purchases. Some regret really is process failure: panic-bought, hype-chased, a thing acquired to end a feeling rather than fill a need, something a five-minute pause would have caught. But most regret is a different animal. The buyer did the available diligence, made a reasonable call with the information on hand, and was still wrong, because the only test that would have settled it required already owning the thing. Filing that under "should have known better" blames a decision for not containing information that didn't exist yet.
The usual fixes (decide in advance, wait thirty days, buy once cry once) lower the rate at which you generate new data. They don't replace the need for it. Careful buyers still end up with a shelf of correct-on-paper purchases that turned out wrong in practice, because a spec sheet can't simulate a life. The only way to skip the graveyard entirely is to stop finding out what you like, which is a quieter loss than a bad purchase, and no cheaper.
So the size of the closet isn't a scorecard of how badly someone plans. It's closer to a record of how much someone has actually tried to find out what they want, run against a world that never lets you know in advance. Zero regretted purchases means one of two things: no money, or no attempt.
Regret is tuition. The closet is the transcript.