Ask an older person what they regret. It’s almost never “I should’ve worried more.”

What people regret late on is remarkably consistent, and it is almost never that they failed to worry enough or stay later at work. It tends to be the things unsaid, the people they lost touch with, the risks they talked themselves out of. That whole pattern is available to you now for the price of one conversation.

Ask somebody much older what they would do differently, and listen without arguing. Then take one line from the answer and apply it to a decision you are facing this month.