Taitz's chapter on regret identifies a specific and very common cognitive distortion: nostalgic fantasy. This is the tendency to compare your present life not to your actual past but to an idealised version of it — the relationship that, in memory, was perfect and full of possibility, the path not taken that would certainly have worked out. The comparison is always rigged, because the idealised past has no failures, no mundane days, no compromises — only the highlight of what might have been. No real present can compete with an imaginary past. The result is chronic dissatisfaction with a present that is actually better than the past being used as its benchmark. The antidote is deliberate accuracy: when you catch yourself in nostalgic fantasy, recall the whole truth of that time — not just the highlight, but the difficulty, the uncertainty, and the reasons things ended.