Life insurance company TAL commissioned research, including a nationally representative survey of 1035 Australian adults, to explore people’s attitudes to work and feelings of self-worth and regret. Of those respondents who work more than 40 hours a week, fewer than one in four regret the time they spend doing so. Of course, working 40 hours a week is not the norm. When you include everyone – full-time and part-time workers, unemployed and retired people, students, parents and other caregivers, and volunteers – the average time spent working is 16.6 hours. In this more general population, 13 per cent of people, or about one in eight, regret the time they spend working. Dr Ilan Dar-Nimrod, from the school of psychology at the University of Sydney, says people tend to regret what they don’t do, rather than what they do do. You won’t necessarily regret the time you spend at work, but you might regret the time you don’t spend doing other things.

Loading Nearly one in four people regret not spending more time with loved ones and 15 per cent regret not spending more time on the things that are important to them, the survey found. It’s become fashionable to bag the concept of work-life balance, but the truth is that very few of us can literally have it all. We all make decisions about priorities all the time, and there are trade-offs. Dar-Nimrod says the right mix is highly individual; to figure it out requires self-reflection and knowing how to interpret your own needs and desires. “A lot of us are having a hard time identifying what we truly want or sometimes we actually even avoid that process of trying to identify it,” he says. “Another problem would be once we are identifying what we want is that sometimes it's just tension between those different things. I might want that beautiful house and want that vacation in Europe and I want to spend 85 per cent of my waking hours with my loved ones but it's hard to put all those three elements together and create something sustainable, so we need to learn what kind of trade-offs fit us best.”

Of course, many of us are far from dreaming of beautiful houses and holidays to Europe, and have the far more modest goal of survival. A job is often just be a way to put a roof over your head and food on the table, rather than life work in the vein of a Picasso or Montessori. Pablo Picasso painted until 3am on the night he died. Credit:Pablo Picasso But Dar-Nimrod says we don’t tend to regret things that we’re forced to do. The struggle to survive can be difficult in other ways, but it’s less likely to induce regret. “Regret is somewhat of a luxury that one can have when one has a sense of having actual choice so in cases where people don't have that sense of choice, we find reduced regret,” he says. The study also suggests Australians with high self-value spend an average of 21 hours a week earning money, while those with low self-value spend 7.7 fewer hours a week.

Most of us know that someone’s pay packet does not define them as a human being, but as Dar-Nimrod says, it’s difficult to assign value to an abstract concept like “self” so people mentally revert to thinking about salary because it’s an easy benchmark. Loading This can explain why women can find their self-confidence knocked around by a prolonged spell as a stay-at-home mother, or new retirees often find themselves lacking a sense of purpose and direction. Low self-worth can affect your life in negative ways, causing persistent feelings of sadness, depression, anxiety, anger, shame or guilt, health authorities say. Besides the benchmark of pay, Dar-Nimrod says two main ways to derive self-worth are from a sense of competency and a sense of self-liking. So it helps to become good at things outside your job, and Dar-Nimrod says it can be a useful exercise to think about the value you would give to other people in your life and then try to apply the same standards to yourself.