Nobody's last regret is that they didn't work more weekends
An Australian palliative nurse kept a private list. The second item on it should terrify anyone proud of their calendar.
Bronnie Ware spent years caring for patients in the last weeks of their lives and started writing down, almost as a private habit, what people said they wished they'd done differently. In 2009 she posted the pattern online; the post was read by roughly eight million people within a few years, which tells you something about how starved everyone is for an honest answer to the question before it's their turn to ask it.
The list has five items, and one of them is almost insultingly plain: I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Not a specific job, not a specific boss — the general fact of the working, the years spent optimizing for a version of success that showed up on nobody's deathbed as a comfort. Ware noted this came up constantly, cutting across income and profession, from men especially, who'd missed their children's youth and their partners' company for a promotion that felt urgent at the time and unmemorable in hindsight.
What's notable is what's absent from the list. Nobody wished they'd been more disciplined, more productive, more efficient with their hours. The regrets all run the other direction — toward courage, honesty, friendship, joy — the soft stuff that calendars don't reward and performance reviews don't measure.
The work will always feel urgent while you're inside it. That's not evidence it mattered.