The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Fighting with yourself

2) Regret

Of all the characters we saw struggling with internal problems, I think Beta might have been the most interesting. He spent nearly the entire episode “listening” to Alpha’s head and stewing in a bar full of reminders of his life before the outbreak.

Initially, he reacted as he has before when reminded of his identity — violently — smashing a guitar (his guitar?) upon seeing the poster promoting his appearance, but, then, after “listening” to Alpha for a while, he started listening to a record of one of his live performances, drawing an “audience” of walkers. As Beta gazed out over his “audience”, it looked like he was…crying.

While I think Beta missed his old life, as I watched it, I wondered if he regretted rejecting it for so long, or, if he regretted the time he wasted with his addiction.

That got me thinking about just how much regret can weigh on you, and more importantly, how that can affect you in a zombie apocalypse.

Let’s face it, we all regret things. Sometimes, it’s out of guilt for something bad we’ve done, but, more often, as the saying goes, we regret the things we don’t do, pondering if we’d done X, instead of Y.

The problem is, even without being in a zombie apocalypse, such regrets do nothing to help you, in fact, I’m willing to bet that, given enough time doing it, they’re more likely to hurt you than anything else, as your regrets (Particularly about things you didn’t do before the outbreak) fester in your mind, and distract you from more important tasks.

Once the apocalypse starts, regretting things you can’t change or things that you didn’t do back when you could, is wasting precious time. You can’t live in the past, so, don’t let it haunt your present.