How we paid 100 strangers over 60 to share their biggest regrets, for $25.71

# Why one open question instead of a survey

Regret is one of the best-studied feelings there is. Palliative-care nurse Bronnie Ware’s “top five regrets of the dying” became a book and a small cultural institution, and Morrison and Roese’s 2011 study of a representative sample of Americans, in Social Psychological and Personality Science, found regrets cluster around love, education, and work, in that order. A multiple-choice survey would mostly have confirmed the checkboxes we wrote from that research.

An open box is a different instrument. It surfaces what you would never think to list: the pilot’s license never earned, the road trip not taken, the friend never called. The catch has always been the reading, because a hundred free-text answers is a spreadsheet nobody opens twice. That is the part One Voicer removes: every answer is a voice, and the AI blends them into one answer that updates as new voices arrive.

Not rediscovering the joy of roller skating sooner.

One of the 99 voices

# Setting up the voicer

The One Voicer side took a few minutes: a voicer with the question, anonymous responses with an optional name field, no sign-in. Answering is tap the link, type, submit. For a rented audience that friction level matters; every extra step is a returned submission.

# Renting an audience on Prolific

Prolific is a research panel: a pool of vetted participants who take studies for pay. We picked it on the strength of the data-quality literature; Peer and colleagues’ 2022 comparison in Behavior Research Methods found Prolific was the only platform of five that delivered high data quality on every measure without extra filtering. One feature carries the integration: Prolific pays participants when they enter a completion code, and One Voicer’s completion message shows that code only after a voice is submitted. No answer, no code; every real answer, paid.

The screeners are where the meaning and the cost are decided. We asked for people over 60, because a question about life’s biggest regrets deserves answerers with a lot of life to look back on, and for English-first-language speakers anywhere rather than US residents only, which makes the pool larger, cheaper, and faster for a question with no geography.

Then the rate. We estimated the task at about a minute and priced it at 18 cents a response, an effective $10.80 an hour: above the $8 floor Prolific enforces, below the “at least $12” its guidance recommends and the $25 its setup screen suggested. Participants see the rate before accepting, and the study still filled in minutes. The receipt: $18.00 in rewards, $7.71 in fees, $25.71 all in. Call it 26 cents per lifetime of hindsight.

# The whole survey ran in half an hour

The chart at the top of this article is the fieldwork, complete: one spike between three and four in the afternoon. No fieldwork window, no waiting on a panel to cycle. We asked 100 people and 99 voices came back; one participant appears not to have finished submitting, a 99% return we will happily take. Watching the voices land live doubles as quality control, and ours were long, specific, and personal from the very first one.

My biggest regrets are moving from upstate New York to Florida in 1974… not having enough time with my children in their school years… not moving even closer to my children.

Kathryn, minutes after launch

# What 99 people regret

Here is how the one voice opened: “It seems many of us are looking back and wishing we’d made different choices, particularly around relationships and family. A significant number of us regret marrying too young or getting involved with the wrong partners… Many also wish they had prioritized spending more quality time with their loved ones, especially children and parents, lamenting that work often took precedence.” From there it moved through education and career paths not taken, risks not chased, and quieter currents of health, money, and children, wishing for more, or any.

Two things struck us. First, 99 rented strangers reproduced the published science almost exactly: relationships first, then education and work, the same ordering Morrison and Roese found. Second, and better, almost none of it reads as bitterness. Read together, the voices turn into instructions from people who have already run the experiment of a life: guard your time with the people you love, take the risk, make the call, trust your own voice. Hindsight is the one thing you cannot buy for yourself, and 99 people will apparently hand you theirs for 26 cents each.

I listened too much to others telling me what to do… not trusting my own inner voice.

One of the 99 voices

# Posting the answer where people could argue with it

A result you keep to yourself is half a result, so we posted the blended answer to r/selfimprovement; the thread is linked in the references. In its first 48 hours it drew 242K views, 436 upvotes at a 95.8% ratio, and 46 comments, from readers across the US, Canada, the UK, and beyond. Even accounted purely as marketing, a quarter of a million views of a question your product answered is a strange bargain. The real reason to share is better, though: the whole point of borrowed hindsight is that other people get to borrow it too, and the comments told us they did.

# A commenter wanted a clearer format, so we changed it live

One commenter wanted more clarity than a flowing paragraph gives. With a traditional survey that means an evening re-coding a spreadsheet. Here it took one sentence in One Voicer’s response criteria field: “Write the response as if it is a top ten list with the most common response being the lowest number.” The one voice re-blended itself into a ranked top ten, marrying too young at number one, neglected family time at two, while the question stayed live. From a reader’s complaint to a reformatted result took about a minute, and it is the part of this experiment no form-and-spreadsheet stack can follow.

I was a talented rock guitarist when I was younger and I regret not trying to make it big! I was too scared of criticism and tried to be too perfect.

One of the 99 voices