Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?
If you could change anything about your past, what would it be?
I've never met someone that I care about the way I cared about her. Huge what if.
Eventually she hoped to elope. She also had a deadline for leaving the country, visa etc... I wasn't as sure as you sounded tho and decided even though things were great we had not been together long enough to get married and she shouldn't give up her family for me.
Two years after she got back they made her choose a husband from one of 3 from a matchmaker. She said she wasn't in love with the guy but she was doing her duty.
So what's my regret? Well there's a couple but the biggest one is that instead of embracing being different and who I was and where I came from, I instead tried to hide it as best I could. I avoided anything to do with my native culture or language because I think I was so hurt internally that someone who appeared to have feelings for me would put them aside for fear of their family's reaction. I even gave up my interests that I feared were too nerdy and contributed to my being "different", after all I am on hacker news so there's some nerd in me, right?
Ended up going off to college in a big city school where different was normal and got back to my roots and interests and this put me on a wonderful path that lead to great success early in my career, stronger relationships with my family and culture, and a much happier life. It feels good to embrace "you", even if some small-town folk may think it's "different".
My secondary regret is that I never reached back out to her to see if she still had similar feelings or maybe tried to get a relationship going on as more mature adults. I've thought about her a good bit but I think what I've realized is that it's not so much her that I'm interested in, it's that all I wanted was to be accepted by her and that maybe if I were to be accepted, I could prove to myself that I'm really not "different".
Queue ~6 years of polysubstance abuse, wasted money, and fake ass friends. Did everything under the sun I could get my hands on. I think the list of unique drugs I did was something like 40. I was high on at least something every day for years. Most days more than 1 thing.
I never got truly "hooked" on anything thankfully. I just loved being high. What I didn't realize was that the opportunity cost was enormous. Every second I was in my room fucked out of my gourd staring at the ceiling was a second that I wasn't out making friends. Being a normal person. It was a really solitary and lonesome existence, just retreating further and further into my own head each day. Additionally, being a "drug guy" just completely shuts the door to a whole strata of people : e.g. good luck meeting a woman that shares your Christian morals if you are a drug enthusiast.
Now I'm off the bullshit. Straightened my life out, graduated college, gainfully employed. Etc. But I feel that I've missed the boat on having a fulfilling social life. I don't really know how to meet people. And whenever I talk with people I can't help but feel like I'm some kind of alien.
I'm working on it. But it's so hard to know how to work on it. Especially now that I work from home, and live alone in a suburb.
Just keep putting yourself out there, focusing on what you do have, and taking it day by day friend.
Congratulations for putting that behind you. If you were raised with church as part of your life, you may actually have an advantage when it comes to developing friends at this point in your life. I've seen some strong atheists say that they envy the way churches can help one create strong friendships and community. That isn't to say it isn't still a lot of work on your part, but there may be a lot of opportunities if you can find a good church community to participate in.
I don't have such a drug story, but I do feel like an alien often. I tend to only be capable of socializing with people who deeply align with my goals and ambitions. Those being: calisthenics, software, fitness, coding, cooking, being organized, etc.
I don't give myself a hard time for seeking a 'strata' of people, etc.
Be selective. Find the people only you want. Be an alien.
I'm in a city so there are options, but figuring out the social world without booze is a lot.
Just be open, put yourself out there, be polite to everyone but respect your own boundaries, and don’t take it personally if things don’t pan out right away. A lot of my close relationships are ones that were background characters for a long time too , but randomly we were brought back together. There’s no template to life and it’s poison to compare yourself to others. Just start taking control of what you want your life to be like and I promise it is a skill like anything else, you just gotta practice even if you fall
I moved to a new city away from my family when I was 27 and that was when I finally pushed myself to start changing things as the loneliness really hit me. I started going to meetup events and work lunches with people. I started reading up on social skills and trying my hand at dating. Roughly 5 years since then I've actually done pretty well for myself, made some good friends, had some good experiences with dating, and I'm rather happy with how things have shaped out. I'm still kind of awkward socially but gotten more comfortable with putting myself out there anyway and found that a lot of people don't really mind.
I am of the opinion that people who have gone though this are more empathetic caring people
Could you recommend some of the resources you read to learn social skills? I'm currently fighting the same fight you did, and maybe it could help.
I suggest joining communities for topics that interest you, for starters. You're likely to meet some like minded people and make a few a friends. This happened for me every time I tried a new hobby.
I'd love to chat more if you're interested. You can find my email in my profile.
I met many friends through having season tickets for my local NHL team, met friends playing adult "beer league" hockey, met friends traveling for away games in different cities, and I even have friends internationally whom I've never met in person but still remain in contact with.
But nobody knows how to meet people, nobody has some magic playbook. You've got to press, and you've got to deal with rejections, because most people are too afraid.
That's just from memory. I know there's some ketamine and psilocybin derivatives I'm missing there. I also counted alcohol, psuedophedrine, ephedrine, nicotine, and caffeine.
The list of "designer" drugs is endless. There are hundreds out there and more discovered each day.
If you're interested in learning more about this sort of thing lookup Alexander Shulgin. He wrote some books documenting his experience as a chemist synthesizing novel psychedelics. Many of these have since seen mass production in china and distribution in the western world. For a while there you could just straight up buy most that shit from the internet - not even the dark net.
1. What was your favorite drug you ever tried?
2. What was your least favorite drugs you ever tried?
3. What was your best combination of substances?
4. Do you feel like any of your drug usage has affected your cognition in anyway?
5. Do you ever miss it?
I only ask these questions out of pure curiosity, and I do no intend to change behaviors with the information that you may provide -- as in, I am not going to try new substances depending on your answers. I personally use Cannabis, and I feel like I have definitely noticed both benefits and harm from it. There are no free lunches after all.
Anyway, as some random Internet stranger, I am proud of you, and I hope you are proud of yourself for how far you have come. It seems like you went to a version of Hell and came back, and that is not something many can say. I wish you the all best.
2) Plenty of real shitty ones. You eat the cotton out of a benzedrine inhaler and it gives you an amphetamine type high. constricts your blood vessels, makes you sweat bullets, and the taste and smell of it emanates from every inch of your body. Its awful. 3-FMA was awful as well. 0 euphoria or otherwise positive effects but was absolutely fucking wired for like 3 days. Hexen and other cathinone derivatives absolutely such. speedy high for 1 hour and then you feel like shit and redosing only helps like 50% so by the end of the day you're a shell of a person.
3) In general psychedelics + dissociatives was a favorite: Deschloroketamine + a synthetic tryptamine or phenthylamine. low dose benedryl and low dose cough syrup was crazy. Acid and cocaine was awesome, and one of the only experiences which I don't really regret at all. I don't wish, or feel the need, to replicate it though.
4) Yes, but not in the typical way people think - e.g. its not like I feel less intelligent or clearheaded. instead, the biggest effect is that I've basically hijacked my reward system. I suppose you could call it anhedonia, but not to a clinically significant degree. Additionally, I feel like I've made connections in my brain that were not previously there. Like sometimes seeing certain patterns or hearing certain music will briefly remind me of a feeling I had at some point while high. It's hard to explain, its not like a "flashback", but more like a traumatic stress response? its very uncomfortable, but its brief. Also my night vision is significantly worse.
5) No. When I think back to the type of shit I got up to all I feel is regret and disgust. I don't remember times that I was high fondly. And the thought of doing it again is repellent to me. A while back, a friend of mine got their hands on Ketamine, which I never got to try while I was in my hay day. I thought, what the hell, I'll cross it off the list. I did a dose of it and immediately regretted it. I just kept thinking "what the fuck is the point of this?" gave the rest of it away.
Just as a disclaimer - a lot of the shit I mentioned here are designer drugs. These have very little history of human consumption and as such are inherently very unsafe, because long term effects cannot be evaluated. I expect I will have some health complications later in life as a result. I cannot stress enough that doing this shit is a bad idea. I know you said you didn't plan to try anything, but to any other reader. Really. Stay away. Not worth it.
At each and every point in my life, I was working with the information I had at my disposal, each information having its own "weight" in my mind. Every mistake I've made has brought some information in my mind that wouldn't have been brought otherwise. Fantasies of "changing the past" are seductive, but ultimately pointless.
The only way I could justify having regrets, is reminding yourself of some mistake that should not be repeated in the future. Alas, most regrets I see written by other people are things that will not repeat, e.g. spending your youth doing <X> instead of <Y>, not talking to your <Z> enough, not investing in <W> before its price went rockets... There's just no point.
What's going on in your brain is a lot more complicated than this, but I think it's still a meaningful concept?
However, if, at some point, both advisors decided to leave and never come back, and you started thinking about how one of them always gave you wrong advice, and regretting listening to him, then that regret is pointless.
In the end, we must imagine Sisyphus—the final mirror—happy.
I don't believe in the past. It's much the same if you think about it.
>Fantasies of "changing the past" are seductive, but ultimately pointless.
If you were to jump in a tardis and were to go to the event that you want to change. 100% of the time you will discover the entire thing was a story in your mind. Something you didn't understand at the time and if you were to 'fix' it. You would end up only harming yourself of today.
>The only way I could justify having regrets, is reminding yourself of some mistake that should not be repeated in the future. Alas, most regrets I see written by other people are things that will not repeat, e.g. spending your youth doing <X> instead of <Y>, not talking to your <Z> enough, not investing in <W> before its price went rockets... There's just no point.
Regrets of current day are legitimate. Perhaps it's substance abuse, social media. You know in your mind these things are not good. Nobody brags about these things. You know if you were to quit things would be better, but you have current day regrets of not doing so.
Furthermore, perhaps you're a superhuman with no faults. You can also have regrets having not done more. PErhaps you could have started that business or try to get that book published.
Most people I think define regret more abstractly: back in time, <X> was a _mistake_, it shouldn't have happened, _I_ shouldn't have done it that way and consequences came from it either for myself or those I love.
It seems from your response that you're ok with admitting your mistakes which - by the above definition - sounds like you feel regret.
Time travel doesn't exist, ergo regret shouldn't exist. I think what op is saying is they don't ruminate on it and I agree, nobody should. unless you have an established pattern, then rumination is self invoked torture.
This. You play the hand you're dealt — and the hand you're dealt includes your "wiring" (brain anatomy, brain chemistry, etc.) and your "programming" (past experiences, etc.). And you try to learn what you can.
(Warning — tangent:) It all contributes to what I've come to think of as The Great Project [0] of helping to build a universe — where our Conway Game of Life moves (or our Boyd OODA Loop moves, if you prefer) are something like the following:
1. Aspire: Imagine some way in which the world could and should be different than (our mental model of) what it currently is.
2. Act — and while doing so: (A) remain open to new evidence and insights; and (B) for purely pragmatic reasons, seek the best for others as we do for ourselves (in part, because to a certain extent we all operate behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance).
3. Learn: Update the mental model of what the world is, and also the mental model of what the world "should" be.
4. Repeat.
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.com/2006/06/metanarratives_...
Since high school I wanted a spouse and kids (obviously I imagined a good relationship and good kids)
Now I'm in my late 50s and it's not going to happen. I was always hopeful today I'm going to meet someone. That hope has mostly disappeared.
I regret not trying harder in various ways.
However, the perspective I've explained keeps me from dwelling on it for too long. What's done is done, I did the only thing I could do with the information that was available. There is no point in punishing myself (unless it's to remind myself of the lesson). That's what I meant by not "believing" in regret.
That perspective often helps me get out of the self-pitying mood.
As are ones about making an unlikely future come to be. When I find myself sidetracked by those thoughts I now say to myself "Get out of fantasy land where unicorns fart rainbows" and it seems to stop.
Wisdom is gained from making bad decisions.
The thing is, every choice I've made, even "the wrong ones", have put me in a better position overall. Perhaps I could be richer, but I don't really care about that. Maybe I just view everything in a positive light and ignore all the good things that could have been, who knows.
A regret is a mistake that you don’t want to make in the future only it’s projected into the past. “I regret having done that because if I went back to the past, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done that”
You’re also inviting other people not to regret their choices even when those decisions negatively affect you.
After he had been on a particularly long bender, which finally caused my mother to divorce him, me and him had a verbal fight where I decided I would not have more to do with him until he would seek the help we knew he needed (and we had been offering him for so long).
I'll add that he was a moody drunk, never abusive and when not drunk he was the sweetest person.
Some months later he fell badly while drunk, and hit his head. The resulting internal bleeding caused damage to his prefrontal cortex, which resulted in personality changes and loss of inhibition.
Within the year he had a heart attack, alone in his apartment, having ravaged his body with the lifestyle he lived.
I wish I had been less stubborn, more understanding, and would have helped him get through his illness at the time. But I was only in my early 20s at the time, with much left to learn.
Condolences on your loss.
BTW, I realize "falling off the wagon" means going on a bender, but shouldn't it really be the other way around? I mean, if you go on a bender, that's like getting on the wagon. I always picture this wagon with everyone drinking in the wagon. Because no one who drinking's drinking wants to walk. Just one of those things that's always bugged me.
My dad was also an episodic alcoholic. He'd go months without any issues, then disappear for three days on a binge. He'd drink such a massive amount of alcohol he'd have to go onto a IV drip.
My 16 year old self became so disgusted by him I refused to tell him I loved him and shunned him. We tried to give him the "tough love" we thought he needed so that he would "hit bottom" and then take some control back. It didn't work, and he ended up dying alone in a hotel room.
I now see that he needed more love and support instead of tough love and isolation. I wish I had been more patient, understanding, and supportive.
1. Doing a job as a model when I was very young (17) in which I was sexually abused.
2. Not going to university
After first, I got totally lost and torture myself. A lot. I didn't put priorities in order nor seek for help. I wasted a lot of time doing shitty jobs for having some money, having terrible relationships and doing sports heavily to keep me distracted until one day I decided it was enough and did two HNCs related with computer science (which is something I was always passionate about). I cannot complain about the jobs I've had nor the amount of money I earn right now but I'm 33 years old and I if I could change anything, would be definitely those two points. The first was not by choice, but I should have been more cautious.
PD: Holy fuck. I think is the first time I feel brave enough for mention this "out loud" to someone.
Best wishes!!
Edit: On re-reading what I wrote, it might seem that I'm saying you don't have the right to feel regret. Not my intention, sorry if it reads that way. It feels, though, that you shouldn't have to feel regret for living a normal life with normal decisions.
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.
Life likely hasn't been perfect for almost anyone, but would you rather die right now (with likely unfinished desires, wishes and more regrets) or would you try to make the best use of what you have?
(It may be a bit difficult to fully live as per the quote even if you're already familiar with stoicism - it's quite hard for me too - but something that sometimes helps me is to literally visualize yourself dead as of now.
Maybe a stroke.
Would you be happy?
If not, you should do something about it.)
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
My heart tends toward the gutter. Not complaining though.
Jobs was good at echoing the wisdom of people smarter than him, but not so great at using those principles to fix his own life.
This applies to most people.
The thing with alcohol (and most psychoactive drugs) is it literally changes the brain - and by that the person. The young person that says: "I would never let it get this far!" is basically right when it says that. But prolonged use of the drug changes that person. And that new person definitely will let it get this far, because it sees new justifications for doing so.
I know from experience unfortunately.
I don't think sober Alan Watts would approve of severe alcoholism as something 'no better or worse' than any other activity to spend your day. But I can clearly see a drinking Alan Watts run circles around anybody arguing the same thing.
One quote by Konosuke Matsushita that I've heard (which I think he quoted from a Japanese one) :
The light is darkest underneath the lighthouse.
I do love this quote of course (and all things Aurelius).
Much of what modern Stoics put forth appears to be an excuse to dissociate from emotional pain, not cope with unchangeable fate or hardship.
I think I need to add that I don't mean to judge for this. I've been in similar places too. It can be a fine line with many shades of gray between "dissocation" and "coping". Some of it may be useful to somebody. Falling into it as a trap is very human.
Thanks to GP, too. That’s a lovely quote.
Good discussion of this at https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/oir-media-hourly-files-r2...
https://www.houseofantiquehardware.com/shop-by-type/vintage-...
At $15 for a switch vs $1, those things start to add up.
In some poorer places it gets so bad the fire department will basically "wink wink" tell you how to burn your house down.
Other areas have a much nicer version which is "remain visually similar" - basically you can't change how the house looks from the street but you can do whatever you want/need inside.
Could you AirBnB it?
"everyone loses 10 years to something, somewhere along the line"
Everyone has a tendency to evaluate the past with today's knowledge and experience. That's a fallacy. You didn't so much "lose" 10 years, it just took 10 years to come to an understanding about a meaningful part of your life. And maybe you really needed all that time to arrive there.
In my book, regret means you've learned something about your past but you're still trying to change the past. Which you can't. What matters is how you're going to leverage your wisdom going forward in a meaningful way.
Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone makes a few big mistakes.
The key is not to beat yourself up over it. Learn from the mistake and do better in the future.
It's easy to look back on 10 wasted years and think you failed, you blew your one chance at life. But if you come to realize that looking back on 10 wasted years is actually a common human struggle, it can help you reframe your regret as just another one of the trials of being a limited, mortal human and not take it so personally as your own failing.
Thanks for sharing!
I used to listen to that several times a year to motivate myself to do more and not let the months and years pass me by.
Only a few days after Christmas, my sister, who was 8 months pregnant, died very suddenly and with no warning.
I missed my last chance to see her alive, and I wound up spending a month staying with my parents anyway immediately after that, trying to help them manage.
With the information I had when I made the decision, I still think it was the right one, and I'm reasonably sure I would make it again with the same amount of information.
But I'll always wish I had made it differently anyway.
We never know the storms we are about to sail into.
I'm sorry for your loss.
I honestly haven't forgiven my dad for my not being there, though, even though my choice was my own. Perhaps if he had changed at all since then, it would be easier to feel differently.
I've recently heard forgiveness defined as "letting go of all hope for a better past," though, and I might be able to get to forgiving him by that path, for my own sake, not for his.
My biggest regret is that I allowed her to order me to go to the nearest university and continue to live with her. She had drained me of all confidence and was hostile to signs of me being an independent adult.
Getting away from her years earlier would have been much better for me.
Many of your thought patterns are tainted, and healing is a very long and painful process. But being (made) aware of the extent of the damage is the first and necessary step to a healthier self.
Now I’m in my 30s with next to no social life and the realization that I’ve wasted away my time and whatever little talent I have.
There’s a “regret” folder sitting in my Google Drive with two half-finished books and at least half a dozen songs I was too chickenshit to finish and release out in the wild.
Always wonder how things might have turned out if I had more supportive parents (financially, emotionally) and if I had taken a few different relationship decisions.
I reckon it’s still not too late, but something tells me that it is…
Difficult to tell from your comment but if you did bring yourself some financial stability, it was unlikely time wasted.
If you want to give more time to developing yourself as a writer or musician or artist, there's time. You can shift gears, you just have to understand the tradeoffs because just like neglecting social life and artistic development led to those parts of yourself being underdeveloped, so will shifting gears in your thirties in regards to your career.
If you don't throw yourself full-bore into those new pursuits, you can still pick them up as hobbies, choose modest projects, and split the difference.
To be sure, the short stories and such I wrote in my early 20's are embarrassing to me now.
Pynchon was a young published writer when he wrote the story "Entropy" — I believe it was later embarrassing to him (and well it should be).
Since I was raised by a single mother (working as a secretary) I took financial responsibility very seriously — such that, while I had an artistic bent, I did not waste my money paying for college to pursue a degree as impractical as art. I don't think though that, like you, that I have had many second thoughts about the path I took. I know I would have done the same thing given another chance.
On the other hand I have since raised three kids and encouraged all of them in creative expression. I made it clear as they grew up that college was going to be a free ride for them — they should pursue whatever degree that speaks to them. (My first daughter majored in Fine Art — is busy getting her tattoo license).
I kind of feel like I got a second chance through them. Or a chance to see what-could-have-been. They're fortunate. I and perhaps you were not.
My regret is watching so much crap on cable TV before starting a family (cut the cord when the first was born, never looked back). Got a lot of free time back to pursue more artistic interests. :-)
Sounds like you are me. I worked tons, paid off my house. Got my retirement fund way up. Lots went well; but obviously came at a cost of other things.
>There’s a “regret” folder sitting in my Google Drive with two half-finished books and at least half a dozen songs I was too chickenshit to finish and release out in the wild.
Andy Weir was in his 40s when he finished his 3rd book and managed to get it published. Now he's a contemporary scifi leader.
Personally managed to finish writing 3 books but I'm too chickenshit to actually try to get them published. I'm a tech, not a writer and I'm not expecting they are any good.
>I reckon it’s still not too late, but something tells me that it is…
Nope, not at all too late. You have decades to get back to those.
Just a nice example that it ain't too late.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6495956-for-what-it-s-worth...
In their 30s, most average people are busy with kids and work and have little time to socialize.
But eventually they will reunite with their lifelong friends and make videos like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g3OT7w1u5s (I have no affiliation with those people)
Whatever your goal is, try to stop having 0% days.
You don't need to have 100% days, Just avoid having 0% days.
In a few months or a year you'll be surprised at the progress you've made.
Had a realization about small steps making a huge difference a few days ago.
It was so profound to me that I've written a short essay about it.
Worst mistake of my fucking life. Did me no good anyway, as all of peers who had a head on them and took more traditional paths ended up reaching where I was or better within a few years.
I did this too, to avoid addressing being gay. At times in my life I've regretted working so much, but in my late 50's I developed some health problems because of a goofed-up immune system (CVID). Now, I'm glad I was able to retire at 45 because I was a workaholic in my younger days. I still enjoy my life, but if I had to work full time, it would be pretty miserable and I'd probably have to go on disability.
One thing I try to keep in mind about regrets: when looking back, people always assume that if they had made a different decision, the outcome would have been better. But you don't actually know that: things could have turned out worse.
My parents were not very well off and I had to work a couple of jobs to put myself through higher education, so I think this is where that came from. The ironic thing was that in that part of my life I had basically no responsibility so could have actually lived my life and don't whatever I wanted, I just didn't have much money.
Now I'm in my 30s, have a family, and have a ton of responsibilities. I'm doing somewhat well financially (money in > money out), but now have no free time to actually do anything, and not enough savings to take an extended break from working.
Would some things have gone better if I'd done that with my 20's instead of my 30's? Undoubtedly. At the same time, other things made it much easier in my 30's -- for an obvious example, having money already saved up freed me from having to work some menial job to support myself during those years.
It's definitely not too late.
When Günter Grass (famous German author) was asked for advice to young writers he said something like: "Don't try to become a writer just because you want to be one. And if you absolutely must do it, don't study languages. Pick a career that forces you into contact with lots of people. A waiter in a restaurant or something. If young people start to write without knowing the world, they risk writing about their own belly button too soon." (Writing about your belly button being an expression for writing about your own selfish viewpoints and insecurities)
I'm in my mid thirties and published my first short stories last year. I'm very pleased with the result and I'm glad I didn't publish my earlier stuff. I was terribly opinionated while trying to sound enlightened and only out to prove something to myself and the world. Now I have the maturity to be more expressive and it shows in the feedback I get. (Always express, never impress they say.)
Now I'm putting off my first novel to learn about computers, because I feel like having a good job is a more pressing issue right now than artistic expression.
And I'm absolutely positive that it won't be too late for my novel when I'm 40.
The second one was the worst. I've since observed that behaviour in other couples, mostly with the men, but almost as frequently with the women that make the partner's feeling of self-worth completely revolve around them.
It's toxic, left me with severe depression that is still an issue today. There is a certain type of internal self-talk that becomes a self-reinforcing mania and starts with the simplest triggers and ends up with a feeling of loathing that can happen any time. It's dangerous and can lead to thoughts of suicide. This was in my early 30s, and I'm now in my late 50s and I can't believe I still have these things to deal with.
Best advice I can think of is a quote from William Burroughs:
"If, after being in the presence of a certain person, you feel like you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person."
I've been there; in the end, I had to take a job in another country --literally emigrate-- to properly make the break that my head was screaming for, but was so very difficult to make happen at the time within the confines of the relationship.
I'm lucky that I don't have the long-term damage that you have, but it took years to heal, I think - and even now, there are some traits in my behaviour that are far from ideal and which I think trace back to that relationship. (For example, I've developed a disproportionately strong response to any behaviour from others that starts to even slightly near to 'controlling'. This obviously isn't ideal when mostly people aren't like that.) I think of this as emotional scar-tissue; I need to work out how to start breaking it down.
I also had friends bring up the emotional part (nobody ever saw anything physical) but your mind gets pretty twisted when you're in a relationship like that. It's really hard to see it through an objective lens until you're already on your way out, or even far removed.
I don't know your specific circumstances but I'm confident you will continue to get better.
The classic symptoms are alienating you from your friends and family. Negging or putting you down... even subtle jabs. They make arguments personal as an attack on your character and identity or suggest you are attacking their character. Deep down it is all about control and fear. Usually this person will have more narcissistic traits, see everything as a reflection of them and their needs. You are just a tool to meet their needs rather than an individual human.
For folks who have been in traumatic relationships and need help healing I would recommend therapy with a trauma therapist (something like EMDR).
My old man is in for stage 4 cancer and it gets harder to ask him things. Every little tidbit of info he gave me over the years I cherish greatly, but I often times (read: nearly always) forget the context or nuance of the statement, meaning that, of the thousands of moments I’ve had with him, only a select few are ones that provide me any insight into who he is/was and/or advice for my life. The rest are just passing thoughts that make me think “damn my dad was cool”, which is good in its own regard, but certainly not the same.
I hope you and your dad are both doing well.
They boil down to advice like being grateful for what you have, looking back and being proud at what you’ve accomplished, valuing the people in your life especially those that take time to help you, and realizing how lucky you are and at the same time encouraging working to put yourself in positions where you make your own luck.
They seem to come at the right time, after I have a phone conversation when I tell him I’ve failed at something or am frustrated with someone.
It’s less about him and more about me but it helps me remember the kind of man he was, one of the greats.
Either way, sorry to hear about his condition.
My dad died earlier this year from prostate cancer. I wish deeply that I had spent more time with him, listened more closely to him. I lay awake every night thinking about lost opportunities I had during my life, moments when I chose to do anything other than just hang out with him.
You have a hard road ahead, I hope you have a support network filled with people who love you. I am a loner with no support network outside of my family and it has been fucking hard.
I was with my Dad in his final hours, but it wasn't until after he'd passed that it occurred to me to thank him, and it still upsets me 3 years later.
While I've moved on from losing the best years of my life (you're only young and innocent once) I overcompensated for a long time, and still sometimes to this day, by trying to do everything people invite me to do. Paradoxically this made my situation worse because more...stable people have a lot of people-oriented things they like to do and I approach all these things expecting to not keeping to do them. For example, going to the bar or clubs or whatever. These however lead to more regrets, like drinking too much when I was young and not taking better care of my health (thankfully nothing serious happened).
Now, the advantage of getting older is I can look back on this wide body of experience and use it to make calls on things. I know what I like to do. I know that I am not a very social person. Instead of trying to be a caricature of what I imagine a normal person is like I just work with what I have. It's been a long multi-decade process to get here but I am better.
In the song, the young folks waste/enjoy their time when they are young. You spent your time working. In the song they spent their time laying in the sun and staying home to watch the rain. Actually it seems like a pleasant youth, but then they later they regret it. I guess they had hustle culture in the UK in the 70s too.
I made good money in a terrible spot for 2 years. Dropped to 145 pounds or so at 5’7” (now 165 abd healthy). Broken emotionally and in spirit. The worst part? Those closest to me kept insisting I was being off base and Jeff wasn’t really that bad. Oh and don’t quit until you have the next job lined up, which even with 2 applications a week was useless at the time.
All of them were just afraid of instability or that I wouldn’t find work. Maybe at the time they were right. I’m also glad to share the following which I probably couldn’t have done without that awful experience…
In 2022 I discovered my role is getting massive raises, promotions, and work-life balance because of the stress that comes with deadline driven sales processes. Within 5 months I saw a dream job on paper be a bush-league cult pressure cooker. Also they were underpaying market rate by $10-15,000 in salary.
I spoke up about an issue and got Terminated for non job performance reasons. After 5 months there I just updated my resume and leave their name off because Momma told me if you don’t have anything nice to say…and I’m the job hunt in Fall 2022 it doesn’t matter. People are asking “when can you start?” more seriously than “why are you looking now?” because it’s obvious - the market is hot and six-figure gigs are falling out of the sky with signing bonuses for the first time ever.
So, as unsettling and not-their-comfort-level this time has been to them, for me it has been therapeutic and inspiring. I’m a finalist in 3 different firms, 2 are promotions, all pay $15,000 - $20,000 more in base salary so I can keep up with inflation, and hybrid office presence versus butt in chair for a Boomer’s sense of control.
Yea it’s a little over a month but the future is blindingly bright after all that suffering along the way. Yes I love the people who are bothered by this different approach, but it’s my goddamn life and I listened to them last time and it was shit so they can either get with reality or shut up and manage their own lives and leave mine alone.
They keep telling me to buy Bitcoin, I keep buying beers instead...
Life is a blind let's play. It's more fun to watch exactly because you don't know what's going to happen. Having the ability to play it again would destroy consequence, and thus meaning, to one's actions.
Spending extraordinary amounts of time thinking about the past got me literally nowhere. When I realized this, practically every problem in my life started unwinding and I found friends, love, passion, work, and peace.
It’s almost like being able to walk through walls in Doom (clipping life) - very powerful and a lot of people look on and wonder “how do you do that?” because I am a genuinely happy guy.
That said, it’s hard not to regret getting a real band together while my voice was still there.
this might say something deep about the interative process of software development. perhaps we should only get one try.
> After a chance encounter with an extraordinary ninety-year-old woman, renowned gerontologist Karl Pillemer began to wonder what older people know about life that the rest of us don't.
> His quest led him to interview more than one thousand Americans over the age of sixty-five to seek their counsel on all the big issues- children, marriage, money, career, aging. Their moving stories and uncompromisingly honest answers often surprised him. And he found that he consistently heard advice that pointed to these thirty lessons for living. Here he weaves their personal recollections of difficulties overcome and lives well lived into a timeless book filled with the hard-won advice these older Americans wish someone had given them when they were young.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11376196-30-lessons-for-...
I don't know. I used to think that the wisdom of old people was something to aspire to. I come from a place in the world where family ties are very important and we're all very close together, and for the past decade I've been having a lot of trouble with my family's influence on me.
Their insistent advice comes from a good place but belongs to a world that doesn't exist anymore or a world that I don't care for; their advice throughout my life made me less assertive and more submissive in the face of adversity, it ended up having me stay put and not take any chances in life, it ended up destroying a happy 10+ year relationship and just yesterday they started giving me advice again on how I should find a "stupid fat woman" (yes, these are the words) so she can "bare children and not give you headaches".
So, in my 3rd decade on this planet, I have come to fear the advice of old, and to cringe whenever I get these important life lessons. It took a very big toll on me, to shy away from them, and to actually start being myself, and my quality of life improved dramatically, but even now they still push and prod and try to 'advise' me.
I hope I won't end up on my death bed, regretting not following their advice, but for now, I'd rather not regret the present.
* The 50/50 Fallacy: this notion is self-explanatory. No marriage is a 50-50 balance of energy. Contribution levels will vary across situations and over time. If you expect a 50/50 situation, you’re likely really expecting something more along the lines of an 80/20 exchange in your favor, as in you wish your spouse would do 80% of the lifting. Check yourself, and realize there should be zero competition involved in relationship contribution.
* No one— not a single person out of a thousand— said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want.
* I uncovered one underlying principle behind their emphasis on interpersonal skills: maintaining a healthy humility.
* Isolated work is an illusion to be avoided. Your job can be autonomous and flexible AND be connected to many people and environments.
* What if out of the enormous muddle of child-rearing advice there was a “magic bullet”? What if there was one course of action you could take that would create loving relationships with your children, serve as an early warning system for problems they are having, and lead to a lifelong bond with them? According to the experts, there is: spend more time with your children. And if necessary, sacrifice to do it.
* This extra time spent with children should be interactive. Time spent with children is not simply being in the same room with them or just keeping an eye on them. You want to be engaged in their experience as often as reasonably possible.
* No one has perfect children. They all admit it: their kids had at least some difficulty, a flaw, a period of unhappiness, a major wrong turn. The reassuring thing is that most of their kids turned out pretty well nevertheless. The message is clear: abandon all thoughts of raising the “perfect child” or being the perfect parent, and do it as early as possible.
* By making healthy lifestyle decisions as early as possible, you can to some degree control whether you spend the last decades of your life in healthy productivity and contentment or in a downward spiral of physical misery.
* ALWAYS reach out. You do not want to become isolated.
* Be honest above all. If you’re honest with all the people around you, no matter what happens, you can look at yourself in the mirror in the morning and say, “I haven’t done anything wrong.” In other words, you’ve made the right decision if you’re honest.
* One particular virtue was mentioned over and over again – honesty. Just be respectfully honest. If you present the facts as necessary – no more, no less – then you never have to be nervous. The facts are what they are. Withholding or distorting relevant facts when interacting with others generates anxiety and discomfort.
* Don’t worry so much. There is not enough time in our lives to trade off the gold of our existence for the dust of what-ifs or what-if-nots.
* Once people reach a certain age (70s and beyond), it’s almost a certainty that they have experienced significant loss and significant joy. The elders have become experts in walking a balance between accepting loss and maintaining an awareness of life’s pleasures. The elders overwhelmingly believe that each of us can choose to be happier and that we can do so in the face of the painful events that inevitably accompany the process of living.
* They see a distinct difference between worry and conscious, rational planning that greatly reduces worry.
More at:
* https://versatilebeing.com/2018/01/19/book-notes-30-lessons-...
Did your advice come from one person, a dozen, or a thousand? Because the book is the distillation of a thousand: the common threads from all sorts of people from all walks of life.
Reading the book costs nothing except some time (and no money if you use a library like I did).
But college gave me a different view on this. I went to a small university, where some professors made a real effort to mentor students - not only to make them better academics, but better people too. These professors were people I really looked up to.
I think they empathized more with students, recognizing that while they did have advice to give, context matters - some may be relevant nowadays, some may not. They also were quite analytical; they'd only truly believe some advice they gave if they'd spent lots of time critiquing, testing, and thinking about it.
I guess I mention all this to say: respect for someone's advice must be earned. It sounds like your family did not earn this, so IMO you have the right idea.
I'm sure it's great for normies but my kids are mentally disabled and being their dad is grief and heartache without end. I have no close family to share any of it with - the little family I grew up with are all dead and I am looking forward to my own death.
I hope that one day genetic research will advance to a point where 23andme et al can help future young couples avoid these kind of outcomes.
I went on a medication with a side effect of anger. I was told that at the beginning, I was told that there were other drugs I could use instead. I dismissed the concern, I'd be fine.
I got cocky. I got complacent. I convinced myself that the company needed me and would never dare replace me. I started to get a really bad attitude - openly sneered at projects that I didn't think could succeeded. I was probably right but I didn't help anyone by my griping.
I lost the job. Technically I was 'laid off' but it was that or simply get fired. I lost friends with my unpleasant attitude. I made statements that made me cringe with embarrassment now.
I'm doing fine currently, and am on a new medication. I'm making less though that I would have at my old job, and if I'd stayed there I'd be a lot less worried about my future. They held on to experienced engineers and for some people it was their last job before retiring.
I could blame the medicine entirely, but the truth is I'm still an arrogant asshole and I still fall into the trap of believing I'm irreplaceable and can get away with whatever I want.
I wish I'd changed medications. I wish that I'd listen to people who tried to help, who told me that there were teams that didn't want to work with me. I'd be in a lot better place.
Some of things I said and did when I was writing PHP shitcode at 24 make me want to crawl inside my couch. I'd like to think I've mellowed out a lot, but I think everyone is susceptible to falling into this trap, especially when they're highly compensated and well respected.
I've recently taken to adopting an "antiquity mindset." Instead of imagining a piece of information as the pinnacle of knowledge in our current context, I remind myself that in 10 (or 100, or 1000) years, folks are going to look back at these ideas with a red pen marking everything we were mistaken about.
Stay humble in what you "know" - most of what humanity will discover is in the future.
Thing was, the actual effect made my SO go nutters for about a year. Because, again, my SO wasn't supposed to take the drug for the effects, but for the side effects.
When my SO, drug free and many years later, finally told this to a therapist, the therapist was aghast that my SO wasn't given therapy to help manage the actual effects too.
It seems so blindingly obvious that if you take drugs that effect your mind that you should also get therapy to monitor that effect. But it wasn't to us for some insane reason.
So, dear HN reader, take these stories to heart:
If you take mind altering drugs, get a therapist for the entire time that you are on that drug.
And I made 'choices' (are adolescents truly making choices?) in my personal relationships and actions at the time that I think were selfish and at times unethical that I wish I could go back and change.
Amazing that we let these years be such a critical fulcrum for individual's lives even though most adolescents are not at all ready to make the important decisions and sacrifices.
I am a parent of two teens now. It's hard.
Unplugged the drive and haven't touched it since but I'm not holding my hopes up.
Life does go on.
Like mentioned in other comment, I'd def shell out a portion of the money to recover the rest but not sure where to start. Given the amount I'm hesitant to do any further operations myself with the drive (Samsung evo SSD) plugged in.
What a lot of people don't know about ADHD is that with it comes a likelihood of a delay in emotional maturity that leads to behavior that's not age appropriate. When looking back at my life, I can identify several times where I was behaving in a way that might have been expected of a child a few years younger than I was but wasn't appropriate for my actual age at the time. This effectively meant losing out on social opportunities, friendships, and romantic relationships. Most of my problems in life stem from this issue.
A mild example of said behavior is a time where I threw a fit in front of my girlfriend because my parents asked me to take out the garbage for them. I was living with my parents at the time and really didn't have many chores, so asking me to take out the garbage wasn't a big ask. But at the time I felt like they shouldn't have been wasting my time with that while I had my girlfriend over. Kids sometimes act out, yes, but I was 18 years old. That's even idiotic behavior for a 16 or 17 year old.
More extreme examples are the times I made inappropriate jokes or spoke my mind out loud without considering why other people wouldn't appreciate hearing them. I was also very judgmental when I was younger and for some reason thought the world ought to hear how judgmental I was, and I ended up losing some friends and romantic interests over that attitude.
It's possible there was nothing I could have done about it, so I struggle to actually regret it. What might have helped me was having an older brother or adult who could identify my behavior pattern, rather than dismiss it, and get me knock it off.
In the end the company screwed my over. But I have a better job now so it worked out ok.
Of course, it wasn't. I've been out over a year now and getting into a position to be able to walk away financially and then doing it was one of the best decisions.
I'm hoping the lessons I've learned balance out the psychological damage I took pushing through burnout for three years.
This lead me down a path I now regret. All my friends were other musicians. All we wanted to do was smoke weed, play music, and party. Sure, I had lots of fun along the way, but once I got old enough to actually experience the life of a touring musician I had to accept that it wasn't for me. I wasn't happy with the life style. Turns out, I'm actually happier working hard and living a "normal" life.
Luckily, I was able to go to college and get a pretty good job, but I feel like I will never meet my true potential. I spent so many years taking the easy path that I now struggle with mediocrity. All because my 8-year-old brain made a decision that it had no business making.
If I could go back in time, I'd focus on going to college straight out of high school and developing myself as much as possible.
Yes, there was Bitcoin, however there are always millions of investment opportunities that may or may not pan out. Most don't.
I'd say just throw in some pocket change in places where you can afford to lose. You never know as the downside is nearly 0, the upside is in millions.
I did find a fractional BC on a thumbnail drive in an EOL software wallet for which I had long ago forgotten the password. So that could have happened too.
In hindsight...
If I had plugged that machine in, I would have probably retired by now. A few months of mining back then was enough to have life changing amount of BTC today.
I console myself in the knowledge that I'd never have kept the coins long enough for the dream to play out.
"If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will also regret it; whether you laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. [...] This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom."
And later:
"Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility. Pleasure disappoints, not possibility."
I do note that you didn't actually say what your choice was, and whether you regret it.
If memory serves, it's not in any of the dialogues that survive; but was anciently attributed to him.
- And Indian Saying.
This provided me with moral license from an expert (and indirectly from my parents, who had to sign the permission form to attend the lecture). One thing led to another, and it undoubtedly resulted in addiction; the endorphins and oxytocin produced by the human body and released during orgasm are worse than heroin. Bad habits form easily, and it's scary when you can't stop doing something that you believed would be just an experiment at age ten. The shame / guilt was hell.
If I could change anything anything about my past it would be to erase the immersion into that addiction at such an early, formative age. All other attachments of spirit have been easy to deal with - this one has not.
Many factors have conspired to keep things this way:
- The only prerequisite to becoming addicted is having a body that is intact.
- There is practically nothing to prevent a curious teenager from masturbating at a young age, and the current literature regards this as normal, despite the fact that it can lead to addiction if it's not addressed. But teenagers are not about to let something that embarrassing be addressed by their family, especially for one as reticent as I was.
- Because the addiction is behavioral there is no physical substance to seek out and no seedy culture to involve oneself in, so there's no exposure that could lead to outside forces wanting to change you. You can obtain a limitless amount of porn anywhere for free and nobody would ever know.
- The physical consequences of using are mostly fatigue the next day, which can be mistaken as the result of anything. Mentioning sexual topics is taboo in comparison to admitting you are alcoholic, so nobody is going to guess correctly and intervene based on your appearance. It's an invisible addiction.
- When it's to the point that people online question if addiction to masturbation is even a thing, or if it's a puritanical argument in opposition to sexual freedom, it greatly diminishes the stances of people who actually have the condition and can't control themselves. Many are trying to decrease the shame around sexual things while the people that can't help themselves are left behind adding those movements to an ever-growing list of rationalizations.
- Being addicted to masturbating and/or porn is not as severe as being addicted to hard drugs or even alcohol. It gives you a sense that this is the "right" addiction to have if you're going to have an addiction at all, and makes quitting all but hopeless once it's taken hold.
- Admitting to this publicly opens yourself up to ridicule with the way the culture is set up. It's unlikely many would react positively to jokes about heroin users or binging alcoholics. Sexual humor on the other hand is practically embedded into every sitcom and countless memes and dick jokes. Addiction to masturbation is never going to be taken as seriously or at as large a scale as most other addictions.
The only good part is that the addiction is manageable for the most part and my lack of sociality has prevented me from going as far as casual sex. But I'm starting to have erectile dysfunction and a loss of satisfaction from physical overuse.
A part of me thinks that the way masturbation is meant to be a totally private activity closed off all routes for anyone to help me from a young age. It makes me wonder if trying to avoid all addictions would have been a hopeless endeavor from the start. Every time I admitted it to a counselor or therapist they either wouldn't take it seriously or didn't offer any routines that stuck.
Still, even though it is a rationalization for my own addiction, I am still glad I did not get addicted to alcohol or cigarettes or eating instead. It gives me pause to think how easily I could have started down that path with just a bit more openness to experience than I once had.
EDIT: And of course to prove my point about stigma I've been hellbanned for making this very post.
I took me sometimes, I am much better on that. But it takes a shitload of work and just removing the blaming you put on yourself everytime your relaspe.
The first time I saw a movie where the protagonist was a "sex addict" and was going to group therapy, akin to AA, I couldn't believe it. At that point I was abroad, working for a US company. I eventually moved to the US a few years later.
At some point I realized that my bias towards this came from my cultural background, and it was actually hard to explain it to co-workers, or other Americans in general.
I’ve since switched jobs after a break but I still struggle with focus and attention span. Hoping that improves over time.
Did you work from home? Because my attention span also dropped significantly during covid. What helped was getting out of the house to get some work done.
In retrospect I was obviously depressed, but I took me nearly 10 years to understand why. My relationships with my parents and peers earlier in life had been so fraught that I became convinced I could never have a healthy relationship with someone. I had so little exposure to people whose relationships were healthy that the possibility hardly occurred to me. It’s difficult to describe what believing this for an extended period can do to a person.
I ultimately realized my mistake and set myself towards bringing more people into my life. However, in trying to correct this I made another mistake. I started taking finasteride in an effort to maintain my appearance, as I believed early baldness would negatively affect people’s initial impressions of me (particularly in romantic contexts). As it turns out, I’m one of the unfortunate few who have severe adverse reactions to this drug. Now, in addition to being socially and romantically inexperienced and out of shape, I’m also constantly fatigued, sexually impotent, and ironically still balding.
I again find it very difficult to imagine anyone, particularly a woman, would want anything to do with me. I see others my own age with families of their own now, while I have done nothing. It’s hard to manage the despair.
I hope you know now, this is a mistaken belief. Also in romantic context.
However, this effect surely pales in comparison to the effect of the permanent sexual dysfunction finasteride can cause. It is frankly outrageous that regulators in the United States have adopted the drug companies’ willful ignorance of this.
In my case I find it impossible to imagine I will ever meet a partner who is comfortable with inability to participate in normative sexual relations, as well as being compatible in other dimensions. I could honestly say that it has ruined my life.
There is survey data that can prove, or at least strongly point to pretty much any conclusion you want.
And yet, bald people are out there dating. As are overweight people and everyone else that doesn't sit squarely inside society's beauty standards. Have they done anything differently?
I am now far more concerned with the sexual effects of the anti-baldness drug I took which, again, are likely permanent. Men without working genitals have next to no options - if you are interested I would suggest researching accounts from men with a venous leak, botched circumcisions, micropenis, spinal cord injury and so on. There is a reason why those who find partners despite such ailments are a subject of media interest - they are beating the odds.
I would certainly advise other balding men to simply accept it. The risk of ending up in a much worse position as a result of anti-baldness treatment is simply not acceptable.
> I think you misunderstand my position. I am not arguing that baldness makes dating impossible, only that it is more difficult.
If baldness makes dating more difficult, it is almost imperceptibly so. Being self-conscious about baldness might make dating more difficult. Being bald and ok with it is fine.
IIRC the only thing that really matters and is impossible to change is height. If you're tall enough, you're fine. Also, anecdata: I worked with a "vertically challenged" (his words!) guy and he was dating attractive women (taller than him). He was confident and was able to make fun of his height.
Unfortunately, while lifting is probably advisable for overall wellness, it is highly unlikely to change things sexually. My testosterone has been tested and is quite high even after taking finasteride. From what I have gathered, the notion that the drug’s persistent effects are the result of altered testosterone levels is misinformed. Instead, people who are adversely affected by the drug seem to acquire a condition that resembles androgen resistance - their hormone levels may be fine, but their tissues no longer respond as they should. Some experts have hypothesized the root cause to be an epigenetic change, but there is really no financial incentive for getting to the bottom of it. As with tardive dyskinesia, the condition will likely remain poorly understood and practically untreatable for the remainder of our lives.
I’m afraid details would be a bit too graphic for HN, but I can assure you some of the changes to my body cannot be explained by stress. It is much more than just ED.
Most regrets stem from poor information or prediction capability such as the story of the one that went into game development during college instead of a better course or the one that didn't focus on programming until late in life.
I think the biggest regrets doesn't come from lack of prediction or information but just from the lack of willingness to take risks.
Life is finite and so whether we take risks or not, we all end-up in the same place; but to those who took risks and it paid-off, the journey is much more pleasant and the reckoning at the end is much more fruitful.
Of course this is just a platitude and isn't really that helpful, since there are a lot of risk-takers that just end-up dead or worse-off.
But the idea is that a person can't win by not taking risks since we're all dead anyways and so maybe a calculated risk is the answer.
I was socially awkward and tried to overcome it: had fun, had panic attacks, learned some tricks, but still just as socially awkward. Many other flaws of mine I’ve tried to overcome similarly and not really got anywhere. I just don’t care about them now and want to be unapologetically ME as I exist. This attitude has ended up paying dividends. No one cares if I’m awkward, or kinda mental or any of my other flaws. People actually seem to enjoy me… ?
Now at 29 I can look back at my teens-20s and how things could have gone differently, but there’s no point. Me then could never have been like me now and I couldn’t have convinced myself to, even with a time machine.
It’s like I’ve reached a point of “sour grapes” but without any cope. My life, successes, flaws and mistakes just… are… and I have to accept it. I’m done trying to go against my nature to transform to some state I’ll never reach, for god knows who.
I’ll continue to learn from my missteps. I’ll continue to try new things and get into and out of trouble for the frisk. I’ll continue awkwardly trying to elevate the people around me and keep them in good spirits.
But I’m done feeling inadequate for my flaws or wasting time trying to fight my nature.
Oh, I wish I started endurance running earlier but again, there was a reason I didn’t and I do now, so fuck it.
I regularly run an cycle, and kept my weight/waist the same as my 18 year old self, so that's it: tomorrow I'm going to find a club and join.
Thank you!
As a close second: telling girls I was interested was something I could not do for a long long time. It's still difficult and I know it's very common for men to have these sort of regrets but I managed to overcome at least some of that.
I could have studied harder too but it was very difficult for me.
I should've gone.
[0] I'm from a rust belt city in the Midwest. This isn't some kind of outsider prejudice against "flyover country".
I was visiting NYC years ago and realized the day of my departure that Dave Brubeck was playing at the Blue Note. I regret not canceling my flight.
Many of my old "worst regrets", which bugged me for years, no longer bother me.
If I revisit the regrets that don't bother me - well, probably they could start bothering me again!
I still have regrets that haunt me daily. I'm learning to live with those too.
A life well lived has a lot of griefs in it, but stewing in them isn't an awesome way to handle them.
Since then, many wonderful, smart, and beautiful women have been in my life, but I have never loved anyone liked I loved her. It's an odd thing to regret, because if I could go back and live it again, I cannot think of anything I would have done differently.
I've made money and lost money. I should have applied myself more academically. I should have spent more time with my Dad. But when I am alone and reflecting on my life, that is the thing I regret the most.
Working a ton, but not saving. Not investing. Living downtown for too many years. Going out to restaurants and bars multiple times a week. Buying a new iPhone every year. Not optimizing the career path for income (or, anything really). Never really going into debt beyond a (cheap) car payment, so it could be worse, but also not seeing personal capital grow.
Now, I'm hitting the stage where I feel this pull to try an independent venture; and maybe even leave the software industry. But I don't know how to do it financially. Its not just the runway in my bank account which could be measured in months; its the lifestyle.
I'm in my 40s now but I didn't get serious about saving and managing money until my mid-30s. Lived a very fun but expensive lifestyle downtown in a major city for many years while single.
I'd be a lot closer to some of my financial goals if I had been more focused on saving through my 20s and 30s. While my family is doing fine compared to many others, it feels like I'm always trying to catch up. This really starts to hit home when you add kids.
Related to that, I wish I'd found and fostered some sort side gig that would have allowed me to eventually ditch the 9-to-5 work life.
I wish I had realized how important it is to find some place you enjoy living (for whatever reason--friends, recreation opportunities, favorable weather, etc.), and then doing what you can to make a life there. Instead, I pursued jobs wherever they took me and I think my family paid a price for that instability. I didn't realize for a long time, but I think that I, too, paid a price for all those relocations in pursuit of the next job.
And then related to that, I wish I had not been so optimistic about my jobs. I should have realized that no matter how convincing the dream being sold to me, it was never going to be that good. I should gave treated my jobs as paychecks, as means to another end, not something into which I should pour the best of my attention and purpose of life.
Wow. I have never told anyone all this.
I wish I had just stopped going. I was bright enough to teach myself, there was a decent library on my commute.
I wasted over a decade of my life unhappy. It was a good life lesson, it made me stronger and wiser and more grateful, but looking back it's pretty fortunate I'm still here to reflect on that lesson.
Schools, particularly high schools, needs to be completely reformed. They are prisons for the young.
1. Not being more outgoing in university. Feels like that made things like getting a good job way harder than it could have been, and left me in a situation where making friends is difficult, especially offline.
2. Not investing more into my YouTube channel in the earlier days, especially back in 2017. I covered a game which was super popular back then, and many of my random videos from that time did extremely well views wise (one is now at about 5 million views because of it). If I'd built more of a fanbase then, I'd probably be far more successful on the platform now.
Taking every single ounce of advice people give to you.
I've found that everyone has a pathway in life, a way they are able to unlock and achieve their full potential. I found that what works for one person, may not always work for another. When I was starting out I would listen without question to anyones advice, peers, managers, business owners and attempt to shape myself to accommodate that advice & guidance - to only find that it would stifle me. Everyone has an opinion on how to do things best, but sometimes you just need to believe in yourself and your own capabilities.
Now I'm not saying don't ever listen to anyone, just be selective on who you listen to.
This is not a regret, just an opinion.
Nothing to do with Hacker News, just Human stuff. I'm just a nerd who has been unlucky in love.
But I couldn't stick to one language or specialization, I have a bunch of half-working projects and nothing finished. I kept switching depending on what interested me at the time. And I kept putting it off due to poor mental health and travel.
I'll never catch up to people that started in their early 20s, but I hope I can figure out how to climb the ladde as quickly as possible.
If I could go back I would finish one thing before starting another.
I also wish I had studied computer vision at uni instead of being the idiot teenager that did game development.
My advice to others: don't think "I'm still young, there's still time." Push push push today! You will rapidly run out of time. All through my twenties I did various jobs, I thought that great software job was just around the corner. Turns out it's not that easy and when you're older people expect a lot more from you.
Or try less hip domains in SW development popular with gray beards like embedded. Pay isn't as hot as web dev, but age is not a problem.
Edit, since I'm comment throttled and can't reply: In my country studying medicine is free/vey cheap. And SW devs don't make six figures here so studying to become a doctor is way better for your bank account and job security than competing with thousands of new-grads in an ageist industry.
My advice is to use webdev as a backup to a specialisation of some kind, ideally something you can grow with. Embedded is a great choice, and its definitely more technical work.
I read the number of developer jobs doubles every 5 years. So with 5 years experience you’d be in the top 50%
Is there any indication this will go on forever? Moore's law is also dead. At one point "software is eating the world" will also come to an end. In my city it's already more difficult to find a plumber than to find an app/web developer.
I was in a similar position a couple years ago. You don't need to catch up. Just pick a certain direction, i.e. frontend, backend, embedded, devops and stick to it. Once you got a certain years in the industry, it is easy to find better paying jobs and it is way easier to get hired.
I've been you, quite literally. And with an extremely similar age timeline even.
I won't tell you _you will make it_ because we are not owed a specific outcome in exchange for our efforts, but I can tell you it can be done. Channel that regret into creating the proper scaffolding to propel yourself into trying to make it work.
If you don't end up _making it_ at least you will be able to say you did indeed try your best until you couldn't.
The ideal best time to do it was ten years ago. Next best time is today.
I programmed from been a kid in the 80's, I truly loved it (still do) but I didn't start my full time career in programming til I was nearly 30 (I trained as an industrial electrician because I didn't think I was smart enough to be a software engineer - crippling self confidence issues and a horrific upbringing - ended up working minimum wage),
I shot up the ladder and in my early 40's I'm exactly where I would have been had I started at 21 - the later start and working different jobs in difference industries gave me a soft-skillset I wouldn't have otherwise gotten.
So while you are starting a few years after me its well within the realms of possibility if you get the right breaks.
Good Luck!.
This week Disney+ just debuted Cars: On the Road a series and now they are popular again here at home. Went out and got them cleaned up and back in action. So failed at the sale goal for over a year, then they failure turned into a convenient win that was unforeseen cuz I had no idea a new Cars bit was coming.
I did get a hint at the grocery store though when I saw a new die cast character. Some kinda rusty monster truck. Yes…I am trying to collect them all…
Everyone always says you have to think about your what you want to do in life, but equally important is what not to spend time on. You can't have it all. If you want everything you end up with nothing.
Although I'm doing fine at the moment I see old friend having advanced further in their careers, due to focus, less stress and becoming really good at something. I kind of regret not giving my life direction in the past, choosing something and go for it.
"Guilt and regret kill many a man before their time."
I regret many things in life. If I could go back I would do things very differently. I would be kinder. More hard working. Humble. Have integrity. Uplift the people around me. Explore the world.
It's very depressing when I look at my life that way. So I just look at today. How do I make the most of today. If I get hit by a bus will I be satisfied with what I did.
Remember half of life is chance.
My career was OK but who knows where I might have wound up.
If I could change anything in history, I would chose to have never been born at all.
I followed your profile and believe I found your github. You have hundreds of repos and hundreds of stars? You're a rockstar and humanity would be at a loss to lose you.
Sure, there is X amount of ways to improve or make your life happy for a short while but eventually it's all death and despair again.
Life is inherently suffering.
I'm 36 now. When I turned 22 in 2008, my mom surprised me with her having sarcoidosis, a disease which will turn functional cells into non-functional ones. Quite an issue when it starts in your lungs. A year later, my father surprised me with him having cancer.
Long story short, they passed away in 2013 and 2017. I should also mention that I have four younger siblings. I raised my little sister until the beginning of 2020, when she turned 18. And then, the pandemic hit.
I wish I'd talked more to my dad. I wish I would have been more socially active, would have gone on a fishing trip with him. Worked on the car. You know? Things you do with your dad. Instead, I buried myself knee-deep into coding. I read books. But I missed life.
And I accumulated debt. Oh, am I in debt right now. 46k still left to pay off, with which I'm struggeling.
And the path I choose? Up to today, I don't even know if it's the right one. I'm a coder. But from time to time, I need external validation. I need "the stage". And I love to teach other people stuff. Working from home, I realized that I don't have any problem talking directly into a camera. Just recently, I moderated a panel discussion with 7 participants and an audience of ~100 people. I wasn't aware of me being able to do that. But there were people in my company who believed in me and said "Do it!" and I decided to leave my comfort zone.
That was maybe the best feeling I had for a long, long time.
tl;dr:
a) Avoid the debt trap
b) Spend time with your loved ones, as much as you can. Grow bonds.
c) Leave your comfort zone. Experiment. And never be afraid to fail.
> I need "the stage".
Maybe this can be fixed easily? Like go on conference on behalf of your company and give a talk?
I also work from home 99%. Recently, we did a non-profit event and sold some kind of lottery tickets. Proceeds were donated 100% for local causes. Getting out there and selling tickets for 3-6 hours actually gave me energy. I had conversations with strangers that just went extremely fluid. I enjoyed that, but would hate to do it as a full time job.
They mostly sit in storage. Very occasionally I'll take them out to play & stream something. Given the state of emulation these days it is difficult to justify keeping them.
I'm a developer, and a decent one - not FAANG level by any means, but decent. But, my degree is from a school nobody's ever heard of, in an unrelated humanities subject, with a horrendous, barely-graduated level GPA. I was much more concerned with partying and video games. If I had it to do over again, I would have majored in CS, studied, and actually applied myself.
So I'm torn. If I had had my eye on CS, I might have gone to a school like CMU or similar, would have been excited by the material as opposed to the classes I slogged through, and maybe ended up in SF or NYC in the 2008-2010 timeframe. That was a super exciting time in the startup space. Who knows where I'd be now, but it certainly wouldn't be where I actually am, and I really like where I actually am.
This statement rubs me the wrong way. What does that mean being "FAANG level"? It's either a misconception of what is going on there or underestimating yourself... Or both
I'm sure every FAANG has dead weight, but I've always had the impression that in part due to the compensation the best of the industry tend to gravitate there. That certainly may have changed in the last decade when I think that idea got solidified in my mind.
Source: Worked at Microsoft for about a decade.
Money.
Lack of talent at the job, or lack of ability to perform in their notoriously-grueling interviews (I'm brain-dead after ~2 hours of a normal interview battery, personally) means that a whole lot of devs can never make FAANG-tier money, because they can't hack it at the job, because they can't hack it at the interview for one or more of several reasons, or because being pretty sure that the second thing is the case means they never make the enormous time investment to try.
So we're stuck in the middle of the trimodal dev-comp curves, permanently. Except for those stuck in the bottom one. Those two curves are most developers.
So we're "not FAANG-level", the most important consequence of which is we do alright (middle-class lifestyle, judged by what we used to consider middle-class before that started to slip downward to include all non-poor on account of the middle class shrinking and everyone wanting to avoid acknowledging it) but will never, ever get rich (upper-middle money or higher) working our day job.
Possible, though based on what I've seen so far, somewhat unlikely.
Usually, the old job wasn't that bad with more hindsight, and the new job is rarely that good...
I live in a shabby house, and never feel I can afford anything whilst also trying to save for old age and knowing it will be an improverished life.
I've never been able to figure out how to make enough money to not be a salary slave. The fear of job loss and having to work til I die doing work I don't enjoy (and having no idea what else I could do and still keep a roof over our heads) is crushing. Every day.
And then I see folk succeeding in every financial way, buying; building and refurbishing homes, holidays, cars, socialising, clubs, private healthcare, private schools, private tuition, retirement, none of which I can do for my wife and son.
45 now and my body, brain and brain hurt from chasing a salary each month that's just enough to keep me going for the next month.
I wish you all the best!
Marrying the wrong person because I didn’t want to be alone.
Not going into the game industry. I was too afraid of the horror stories at the time, so ignored my passion.
It's still there, and it's still a struggle. I've learned to mostly accept it as just how my brains works. I can recognize when it's causing me to make the wrong choice, and override that. Long walks really help when it's bad.
Not necessarily within relationships - that helped me define my standards and boundaries, raised my appreciation for functional relationships, yada yada ... it sucked ass but it served a purpose.
I mean more the treatment from customers and coworkers in my teens and early twenties, the restaurant jobs and summer gigs when I was just a skinny, horrifically awkward young woman that was busting her ass for minimum wage (or less) and didn't know how to stand up for herself. How I just froze up and smiled and didn't talk back. I should have humiliated those men. Instead they just went on about their day to do it to someone else.
Now I work from home and I'm too grouchy looking and, I guess, too old to get much of that any more, which is a blessing - but as far as regrets, I wish I'd found my spine in the aughts.
I started a business which was successful and dropped out a year before I finished my ChE degree. I had decided that I didn't want to go into oil (which was the most likely career path) and that I really enjoyed writing software and I was making more than I would as a ChE, so why bother? I've been writing software ever since.
However...not having graduated has bothered me more than I thought it would.
I have a letter from the Dean allowing me back as long as I go full time and finish as a ChE. It's been over 20 years so I'm not sure how much weight it carries now, but I doubt it's something I'll ever take the time to do. Looking back, it would have been better to tap down my enthusiasm temporarily and just finished up. Back then a year seemed like such a long time.
1) that your spending needs won't increase as your salary does.
2) that your salary meaningfully increases over time (more true for the top 15% than for 85% of others)
Unless hiperinflation.
I think there is absolutely no reason to teach kids dead languages. If they are really interested, they can do so at university later on.
Unfortunately it seems that a lot of my… sexuality (this word seems like a vast oversimplification in this case) got tied up with her and is basically now gone, and I’m still processing this years later.
I did retain the self-confidence she gave me though, but the cost…
Everything else was wasted.
Think it would have had a huge affect on my social skills, fitness and overall mental and physical health
Now, I half have a large regret and half tell myself that I would have lost it all anyway.
At some point in the next year or two, up to 90% of that will be returned to the 25,000 creditors who filled in the paperwork to make a claim years ago.
Did keep a couple as a hedge fortunately.
I console myself in the fact that I would have sold any Bitcoin I might have mined well before the price really took off.
Right, the folks working in Texarkana on Federal cases for Samsung and the like drive used Hyundai minivans and buy ramen in bulk these days /s.
Pretty glad I didn’t go that route though because deep down I love competition, cocaine, and strippers. About as much of a 180 from present day me.
I went to boarding school from grade 5. You are probably picturing a fancy place with the "elite of tomorrow" walking around in smart school uniforms. My boarding school wasn't like that at all. It was located in a very small village, so small that it didn't even have a single shop. It cost like 250€ a month and you can accurately deduce the rest from that. Yes, some of the minders were clearly alcoholics. Yes, there were lots of troubled youths. Yes, some of the food barrels really did have "pig feed or millitary" stenciled on them. But they tried and on the whole they did a good job. I have to admit that in retrospect.
There are many activities you can do there. Painting, singing, pottery, metalworking, theatre, dance and all kinds of sports. There was even a warhammer table! This being Germany you can play soccer all day everyday.
I, however, was very cool, you see. I was so cool that I was too cool to do any of the activities on offer. So I spent my days on walks with my best friends just smoking and drinking and discussing how we would get rich. We did not get rich.
Now at 41 I am a non-smoker and learning to play soccer. If only I had played in my youth. If only I had been a person who wasn't repulsed by sweat and effort. If only I had the confidence to really try at something hard. If only I could have seen myself as someone with the potential for strength, for speed, as a team player. If only I had known myself a little better back then.
Not saving enough when younger
Not moving to Europe when it was easier to do so (I’m British)
Oh well. Life is too short to dwell on such things. You can only change the future, not the past.
I have other options though and I’m actively exploring them. But unsurprisingly none are “easy” :-)
Your concerns about anti English sentiment are valid. I got tired of the “we’re just joking” excuse.
The housing crisis is extreme. Foreigners often think it can’t be that bad. It’s 10x worse than you think.
Car centric society (understandable - it’s been built that way).
Similar issues to the UK when it comes to landlord politicians, housing policies, healthcare, transport, prices etc.
Hard to make true friends. That’s from my friends who have lived there over 10 years and are very sociable people.
I could go on but it’ll be opinion and not direct experience and I don’t want to offend any Irish people reading this.
Most of our life is failures. Once I hit a particularly low point (and also with age), I appreciate the journey much much more as cliche as it sounds. For a different reason - with an expectation to mostly fail, we are set free to truly live.
My list of messing around:
- Back in high school, I read a biography of Bill Gates and found it cool to learn some programming. Back then we were taught FOXBASE but I taught myself FOXPRO because it is more pretty with all those Windows UI. I asked my parents if I could do some work for their university (they worked as professors back then) but didn't get any reply. I messed around for a bit longer but then my bad grades caught up so I never did any programming for a long while
- In university I got fancied by level design (big thing in late 90s/early 2000s), again only learned a few tools and made some samples. Never drove myself deep enough and gradually lost interest after a couple of years
- Fast forward maybe 10 years, finally mustered enough courage to teach myself C++ as game programming seems to be fun. Learned a lot and made a few simple games including half of a Ultima spin-off in 3 months. Life was a bit hard at the time so had to focus on getting a job and working as a salesman (really hate it).
- Worked hard to squeeze into IT as I still like programming. Wasted a few years on that sales job but eventually landed a BA job. After a couple of hops I managed to land an IT job (current one). In the middle married my wife and got a baby, but never truly found the focus/passion of life. Actually, the closer to my target IT job, the less passionate I'm. I still pick up hobbies nowadays (am reading binary analysis today) but don't really think I can drill deep in any of them.
There was no point along that progression where I experienced the feeling of having a win. Just levels upon levels of chronic exhaustion, overwhelm and burnout. To the point where that enduring suffering became my reality.
I wish I would have learned about manifestation (reality shifting) earlier. I didn't know that I helped create the reality I was in by fixating on the negative and dwelling on the past.
Since I was awakened, I've been shifting along the multiverse through meditation towards realities that better support spirit and magic. I always thought the dawning of the New Age had to do with time, but time is an illusion. It's more like, a dimension just outside ours that we grow into phase with through our vibration, swaying the collapse of the wave function (or whatever you want to call free will). Anyone can do this at any time, but for whatever reason we suppress that lucidity and deny our relationship with creation and our contribution through co-creation.
What I'm saying is that from all the ways I let the cold hard facts of logic and ego and the quest for personal gain fail myself, I've found meaning through faith/hope/love and service to others. From the inward flow of the Sith to the outward flow of the Jedi. Or whatever pop culture reference floats your boat. The hippies were right man, all you need is love.
Would it have been better to go to university just for the social experience? I don't know. Is signing up for a mountain of debt worth it to build a network? Some university students would surely kill to be in my position, so do I have a right to feel like this?
I feel like a broken person and I don't really know how to turn things around. I think the "just go to clubs" advice is overprescribed and in my experiences it's just people way older than me that attend anyway. The door to social circles is locked and triple bolted now that I'm in the working world.
Also I'm not sure if I'm gay. My life experience leads me to believe that I might just be gay and in denial. I'm not sure. Wish I had figured this out in college.
Another one: I wish I hadn't done sports in high school. My natural interests were always along the lines of music, acting, programming, etc. I never really liked sports, honestly. But my parents kind of pushed me into it. So I spent 4 years in high school sucking at sports. I did try, very hard at certain points, but I'm just not a natural athlete. I think it made me a stronger person to have to deal with that but I wish I had been able to pursue things I was actually interested in during HS.
Also, I've smoked way too much weed.
Also you don’t have to come up with a label for your interests.
Seems like you need guidance in your life. Lots of ways to get guidance, idk if HN has a DM feature but I think we have some common areas. Anyways, hope you have figure out some stuff
In reality, that number is way, WAY lower, especially at your age? Perhaps 10-20%. The rest is struggling too, in one way or another (some may not realise it at the time).
The best thing you can do now is act and do something. Failure is better than no action.
He suddenly died from a heart attack on a Sunday afternoon, while I was scrambling to write a paper before the midnight deadline.
The divorce didn't help either but I don't know if I regret that so much as had no real recourse about the whole situation. (My ex decided she no longer wanted to work and we split up over that)
I dabbed into programming when I was 25 and thought I was late. I also killed my business pre-maturely going the safe route when first hardship occurred. I suppose fear got better of me.
I am incredibly grateful for where I am, but the monkey brain always wants more and asks what if...
That can be survivorship bias. Money will follow if you have a great network and/or live in a hot area with tons of networking and jobs opportunities for your trade.
Being good at what you do is not always enough to succeed financially.
Recently changed careers and now happily programming and on my path to being a bit more financially secure. I can now design and make things I want in my spare time, without having to worry about where the money is coming from.
The comment someone made about everyone losing ten years somewhere really resonated with me.
Eventually, got a Masters in Statistics. But I wish I could run this back and get those lost years.
When I was studying for Master's in Sweden about 20 years back, I had a crush on an Austrian girl. I was so timid and had lack of confidence that I never asked her out due to fear of rejection. In fact most of the decisions and I took and still taking are influenced by fear of rejection.
I know how to live a happy life theoretically but don't know how to implement in the real life.
Sometimes I feel life had given me quite a few opportunities and squandered them
Part five is a wonderful video essay on memory, nostalgia and regret. Tim is also in a unique position to talk about this as he has a condition where he never forgets anything. It's really a fascinating video.
Also general shout out to action button, all the videos are fantastic.
Link to the video: https://youtu.be/779coR-XPTw
Life was crazy and I kept putting it off. But I could have cut my rate in half.
Possibly undergrad as well.
I think I would have done much better in the trades, honestly, but that was not an accepted/encouraged option in the early 00s. Especially for girls. My parents are still giving me guff for having left an office job.
With your own personal situation so good, it can be too easy to just stick to the default and not chase something that's more ambitious, but perhaps also more risky as well (whatever that is). The years go by fast and eventually you start wondering if its too late (it's not).
So, have gratitude and appreciate the good situation(s) you've found yourself in, but if there's some idea or action you can't seem to forget about, go do it.
Ended up programming a distributed simulation optimization tool for my master thesis (in business), while already doing multiple online startups.
Do I regret not studying CS and following a SWE career? I really don't know because many skills from the business side have served me well too. Would I have started those companies without understanding customers, marketing, accounting, taxation, investing?
So I try not to regret things because I don't know the alternate timeline. Could be better, could be worse.
Then there's the fact that I decided to go to a state school because I was entering with a decent amount of credits and entered a special program for tuition assistance (it sucked). Dropped out (which I also regret).
I regret not accepting the NSA's cooperative education program when offered.
I regret not deciding to live with my mother when my parents divorced.
I regret taking on a job with a ~3 hour commute as my first gig.
Should I keep going?
If you are young and have an income stream, do your future self a favor and invest in a diversified fund as much as you can and a 401k and don’t touch it until you’re ready to retire. Compound growth is insane.
I’m not talking about spending money traveling and on experiences, I think those are worth every penny.
I’m talking about blowing money living paycheck to paycheck instead of growing my savings on designer clothes and modifying cars, etc. trying to look a certain way among people my age and trying to impress the opposite sex.
None of that stuff matters now and didn’t back then in retrospect. I found my spouse partaking in a free hobby.
I guess hindsight is 20/20 as they say, back then I was surrounded by social and single college friends looking to find partners to date.
I think the biggest mistake that I've made (that others might be helped to avoid by hearing about) was not to save money. I've had a lot of money flow through my hands over the course of my career as a programmer, yet I have very little to show for it, and I'm not getting any younger.
Other than that, I mostly regret the times I've hurt people or not helped them but could have.
For example, let's suppose that the answer to the question about the biggest regret is "not learning to swim while still a child" (I learned while being 31 years old), but the reason is that my mother could not teach me and actively opposed any other possibility for me to learn. This was not something I could change about my past, even in theory.
It wasn’t my argument and not my “responsibility” per se, but I’m sure that I could have defused it, and I didn’t for reasons that seemed reasonable for 15 year old me.
Idea and execution had potential but I lacked networking or courage. Also professors was really dismissive about it. I could have it used in 2 different courses only.
I wished I pushed it harder to even different universities and courses.
I recently got into a mindset where I thought I may die. I was alone and had sudden chest pain. Anyway, my mind wandered to this question and I fixated on the fact that I’ve dreamed about it my entire life and yet I haven’t made it happen.
I did walk away from that feeling pretty good. After all, I had no immediate regrets about the important things like family and friends.
I was moving from Australia to Sweden. I looked into bringing him with me, but how well would a tropical bird really do in _Sweden_, and would he be able to survive the stress of the journey? I decided to find him a good home.
I put an ad up for him on the local classifieds site. I was giving him away for free to a good home, with cage, feed, etc. My requirement was to meet the family first, and that they would promise to contact me immediately if something did not work out or if they changed their minds, and I would make other arrangements. I had hundreds of replies and went through them all. One of them was a family with a young daughter who already had one other friendly Rainbow Lorikeet. They sounded very nice, like they'd be an attentive and stable home, and I thought it'd be great for Goku to have another bird companion, too.
I met them and they seemed great. They were good with Goku. They said they'd take their time introducing the other lorikeet (I wasn't worried about this because they said they had lots of prior bird experience, and we discussed this point specifically to make sure we were on the same page with the introductions). They promised to send me updates and pictures, and we added each other on Facebook.
They sent a picture of Goku perched on their daughter's shoulder the next day and was so relieved because I thought I made a good decision. But after that, it was radio silence. I sent them a message asking how he's doing a week later, to make sure that all was good before I fly out. I got no response. I messaged again a month later, on Facebook, and got no response again. I tried again a few more months later, and then once a year or so for a few years, but they never replied to me. I wasn't spamming them demanding information or anything, just checking in at reasonable intervals, since they agreed to send me updates from the very beginning.
To this day I have no idea what happened to Goku, and feel like I betrayed him. I didn't pick the family carefully enough, and could have taken more time. I got too excited. I didn't even look at bird rescue operations, since for some reason I just assumed a regular home would be better. I'm certain that something bad happened: he got hurt, or they ended up not being the people I thought they were and sold him or something. Otherwise why would it just be total radio silence?
i shouldve tried harder to evaluate my options but at 16 i just went with what everyone said was a good enough path.
https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/regrets-a-powerful-plann...
My advice? Stop living in the past. Your car's windscreen is 100x bigger than the rear view mirror for a reason.
Great metaphor! It reminds me of a song lyric: “The Future’s so bright you’ll have to wear shades.”
- What you do - Where you live - Who you marry
I did pretty good on 2/3. Third one, not so much, although I think that was more me than her.
What I would change is convince my ex wife (when were still dating) that we should get married after university, not before.
Feeling the need to be entirely self-reliant and not asking for help or admitting difficulty.
Not asserting my preferences, even though I had no problem asserting rights and formal entitlements.
Lacking sexual confidence in high school.
You get busy with your own life and they never made me feel guilty for not visiting, but this is something that would have benefited me as much as them. I could have done better.
And in general I should have been way faster on making decisions.
I realized only in my 30s that not making a decision IS often the worst type of decision you made.
You’d expect me to say my 14 year marriage that ended last year, but without that marriage I wouldn’t have my son. My only regrets are not spending more time with him, which I’m making up for right now.
Yes it does. I could walk into the street right now. I could walk into the office next door and slap a co-worker. I could learn German. I could leave my life and walk to China.
What is your justification that free-will doesn't exist? Other than biological needs like eating and sleeping, I have control over the rest. Or, rather, I have control over how shitty the rest is. I have yet to hear an argument that has swayed me at all.
It was such a low risk proposition at that time in my life.
I hope you get the irony.
Didn't start that businesses I wanted to in my 20s. Would had been in the same position financially by now anyway.
Seems to make the difference between heaven and hell in terms of overall quality of life and opportunities.
I was surrounded by really smart people.
I regret leaving China to go back to Europe. I truly wished I was still living there.
I wish I could be there right now
I paid full tuition in my course to get some understanding of people.
Dad had some understanding, and Mom was really good at it, but neither tried very hard to teach me.
In particular:
[i] Boys and girls, men and women are very different.
(A) The cliche that boys pay attention to things and girls, to people is not fully true but significantly often is true.
(B) Once from a real expert I got a flat statement: "Of COURSE, women are MUCH more emotional than men. That is the cause of all the problems.". That answered a lot of questions!
(C) A large fraction of girls and women tend to be afraid -- the list is long with some standard items and some more. One of the more important things a boy/man can do is make it really clear to the female that they are at zero risk with him.
(D) Generally girls/women are exposed to some means of manipulation, and some of them get good at it -- boys/men need to watch out for that.
(E) Some girls are afraid of being in love (there is a lot to understanding love, and I can't cover all of it here) but, still, are very interested in sex. For them, holding hands can be more intimate than sexual intercourse. Boys/men need to realize that.
[ii] A surprisingly large fraction of people are in some significant ways seriously mixed up. So, watch out for that. Also have a list of common ways and watch out for those.
(2) Business
It took me way too long to understand the importance of business, even just small/medium business, as a path to being financially responsible and maybe even secure.
In particular, for a good job in the economy as an employee, there has to be up there somewhere some person(s) who did well enough in business to have created that job.
So, being an employee is limited by the jobs other people create. It is better to be the person who is successful enough in business to create good jobs.
E.g., at one time I had a relatively good career going as just an employee in computing. Then (A) I didn't appreciate how that career would have to change or how to make that career a lot better, e.g., by starting a business or being such a good employee that I could get stock in a growing company. (B) To be better qualified as an employee, I got a Ph.D. in pure/applied math. I didn't appreciate that in fact, in reality, in the US, a Ph.D. is intended for people who want to be devoted to an academic career and put up with being, in my view, financially irresponsible. I had zero interest in being a professor.
The academic work and my independent study are crucial parts of my startup, but the Ph.D. was a very inefficient way to get some help on some of the parts. I conclude that, generally, a Ph.D. is more trouble than it is worth and financially irresponsible. Learning can be important, but a Ph.D. is an inefficient way to do it.
(3) Stock
At one time the founder, CEO of FedEx told me
"You know, if you stay you are in line for $500,000 in FedEx stock."
I was holding a really good hand but didn't know enough to play it at all well.
I didn't stay.
My father understood even less than I did. Mom, didn't have a clue.
(4) Art
In high school and through college, the teaching kept trying to get me to pay attention to art, especially literature. I didn't see the value. And the lessons in literature were not very credible, that is, I could not trust that they would really be true, say, like Newton's Second Law.
For art, I like the definition --
"The communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion."
With that definition, okay -- via art can get some views of examples of the experiences, emotions of other people. Maybe sometimes the examples do illustrate something about a lot of people and not just some one.
With that definition, I might have paid a little more attention to literature and gotten a little value from it.
Being successful with people is CRUCIAL, and understanding their possible experiences, emotions can be important for the success.
For me and art, I liked music a lot right away, some before I was 5. Explaining just why took me a while!
(5) Jobs and Marriage
Apparently some of the prosperity of the US now is due to having a lot of women working.
A lot of career paths require moving frequently. But those moves can play havoc with a marriage having two jobs. And with only one job, it can be tough financially to buy a house and do well supporting the family.
Lesson: A career that does not require moving has a big advantage in being financially secure and doing well supporting a family.
So, if you want to pursue a career that has you move or be in some really expensive place to live, then consider delaying getting married.
(6) Gossip
In an office, and maybe in much of a life, gossip can be a threat.
In an office, if you do well, then others can feel threatened and attack you with gossip.
So, apparently it is not enough to assume you are innocent until proven guilty and instead need positively to assert innocence on likely gossip accusations.
I'm no expert on how to defend against gossip, finding a good expert could be important, but I'm sure that gossip commonly is a threat. So, watch out for gossip. If it appears you have been attacked by gossip, then (ask an expert) do defend yourself.
People are different, splitting people up into two groups generally doesn't help anything. The vast majority of your life will be spent dealing with individuals, not groups. Don't treat individuals like any of their groups.
> (A) The cliche that boys pay attention to things and girls, to people is not fully true but significantly often is true.
I have found nothing of significance in my life due to this purported "fact". People are people. Look at the individual, not the group.
> (B) Once from a real expert I got a flat statement: "Of COURSE, women are MUCH more emotional than men. That is the cause of all the problems.". That answered a lot of questions!
Uninteresting. Maybe you are less emotional. Maybe the people you dated were more emotional. If that is a problem, seek out less emotional people to date. There are plenty. More importantly, find someone that makes you feel good, regardless of any insipid advice about "women".
> (C) A large fraction of girls and women tend to be afraid -- the list is long with some standard items and some more. One of the more important things a boy/man can do is make it really clear to the female that they are at zero risk with him.
You should do this with anyone.
> (D) Generally girls/women are exposed to some means of manipulation, and some of them get good at it -- boys/men need to watch out for that.
Men manipulate just as much as women. Again, look to the individual. Stop thinking in terms of men vs women. Find someone that isn't manipulative.
> (E) Some girls are afraid of being in love (there is a lot to understanding love, and I can't cover all of it here) but, still, are very interested in sex. For them, holding hands can be more intimate than sexual intercourse. Boys/men need to realize that.
Take the gender out of this statement and it is an interesting one.
> [ii] A surprisingly large fraction of people are in some significant ways seriously mixed up. So, watch out for that. Also have a list of common ways and watch out for those.
See, great statement, absolutely decent advice because you kept gender out of it. Although it does sound too jaded. I'd rather state it as, "people struggle with life, understand a person's struggles and make sure you can handle them before becoming too deeply involved with them, not just romantically, but platonically, too."
You seem to be saying that, in dealing with people, should get more information.
In a sense, you are correct: That sense is from applications of the Radon-Nikodym theorem. The charming proof by J. von Neumann is in the W. Rudin Real and Complex Analysis.
In practice, not really: What I mentioned and you object to can be called generalities. Sooooo, in the politically correct world, those are called, say, stereotypes and are offensive.
So, it appears that you see the generalities as drawing some detailed conclusions about someone based just on the generalities. Instead, you want to hold off on the details until there is good evidence one detail and person at a time.
That won't, can't, work very well.
E.g, you are coaching a girl's basketball team. Some of the girls are not doing well. You don't know why, and they are not clearly, explicitly, frankly, honestly telling you why -- such reluctance is common. Soooo, you have to guess. You start with, they are girls, girls tend to be emotional, in particular, afraid. So, try that diagnosis.
Uh, in US society, women get be afraid. Men don't.
You are coaching a boy's basketball team. One of the boys is not doing well. If you even hint that you suspect he is overly emotional, afraid, you would be calling him a "sissy". All the other boys on the team would howl with contempt, point fingers, bend over with laughter. So you don't do that. You assume he has left his emotions of fear in the locker room and is willing to guard Michael Jordan or foul LeBron James, even if Jordan fakes him into the nickel seats or LeBron knocks him there. Afraid? A boy on a round ball team? NO WAY.
In WWII and the battle of Midway, the US sent fighter planes, torpedo planes, and dive bomber planes to attack the Japanese carriers. Of course, the Japanese had fighter planes in the air to protect the carriers. Well, the US planes were poor on coordination, and the torpedo planes attacked with the rest of the US planes still on the way. Well, it would look like the torpedo planes had no chance. And in fact, they didn't have a chance; not even one torpedo hit, and all the torpedo planes were shot down. The US torpedo plane pilots knew they were likely to be shot down, but they flew in anyway. Fear? No room for fear.
Sure, some women can also overcome fear, but they are usually not expected to and still usually don't.
Did I mention, boys and girls are different.
It appears that you want to set aside generalities and assume that the girls are not afraid until it is clear they are or that the boys are afraid until it is clear they are not.
But this clear information you want, and I agree would be good to have, mostly won't be available.
You want to ignore the generalities. But the generalities are from decades of careful observation and have too much good information to discard, especially when the detailed information you want is not available.
What I posted is what was requested, what I wish I'd had in my experience.
I'm not trying to get into current politically correct gender equality arguments. Instead, I was describing what I wish I had known.
What I listed that I wished I'd known was important. A lot of the wishing that you responded to was about love, and that is a challenging subject.
E.g., not knowing what I listed I wished I'd known cost me the relationship with the prettiest human female I ever saw, in person or otherwise. And she was terrific in nearly all respects otherwise. Later I discovered by improbable accident that she really loved me. For me, I still have her high school graduation picture in the UR corner of my computer screen -- I'm still in love with her. That was a failure. I believe that had I known what I wish I had known, I could have saved the relationship, likely had a really good marriage, etc. We would have done well with children: I like children, and she was way over the top in adoring children, especially the faces of children, say, under the age of 5.
E.g., my marriage (to another female) was a failure. Had I known what I listed I wish I'd known, I could have either avoided the marriage or saved it. She was quite sick. Visiting her mother on her family farm, she was missing and her body was found floating in a lake, an apparent suicide. Did I mention failure?
So, both of those females were afraid. Did I mention that I wish I'd understood that females tend to be afraid?
For this subject of fear, I will remind you of a 101 level of a little of it: In now some old and relatively solid clinical psychology, fear is called anxiety and tends to bring paranoia, hysteria, and obsessive-compulsive (OCD), psychopathic-passive behavior. Soooo, if see a lot of symptoms of anxiety (fear, as my quite perceptive Mom, after only 15 minutes, put it, "afraid of her own shadow"), look also for the rest. Your approach fails here -- you are asking everyone to rediscover 100 years of clinical psychology one detail and one person at a time. Then, the anxiety tends to bring stress, and the stress tends to bring depression. The depression lowers productivity and can, thus, can bring more stress. The extra stress can lead to clinical depression which is dangerous -- can cause suicide. And that is EXACTLY what happened. It is just CRUCIAL for someone to understand this 101 level of clinical psychology.
Just what she was afraid of, a detail you would insist on, she would never say, in decades, never say or hint, and would prefer to go to her death than say. Did I mention that some of the details you want won't be available?
And why this 101 clinical psychology mostly for women? Did I mention, women are much more emotional than men? And more afraid?
You want to discard the generalities. Soooo, you discard the information the generalities imply and want to get that information one detail and one person at a time. E.g., you see an anxiety case but want to discard that, from enormous evidence, the generalities say that the anxiety can lead to OCD, stress, depression, clinical depression, and death. Okay, now that they are dead, you have your detailed information. Of course, you have the information too late.
> For me, I still have her high school graduation picture in the UR corner of my computer screen -- I'm still in love with her. That was a failure. I believe that had I known what I wish I had known, I could have saved the relationship, likely had a really good marriage, etc. We would have done well with children:
This is pretty messed up.
Also, no one understands love, in particular, you don't. I'm not nearly the first man to stay in love for life!
Sure, but for most of those dude's it's with their partner.
In my early thirties I realized that unless I did something drastic, I was never going to be a writer. So I enrolled in a four year creative writing course. (Creative writing is not routinely taught in college here.) The place had a tough selection policy and was run by established writers with editors and publishers. It is probably the best place in my country to build a network and get noticed.
I did get indeed noticed and published a few short stories in a reputable magazine. Then the publisher (which is one of the most prestigious in the country) had a sit-down with me and told me they really liked my work but they wanted to see something more substantial, which is thinly veiled code for a novel. It was a come-on as big as they come in the literary world. And I fucked it up. I never took them up on their offer. I did not even try and write that book.
After a while my contacts dried up and the window of opportunity closed. Nowadays when I send something to that particular publisher it ends up in the slush pile of uninvited manuscripts (of which they receive over a thousand yearly). I don't blame them, but I do regret it.
Meh. You would have sold them at $4.
You don’t get back that time. Ever.
Most of these I have made peace with and addressed in my life now, but historically, these have been my biggest regrets:
Becoming addicted to prngrfy and mstrbtion in my early teens and staying addicted throughout my 20s. I have been sober for years now, and for me, it was only possible through working the SLAA[1] program. I never actually knew it existed until a therapist suggested it to me; I wish it had been easier to find, but unfortunately whenever I would search for resources in overcoming prngrphy addiction, I would only ever really find places like the big sub with "astronauts".
On the one hand, I have spent more than half of my life addicted to prngrfy. On the other hand, I now have the gift of potentially being able to spend more than half of my time on this earth sober. The glass is definitely half full for me on this one.
Not learning how to dance until my 30s. I was once made fun of for dancing at a party as a young child (<5yo maybe) by my mother and a friend of hers, and that led to me being completely terrified of dancing until last year. I would get very angry and ashamed whenever I was in a situation where dancing was involved, and just generally feel not-good and attacked whenever somebody who loved me wanted to dance with me. I picked up swing dancing last year and now dancing is one of the most joyous activities in my life, and you can usually find me out cutting a rug on a Wednesday night.[2]
Being a lousy big brother to my one younger brother. This one probably hurts me the most and I still have not been able to forgive myself for it. Funnily enough, my younger brother loves me very much and we have a good relationship now, but when I think about all the ways I failed him when we were younger I just lose it emotionally. Working on this in therapy currently.
Not taking care of my body in my teenage years and 20s, and especially wasting all that free extra T[3] when I was going through puberty. I wish I could go back in time and drag myself to the gym when I first hit puberty! I do a wide range of physical activities now including lifting and I have a body and the kind of mass I never would have dreamed of before, but sometimes I like to imagine what I would have looked like now if I had started 20 years ago. Oh well, I can always see what I look like in 20 years' time!
[1]: My stubborn younger self would have written this due to the vaguely religious overtones of the 12 steps, but I'm glad that as a still-non-religious adult I was able to get out of my own way on this one and just focus on doing what I needed to do to get better
[2]: This is also how I found probably my most important adult friend group after the age of 30!
[3]: I will probably hop on TRT when I'm older and my T levels go down, so maybe I will get to experience something like that later in my life after all
dang: I think this is because I used the full "p" word in my initial post, can you confirm?
I gave PagerDuty a $100k discount on my market rate in exchange for 2% of stock.
The week I got fired, I had just taken us to AWS Re:Invent and helped sign a lot of business.
During this conference, a gross creeper named Jedidiah Smith (really) from Linode/Foursquare, started sexually harassing and stalking our Office Admin who had come to help with the conference. Our child of a CTO wouldn't do anything about it, so I took matters into my own hands and had him fired, because his boss was a friend and former customer of mine. This made my boss feel impotent, knowing I acted like a man, and he acted like a coward. A man protects his people at all costs. A coward drinks whisky and hobnobs while a potential rapist threatens his people.
( True story, when Moira of the Apache Foundation killed herself, Jed was considered to have shared some of the blame for his constant harassment over her for having been raped, and for being trans. When I still had LinkedIn, he stalked me every 3 days terrified I would do something to him. )
During the conference, AWS us-east-1 went out, and I was blamed for PD's shitty single-AZ, single-region infrastructure, even though 110% of my work had been marketing at that point, and I had not really done anything technical. The founders were to blame for every shitty technical decision they had made, but I was the oldest person in the company, and the easiest scapegoat because I wasn't a young techbro (I was 30, they were 24).
On the flight home to San Francisco my father died. When I arrived at the office that afternoon I was fired. No stock, no severance, just "we locked you out, give us your laptop, fuck you". I was fired and paid a half day's pay for that week.
Working for pagerduty was the worst mistake of my life. I was still idealistic and happy when I first started there. I loved the project. I thought we were going to take over the world. They became billionaires, I became homeless. My stock would be worth like $100m now. For a while I lived on the roof of Pagerduty's office. It's easy to walk by the security guard, the view is stunning, and it's really warm in the loft up above the elevator shaft.
The last picture of my father, he was wearing a PagerDuty shirt he had just received. On the way to bury him, my brother in law and closest friend in this world died of an accidental oxycotin overdose due to a surgery. Boy didn't even take aspirin until his achilles tendon snapped, first week of painkillers he died. Just like that. Poof. Living consciousness to dead meat in a box. My grandfather and mother all died within a year of that.
I fell into a hopeless depression, tried to kill myself several times, spent the next year and a half in a drug-fueled haze.
When I woke up, I was living in a stolen RV, my fiancee had left me, all of my friends had ghosted me, my family had disowned me, I'd been arrested three times and was over $75k in debt. I decided to nullify my life.
Cynicism and nihilism is my life's philosophy. For the past 11 years I have only slept with women I paid, so that I don't need to have any attachment. I have no ties, no responsibilities, no connections.
I lie to people about my name if I socialize so that I never have to engage with the same person more than once. If I do accidentally connect with the same person twice, I decide it's time to move on, which happens every 2-4 months. I've moved about 50 times, if you can call drifting "moving". Digital nomadding, I dunno, whatever.
I own three motorcycles, (all R1250RTs) the one I'm on now, one in London and one in Mexico City I imagine has long-since been stolen. I have a backpack, a hand drum, a laptop, a few burner phones, about 50 sim cards, a wallet, a two pairs of custom hiking shoes, a week's worth of hiking clothes and a couple of Neal Stephenson books. Also, some antacids, i have the worst acid reflux.
I carry my Do Not Resuscitate on me, I have not had a social media account of any type for 10 years. My real identity is long lost, sometimes I refer to myself by one of my fake identities so much I start believing them. My passports and IDs are all fake, and I'm happy being anonymous. I've managed to squirrel away a few hundred thousand dollars in cash and gold in storage lockers in my favorite cities. No crypto, I prefer pure anonymity. Before I die I'll collect it all and give it away to homeless people.
I like sitting with bums, drug-dealers, hookers and junkies. They're honest, they accept me for who I am and never ask me questions I don't want to answer, and I never ask them any either. The closest I come to having friends is knowing drug dealers by name in 20 or so countries. When I come to a new city, I walk around looking for the thugs, make a deal, hand them a beer and talk to them for a bit. I haven't actually done drugs in 5 or 6 years, besides cannabis and acid, I just like talking to real people and there ain't nobody realer than a hustler. My old man was a hell's angel, I prefer lowlifes to the rich.
I left tech for a while, made a pile by selling coke, heroin and mdma to yuppy tech bros, many, many of whom worked for YCombinator companies. Let's just say I know where a lot of bodies are buried. If I wrote a tell-all book, I could run the lives and reputations of at least 20 names you recognize very well. Don't worry, I am an animal with integrity when it comes to secrets.
Within a few years I will be breathing through an oxygen tank because of congenital emphysema, and a few years after that I'll be dead. This is my remaining comfort, this knowledge of my mortality is strangely very comforting.
The series of events which began with PagerDuty nullified my life. I hold only bitterness and hatred for my peers, my colleagues, my employers and my customers, and each and every one of you on this site. To me, you are prey, somebody to rob or jump for fun. Don't worry, if I jump you, I won't keep your wallet, I'll give it to the first bum I see. I'm too old for that now anyways, my lungs are failing.
My last ~20 employers never knew my real name. I have a few people I hire off of UpWork to be my references when I need a new gig.
I have no social media presence, no saved e-mails, no photos, no papers, no property. Just the bare essentials to survive and to keep moving, I'm like a shark, always gotta keep moving.
I don't exist.
For those of you who are familiar with GG Allin, he defined who I became after PagerDuty with more eloquence than I ever could.
"Everybody knows that I'm a scumbag They won't come and see me in this dive Everyone's afraid of what might happen to them Or if they'll even get out of there alive
Some fuckhead in the corner is getting to me Talkin' about the way I look and smell Well I guess he don't know that I'm the Outlaw Scumfuck Someone aughta' warn him before I knock him straight to Hell
Because everybody knows that I'm a scumbag I like sluts and whores and I don't care You can say just what you want to say about me But if I hear you I might just go knock you off your chair'
Cause I like to drink whiskey by the gallon I live on peanut butter sandwiches, I don't care I spent some nights in jail in this old country Everybody hates me and I just don't fucking care"
Fuck y'all, especially you Alex. Fuck you, Alex.
As many stated, I don't regret much, it pretty much doesn't belong to my vocabulary. I have made choices with a state of mind, a state of knowledge and a context that explains them. Now I have matured, relieving a moment with 40 years more of experience is not available on the market.
Though this thread could be a trigger for some people in similar moment of their lives.
A few keys things that define me, why they are not purely made of happy consequences, why they also had to happen.
Relationship: my first relationship lasted a super long time. My now ex is a good friend. Though I feel I have skipped on some of my fun time, and I actually broke up because I had to drink from this carpe diem cup. We are still friends, it doesn't help with whatever relationships come after. It feels I am a bit living my life backward. But at that time, this person was the first one that made me feel good / worth loving. And I think that she enabled me to achieve a pretty good high school / university time ... I think I wouldn't have been able to hold without her.
Self knowledge: unfortunately when I read about all your abusive relationships I am scared I am the asshole in them. Anger issues, obsessiveness, no violence but I definitely brought down people I loved in discussions in the past. I have spent a lot of time depressed without knowing it. It took me a shitload of time to aknowledge it and claw back. My key elements have been: doing sport and having a rythm were going to bed at 1am for work everynight is not ok. Seeking help was also a smart thing to do. It took me a shitload of time to figure that. I have destroyed my second relationship by letting work putting me on edge all the time. Positive spin: I think I am decently good at my I do, I think I overinvested but got some payback in skills. I am still struggling with anger issues and not beeing a dick...
Work: younger, someone close in my family told me "go work for a big company you have all the time in the world to start something it will give you money and credentials". I didn't, because nobody in my family really hit the jackpot starting to work for a big one, because not the same times, not the same social background. I had constructed a logic to explain why I would be better starting my own stuffasap. And starting a company in a country that doesn't value risk, has no investors, no mentors... I basically failed for ten years on different projects. Damn I must be somehow resilient or loving the loser game. It was tough, I think that's one of the thing that brought me down (above paragraph), me and my business partner. And I keep seeing this guy I know, he did an internship for a major company, and everytime I hear about him and his projects "he must be good, he has been at X". Now I think I am at a quarter of where I thought I would be at 23 when I was 20, but I have a company that works well and I have learnt a shit load.
Becoming addicted to pornography and masturbation in my early teens and staying addicted throughout my 20s. I have been sober for years now, and for me, it was only possible through working the SLAA[1] program. I never actually knew it existed until a therapist suggested it to me; I wish it had been easier to find, but unfortunately whenever I would search for resources in overcoming pornography addiction, I would only ever really find places like r/NoFap.
On the one hand, I have spent more than half of my life addicted to pornography. On the other hand, I now have the gift of potentially being able to spend more than half of my time on this earth sober. The glass is definitely half full for me on this one.
Not learning how to dance until my 30s. I was once made fun of for dancing at a party as a young child (<5yo maybe) by my mother and a friend of hers, and that led to me being completely terrified of dancing until last year. I would get very angry and ashamed whenever I was in a situation where dancing was involved, and just generally feel not-good and attacked whenever somebody who loved me wanted to dance with me. I picked up swing dancing last year and now dancing is one of the most joyous activities in my life, and you can usually find me out cutting a rug on a Wednesday night.[2]
Being a lousy big brother to my one younger brother. This one probably hurts me the most and I still have not been able to forgive myself for it. Funnily enough, my younger brother loves me very much and we have a good relationship now, but when I think about all the ways I failed him when we were younger I just lose it emotionally. Working on this in therapy currently.
Not taking care of my body in my teenage years and 20s, and especially wasting all that free extra T[3] when I was going through puberty. I wish I could go back in time and drag myself to the gym when I first hit puberty! I do a wide range of physical activities now including lifting and I have a body and the kind of mass I never would have dreamed of before, but sometimes I like to imagine what I would have looked like now if I had started 20 years ago. Oh well, I can always see what I look like in 20 years' time!
[1]: My stubborn younger self would have written this due to the vaguely religious overtones of the 12 steps, but I'm glad that as a still-non-religious adult I was able to get out of my own way on this one and just focus on doing what I needed to do to get better
[2]: This is also how I found probably my most important adult friend group after the age of 30!
[3]: I will probably hop on TRT when I'm older and my T levels go down, so maybe I will get to experience something like that later in my life after all
i fully agree. i had my kids late and i am almost fifty now. i am not regretting having kids so late, but i feel much better than i thought i would feel at that age. and that's what got me thinking that having kids earlier would mean we'd now be independent and, given the higher income would be able to do a lot more interesting things than i was able to earlier. again. i have no regrets, especially because i was able to travel and live in many different places before i got married, much more than the average person, which i would not have been able to do, had i married and gotten kids earlier. so it's a tradeoff, but it's something well worth considering. just make sure you have a partner that shares your motivations.
The pain from the abcess/fistula and the two surgeries was unimaginable. Long after the second surgery, I still suffer from bouts of pain, some weeks it's gone and some weeks it's so bad, I can barely work. If the pain is there, none but the strongest of pain killers and illicit drugs will stop it. When it's especially bad, I visit a proctologist, but they all say there is nothing wrong and it's post surgical pain we can do nothing about. I kept my stool continency by the way, but sometimes I can't hold my farts now.
So, chlamydia. Extremely easy to treat and practically harmless if you discover it early. My regret is that I didn't go to the doctor sooner.
The fun continued when I got, you wouldn't believe it, monkey pox up my butt! You know those famous monkey pox sores? I had less than 10 small, harmless ones on my body, but the inside of my rectum became a bubble waffle. Doctors believe you get the strongest outbreak of them at the place where you caught them, e.g. face/mouth/throat, penis or butt. I had to take sleeping pills for 2 weeks to keep functioning. Getting off of those is very, very hard. My doctor told me he had someone with monkeypox up their urethra and that guy got catheterized for a week because he couldn't piss from pain. As a bonus, the monkeypox also gave me myocarditis. I am still healing from the sores up my butt, 2 months after I could leave quarantine. I will have an MRI of the heart in a month.
I am dumb and unlucky and yet still I deserve this because I just can't stop having casual sex with strangers.