I've never met someone that I care about the way I cared about her. Huge what if.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
Good discussion of this at https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/oir-media-hourly-files-r2...
"everyone loses 10 years to something, somewhere along the line"
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.
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.
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…
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve since switched jobs after a break but I still struggle with focus and attention span. Hoping that improves over time.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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'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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Think it would have had a huge affect on my social skills, fitness and overall mental and physical health
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
- 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.
It was such a low risk proposition at that time in my life.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.