What would you change and why?
I wish I had learnt social skills earlier. Brilliant at maths and science but did not start paying attention to the soft skills until mid 20s.
If it makes you feel better, there are so many people like this 😅.
On the flip side, people can also “lose” their social skills - I feel like I have had good social skills since being a kid/teenager, but they got rusty because trauma meant that I shut down and stopped talking to people as much. I was facing so much anxiety around social interactions that I sought a diagnosis for autism as an adult, but the doc made a strong case that it was other factors, and since getting a better understanding of it all I’ve become more of a social butterfly again.
Nah. What’s done is done. Hard lessons, but those are the ones I remember.
But let’s imagine I could send a message to an alternate timeline version of past me. I have some ideas.
Don’t hang out with the people on this list. Learn about mental illnesses such as narcissism, bipolar disorder, paranoia, depression, and psychosis. Read a bit about conspiratorial thinking too.
Equipped with this info, you no longer need that list of names. You can notice when it is the time to leave a particular crowd. Now that you didn’t learn things the hard way, you avoided some hardship and trouble.
Bought a house on a corner lot. I liked that we would have one less neighbor around us and the potential resale value of a corner lot property. Only realized later the pain to mow a larger area and having to deal with people letting their dogs pee all over the side yard as they pass by. Also, kids throwing trash (sometimes into the yard) as they walk home from school.
Neighbors can be a lot worse than everything you listed. Carry on by imagining the missing neighbor would have been the neighbor of nightmares
Today, between classes, I decided to go to the co-op instead of the library and doing my property reading. I told myself I’d just pick up some red lentils, since my grocery store is out. It’s only a 20 minute bus. -$113 dollars later and missing the bus and standing outside in the freezing cold for an uber and missing my property quiz again…should’ve just went to the library…
I messed up during character creation and didn’t pick the rich parents perk, it’s making gameplay much more difficult.
Damn. You too?
I thought I had all the sliders on max easy setting, but I missed that one.
I should have bought myself a home when I was a fetus.
I went to a café just before the Covid lockdown and got Covid. Been chronically ill for the past 6 years. I should have stayed at home.
Dude. That happens like twelve time a day.
In 2013 I bought a train ticket to Paris.
Why was that a mistake?
They play D&D and thought they were buying two tickets to Paris dice.
In 2015 I turned down an excellent job in the Netherlands - a country I see myself retiring in - because I had an even better job coming up in the UK at the EMEA campus of a major global corporation. Then Brexit hit, and our incompetent, populist government paralyzed themselves by making multiple contradicting promises, pissing off everyone else in Europe, presuming the most extreme implementation of Brexit imaginable to satisfy some kind of nationalist bloodlust, and refusing to entertain any kind of diplomacy or moderation. The company I was starting with waited as long as they could but ultimately had to throw in the towel - how could they have their EMEA headquarters in a country that wouldn’t even commit to allowing foreigners visit, let alone live and work here - and they shut the campus and all the jobs moved to EU countries. Desperate I took a series of miserable underpaying jobs in shitty towns. It took me eight years to find a job that would allow me to pay rent consistently and even though I like my current role it pays about a third what I would have been earning, even before adjusting for inflation.
So I wish I’d taken that job in the Netherlands: I could have citizenship by now and reclaimed the freedom and opportunity that was taken from me.
That sucks. I feel for you.
Nothing I’ve done, as stupid as it might have been, has resulted in me having a worse life altogether or has destroyed/heavily negatively altered anyone else’s life. It was stupid of me to move to a different country in a far away continent so young and without knowing how important other people’s company was in my life (and, more importantly, without speaking the language fluently enough to feel comfortable enough to crack jokes and make friends!), I flunked out of uni, my visa expired and was massively depressed… but then I joined the army, became a national, God helped me find my now wife and my wife helped me find God. I would do it again, no hesitation.
The one thing I do regret is losing touch with one friend from my army days. I simply forget to reply and then months later I feel embarrassed to do so. I have somewhat changed my ways since, and he was married so it’s not like they didn’t have each other, but I still feel a little bad about that one.
