Was talking about home economics as a school subject in another thread and i realised that for me personally, taking “Food Tech” (cookery gcse) would have impacted me pretty negatively, even though generally speaking GCSEs don’t have much of an effect on the rest of your life or education.
So i wonder if anyone else has similar revelations? My post title is also phrased more openly than that, so it doesn’t have to be school specific, but i am mainly interested in things from the teenage time period.
Another choice i made in HS, for instance: i remember being really glad to have a medium-size group of friends in high school, but in retrospect they were terrible people and i realise that there would have been huge benefits to spending more time alone and in the library - yes, i genuinely look back and wish i studied more, lol. Something which I'm always told never happens.
This one “affects me as an adult” because i ended up entering adulthood with several friends determined to force their personality to be cool, relying on manosphere influencers to determine how they should behave; a lot of these people i didn’t want to know in the first place.
I didn’t start getting stoned out of my mind until my late 30s so I guess my brain developed normally.
Go me.
I smoked weed in high school, a fair bit lol, I was definitely considered one of the “stoner kids” of the school.
In my 20’s I stopped for the most part (only a joint here or there, maybe 2 or 3 times max per year), many of the kids I went to school with that were all anti drugs and anti drinking as kids became hard drug addicts in their 20’s.
Now in my 30’s I smoke again, much easier now that I can comfortably afford this habit
Huge win!!!
I didn’t start until I was almost 40! But I think I’ve more than caught up for lost time.
The things you THOUGHT were the most important, never matter at all, but everything that you considered background noise (school, family, jobs, morals and values) that shit will determine EVERYTHING that happens after high school.
The elective classes I chose played a huge part in who I became. More so than friendships or cringey moments or anything that happened in the mandatory classes.
I took home ec and made crappy fried rice and sewed an apron with the pattern upside down. I thought it was lame at the time. Today I cook every day and I can sew well enough to fix things. They are ridiculously valuable skills.
I took electronics and made a dumb little siren that pitched up and down when you held down a button. Once every couple of years, I need some simple bit of electronics and I design a circuit board, etch it onto copper, and solder on some components. If I hadn’t chosen that elective classes, I’d think that sort of thing was super advanced.
The hilariously basic “IT” class (I made a PowerPoint slideshow with animation and fart sound effects) is probably responsible for me having a career in software development.
I wish I’d stuck with the vocational classes and ignored the utter morons I was surrounded by.
I could have made a killing and been retired by now, but I thought I was too smart and went to college, got in a bunch of debt, and crushed my soul in advertising and web dev for my best years.
Same. Last year of sixth form, when we’re applying for unis i was given really bad guidance for where to apply. I saw an apprenticeship for my degree and thought “if i can get paid for it, why not get paid for it??” But didn’t look into it any further because i was lazy. Wish i was grtting paid for my suffering right now.
In grade 12 i took calculus instead of an easy A in art class, i figured it might be useful if i went into engineering which i was vaguely interested in at the time and it helped when i did actually take calc in university
I had to choose an elective in 9th grade. Nothing looked interesting except for drafting, but I sucked at drawing. I took the drafting class.
Now it’s ~25 years later and I can go around town and point out the buildings I had a hand in designing.
I chose languages instead of the science side because I was told to do so because I was a girl. So now I’m an unemployed translator instead of a doctor.
Does forgiving my ex for cheating on me count? I think I wouldn’t be so socially unhealthy if I stood up for what I believed in.
Sounds like an instantly actionable change. Get out thsre and speak your mind
Too real
I have ADHD. In most of my formative years, I was on Ritalin and it wrecked my mental health. In high school, I pulled myself off it and my school grades tanked. I regret not finding an alternative other than “Caffeine makes me think somewhat right.”
Why does ritalin wreck your mental health?
I pulled myself off it and my school grades tanked.
So does that mean you put yourself back on it after or what happened?
Never went back. Still haven’t.
But… since your grades tanked, isn’t that bad?
I went to the mental hospital when I was 16. Lost several friends due to them thinking I was crazy.its how you know who your true friends are. It affects me today because I started a habit of running to the hospital when life gets stressful. I’ve been out of almost a whole year now. It has been 17 years and 42 hospitalizations by now.
Only one: dropping out. Best choice I ever made.
Interesting!
How so?
It put me on a path where I did what I liked doing, instead of what I was supposed to do. Today I get paid handsomely for a set of niche skills in IT that are hard to find. If I’d gone the normal route I would probably instead have been confined to being some sort of corporate sysadmin that spends most of the day fixing people’s email.
I resolved to go to college out of state. I did and it went well.
Can’t think of any offhand. Until college I pretty much just coasted along doing what was expected of me. Didn’t make any mold-breaking decisions until my 20s.
I regret spending so much time playing sports. I didn’t have enough time to figure out what I like and what I’m good at and where those things intersect so now I’m just kinda adrift as an adult. My parents forced me to play though because they were shitheads that thought my not terribly athletic self would get a full ride college scholarship through hard work so I had zero financial support for college as well, I was just glad to escape their manipulative bullshit. The lesson I should have learned was that natural talent beats hard work every time, it sucks.
I made good grades and got multiple scholarships that gave me a free ride through undergrad plus enough to buy my first gaming PC. If not for that then I’d be owing 60k in debt instead of the 20k. I also would have missed out on the PC hobby.
