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.
decided to start smoking weed in high school
now as an adult i vape it every day
it helps me out with so much. zero regrets
None. Every year at school was so boring I forgot what happened, but I don’t care since I had to learn everything on my own way after it happened.
:(
Don’t be sad, I forgave everyone and I now have almost the life I wanted :)
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 resolved to go to college out of state. I did and it went well.
Positively impact? Not much that I’m aware of. Negatively impact? I mean the bullying caused so mental mental damage that it’s still affecting me and making life harder 13 years later. I’m now getting help from a therapist and have been for the past year, but the road to normalcy is long and rough.
I don’t think getting bullied is a choice. I was bullied for a while until I started wresting, then I beat the shit out of three kids and the same time who continued to try to and no one said a negative word to me again.
Ended up becoming a SpEd teacher for behavior disorder, autism, and emotionally disturbed kids. I know it’s not easy, but you have to just not give a shit about what other people think besides your support group. Like close friends, family, ect. Everyone just wants to tear you down because they’re unhappy so fuck them and their opinions.
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.
All of them and none of them
The wise Jesuaurus has spoken.
I feel like so many of my days don’t actually contribute to the grander life narrative, myself - it’s a bit frustrating.
I know the solution though
Go on…
Less time playing video games, more time shaking up the routine. New tasks you don’t do regularly make the day feel longer.
I view life as a deterministic “chain reaction” of current events following from past events and me just being along for the ride so I assume all of it affects my adult life. An insignificant seeming change then could dramatically have affected the trajectory of my life. I wouldn’t change anything because it all is what led to me being what I am now.
Does that mean you absolutely love yourself in every way?
Yes. I’m absolutely flawless.
Anything else?
Well, now that borders on arrogance lol but I was going to say that that sure seemed like a healthy view, because there are certainly things I’d back and change if I could, even if it was mere exposure to certain ideas or my interpretation of them
I thought you were being a smartass - sorry about that.
No, there are thing I’d like to be otherwise but broadly speaking I’m satisfied where I am and I wouldn’t want to start tweaking anything because I can’t know the unforeseen consequences of it. This is good enough.
if HS in my school had proper way of introducing algebra,adv algebra, chemistry i would taken it and i wouldve done much better in college with it.(they dont introduce algebra to students in ms, only for the more “Advanced students”). except HS was just rehashing MiddleSchool courses.
but they already expected you to know those subject at from the getgo.
I’m curious how a cooking class would have affected you negatively.
Because we only get a set of 11 GCSEs we can take (+ in my school some people get “further maths” as a bonus one for being higher maths class, or can take their native language as a gcse), taking food tech would have left me with less knowledge basically, and less options of other things to take. Every subject i took feels like it was worthwhile. Food tech doesn’t seem to provide value added e.g helping you get work in kitchens.
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.
Installing Linux turned my life towards computers and now I’m doing a compsci degree
My entire career was steered by my decision on what degree to take while I was in high school. I was in a government scholarship program where tuition was free but you could only take a STEM degree for college in exchange.
Lots of STEM degrees out there, doesn’t sound like a bad deal. Are you happy with how it went?
For sure, no regrets. It was at the time when tech careers were just about to blow up. Some of my friends who pursued science degrees (biology, chemistry, etc.) eventually shifted to IT careers anyway, but didn’t have the headstart/advantage of having an IT-oriented degree.
Having an abortion. It was probably the one good decision I made for several years, and the only one not informed by chaos and despair. I mourned on the day for years, but have had zero regrets.
Declining an ADHD-evaluation. I didn’t think having another diagnosis would help, nor understand the symptoms enough to think I had it, and thought it would only work against me because of the stigma (certain jobs, licenses etc). This is probably the one I regret the most. It could have changed so many of the other choices.
Those are probably the ones that single handedly would have impacted my life the most if made different.
certain jobs, licenses
Wait, how? I thought you’re legally allowed to hold the diagnosis from them, or am I misunderstanding?
It probably depends on where you’re from, but you for example couldn’t do military training or become a pilot with a diagnosis, and you needed a doctors note that you were reliably medicated for a long time to be allowed a driving learners permit. Some things have changed since then though, since this was decades ago.
Pretty crazy that they used to encourage people to stay undiagnosed and unmedicated to go into dangerous careers, rather than the other way around.
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 super support for college as well, I was just glad to escape their manipulative bullshit. The lesson I should have leaned was that natural talent beats hard work every time, it sucks.
most people arnt informed alot of scholarship, grants go unawareded and dont need significant gpa achievements to get. its probably the fault of High school not preparing people properly on financial aid.
