What Do You Wish You'd Done?

A programmer friend with whom I play tabletop games has a weekly newsletter - part of its appeal, and the appeal of tabletop games for me, is being part of something I wasn't into when I was younger. I was a teenager in the 80s; I could have gotten curious about programming languages, etc, but I didn't -- now when I read my friend's newsletter where he discusses the pros and cons of markup lanugages, I think, wow, if I had his skill set, there's stuff I could do that might be interesting to me. It's not like some "oh no I have ruined my life" thing I'm thinking about, just a "that's something I certainly could have done, but didn't, and life might have been different in some ways if I had."

Are there specific things about which you think "I might have done that"? What are they?

("Wish" is a strong word, and I mean more "wonder about, but wonder often enough that it veers into wish territory sometimes")

Gotten a degree in something other than journalism. My father's suggestion of the viticulture/enology program at MSU wasn't such a bad idea after all.

I could see myself having gone to library school long before now, given that I've worked in libraries most of my adult life now. For a variety of reasons I'm happy not to have done so, but it would have been interesting to see what I could have done at the fully professional level in the spots I've worked at. Alternately, I really enjoyed teaching writing while in grad school; however, programs designed for accreditation/degrees in teaching composition were (likely now still are) few and far between, so I only discovered that particular knack/skill I had in a grad school context which wasn't designed to do anything further with it.

Despite all the missteps and mistakes I've made along the way, somehow I managed not to ruin my life. I'm pretty contented with the end results, even allowing for the imaginary excellences of my alternate lives.

Wish I had studied computer science earlier instead of dicking around as a young lad. It's really really cool stuff and it blows my mind on the reg. Didn't expect to enjoy it that much when I "pivoted" to it, my attitude going in was "I need to make money". Couldn't have worked out much better in terms of picking a field that is personally fulfilling/enriching, just wish I got into it earlier.

I wish I'd ordered a lemonade with my sandwich a couple hours ago.

I'm sure I could've done more math and science stuff if I hadn't had such shitty STEM education in K-12. I've been slowly trying to learn more about electronics over the past couple of years, and stuff makes such perfect sense once I work it out but given the shaky foundation I'm building on it's usually a drawn-out process getting to those solutions. Like tying a knot with my brain or something.

And, yeah, coding. The little I've done has come to me really naturally but I'm so far behind and incomplete in my education that I doubt I'll ever do much of consequence with it.

i often wish i went to art school. i created a lot of art in high school, even won the major visual art award at my school the year i graduated, but i never saw it as anything more than just a hobby and i stopped creating art when i went to college. also my brother went to art school and i didn't want to just follow his path. in retrospect i think it would have been really fun though to spend more time immersed in a community of artists and lived a life centered around creating things. i have a low-stress cushy librarian career and it is cool but i wonder about that other path.

i met my wife in college and we've been together for 13 years, but i often wish i got married later and spent more time as a single person or dating around, or exploring different kinds of sexual relationships.

i have two kids and i adore them, my life is truly better with them in my life, but i am right in the middle of the most challenging early childhood years w/ lack of sleep and tantrums and stress and in those most difficult moments when i just want escape i sometimes wonder what it would be like to be childless and have more freedom to myself.

i would have lived abroad for a year during university. i could've lived in havana, zaragoza, or santiago. i chose to stay in my comfort zone and stick around glasgow. that was dumb.

i used to do some really rudimentary programming stuff when i was a kid in the early 90s, wish id kept that on, the idea of coding for a living sounds v boring to me, but I'm hardly stoked on my current work and i would make more $$$s .

It must be amazing to work in a job or vocation where you're actually doing something of value to society. I thought I was for a while.

Can't complain too much - as long as I have something interesting to get up and do each morning, I'm mostly fine really..

Learned drums left-handed instead of right-handed.

Wish I had studied computer science earlier

^^^ cosign

Like the OP I was a teenager in the 80s, but I did get into programming, then gave it up. Wish I'd stuck with it rather than putting it aside for 20 years.

i've spent my whole life in the eastern united states, apart from traveling and a study abroad in college (jim it was in santiago! it was cool but i wish i chose lima, peru or mexico city, ha). i wish i spent a year or two living somewhere else in the US - new mexico, colorado, california, texas, seattle. somewhere else.

I wish I'd just done what I really wanted to do in art school instead of tempering it with practical notions that led me to get a degree that I've barely even used.

i don't like to spend a lot of time thinking about this
doesn't seem fruitful for me
prefer to do more things rather than lamenting things i did not do

...and if you see your mom this weekend, don't forget to tell her
SATAN SATAN SATAN SATAN SATAN SATAN SATAN SATAN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbs6GvLeEXQ

I started studying for the commodities broker's exam when I was 19, but never took it. I'm pretty sure that if I'd gotten that certification and worked in that industry my life would have been very different. I also wish I'd worked harder to really learn an instrument as a kid. I own a trumpet, and I can get it to make the same noise twice if I want to, but I don't really know how to play it, and I can't read or write music.

Unlike everyone else I wish I hadn't studied computing because it was boring and I was/am terrible at it and also I didn't really have any idea what Computer Science was.

(hated the theoretical 80% of the course, didn't even like the practical parts because the theory had beaten any capacity to enjoy anything out of me already and also it turned out that dabbling with graphics and lame puzzle games in QBasic was in no way preparation for "attention scum, your practical this term is to write a compiler in ML, we aren't going to teach you anything about ML but there are two copies of a book about it in the library to go round all 100 of you. oh, they're both already checked out. well, have fun with that")

OK, rant over.

I wish I'd done more languages at school, maybe done something language-related at university, tried to keep doing creative things. Also I wish I'd kept in touch with people, been nicer, been less afraid. (I am still not learning this lesson in my day-to-day life tbh)

I can't really imagine doing anything differently in a way that I could have taken advantage of or appreciated. Sure, at this point in my life I would love to have lived all over the place, learned languages or coding, or taken a lot of piano lessons as a kid, but I just did not have that in me at the time.

I also think about art school sometimes. Or just art. I don't think I'm all that talented, but I loved drawing and painting as a teenager and I occasionally feel a pang that I didn't develop it more.

no use re-writing the past bc once you theoretically entertain a new timeline, all bets are off. as the butterfly effect shows the tiniest inconsistencies can have massive repercussions, going back in time and making even the slightest adjustment could possibly have fatal consequences. maybe you lucked out your first time around by not being in that intersection during an accident.

it's just as useful, and probably healthier, to fantasize about an idealized future rather than an idealized past you know can never be.

i wish i'd been less depressed, mainly

Uh, I think I spent a number of years cultivating anxiety thinking I'd put things aside (or not pursued them) and the time had passed. Honestly, I think it was more about cultivating anxiety. (So number one is always "I wish I'd addressed this anxiety thing!")

I wish I'd studied abroad during college or branched out more socially during that time. Seems to be a popular one so far.
I wish I'd adopted a cat when I was in my early 20s instead of when I was nearly 30.

uhh I think I've made my peace with most of the rest. mookie otm

Taken a dressmaking course when i was in my teens instead of 30 years later cos I could have got into this much earlier.

Picked up a bass as had been suggested when I was a mid teen. By the guy who was playing bass for the London Psych revival High Tide.

Managed to do the weekly free club entry thing cos i was the first person to start dancing and the offer was there.
Taken the job with the 2nd hand clothes shop on the King's Rd cos that would have been promising.

Started singing for the In-Stinks.
Hitched to Israel and a number of other quixotic adventures.

no use re-writing the past bc once you theoretically entertain a new timeline, all bets are off. as the butterfly effect shows the tiniest inconsistencies can have massive repercussions, going back in time and making even the slightest adjustment could possibly have fatal consequences. maybe you lucked out your first time around by not being in that intersection during an accident.

it's just as useful, and probably healthier, to fantasize about an idealized future rather than an idealized past you know can never be.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Friday, October 21, 2016 12:54 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah god forbid anybody reflects on their life choices.. what a useless activity...

it's possible to do this kind of thing without falling into an abyss of despair (speaking as someone who often finds himself in an abyss of despair), it's not like opening some awful psychic scab that will never heal or something. now if you're constantly regretting shit, well yeah that's not good

oh yeah languages is a good one. i could've taken french in addition to spanish in school and university but didn't. i now live in canada and basically am precluded from living in the second biggest city/huge cultural hub because i don't speak french.

depending on your residency status, quebec will literally pay for you to learn french. if i was canadian or had residency there, i would be looking into it

I wish I had grown a little bit taller
I wish that with that added height I had practiced hard and become good at basketball

jeez dude how much taller do you need to be

depending on your residency status, quebec will literally pay for you to learn french. if i was canadian or had residency there, i would be looking into it

― mh 😏, Friday, October 21, 2016 1:13 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they will pay me but it will be like welfare level pay iirc

Important, perhaps, for some itt to reflect on Joan Crawford's intent in the op. I don't think this was meant to be about lamentation but rather, like, if you'd chosen a different adventure what page might you have turned to, and would you have seen a tiger or a ghost pirate and wouldn't that have been cool?

There is a distinct difference in my own head between 'I wonder what it would've been like if I'd studied ___ instead of ___' and 'oh fuck, why didn't I ____ at the age of __, I'm such a stupid idiot who totally ruined his life'.

I wish I'd kept my magic: the gathering cards from the mid 90s

yeah, otm, old lunch

oh yeah! and I should have totally had a college radio show. I have a few friends who did, and if I'd done it, I would have met them a lot sooner and it'd be cool to see if I'd kept up with it

Having a college radio show is one of the few things I managed to get right.

I think I spent a number of years cultivating anxiety thinking I'd put things aside (or not pursued them) and the time had passed. Honestly, I think it was more about cultivating anxiety.

Aargh OTM.

But, OK, in deference to Old Lunch: I wish I had learned more languages at school because I'd have picked them up faster and my accent might be better now (some people say adulthood is too late, though tbf a few people say it isn't, w/e), and I do wish I'd done something different at university and I really have no guesses as to what except that I've always thought languages were interesting. And then maybe I could have travelled more in my 20s, which I regret missing out on, and if so I would have seen a bunch of awesome things and maybe met people abroad etc.

But on the other hand, I know I had a couple of travel opportunities I didn't take up because they seemed overwhelming or w/e, so, Jordan's line also OTM: I just did not have that in me at the time

That's a good attitude, I think. I should try to be more at peace with things.

i wish i had had some kind of mentor figure, a liberal uncle or something, who could have taught me something useful after high school and before college and maybe got my head out of my ass a little bit. it would have been great to have some kind of real world immersion before college, especially outside of my dysfunctional family. i don't think i could have really done it on my own though. sometimes i think about being that uncle some day.

this one's a little crazy but sometimes i kind of wish i had gone on a mormon mission, just for the foreign living and language experience. i knew some return missionaries who basically moved on from the church afterward without looking back. i feel like maybe i could have been one of those guys, gone through that initiation process, found myself, and had more confidence moving on with my life afterward.

ooh that's a good one!

I wish I'd kept my magic: the gathering cards from the mid 90s

^my one true regret

as far as career stuff goes, what if i'd had the guts to do the music composition degree i actually wanted to do instead of opting for film because it was easier then pulling the brakes on my liberal arts inclinations with a library degree that i kind of despised and wasn't very good at. i wouldn't have the low-level but stable job that i do. and am kind of stubbornly learning to like. maybe i would have still saddled myself with insanely irresponsible student loan debts, maybe not... but yeah, not worth getting lost in. on the other hand all that past is good to process and digest in order to face the present fully, as corny as that sounds.

i'll try to avoid the long litany of more existential and personality based answers to this question and simply say that i wish i had gone to a different university--one much farther away from home.

...and yeah obv the almost universal desire to have worked harder at musical instruments and foreign languages.

Kylie Minogue

also i have a kind of Citizen Kane-like regret about relationships left un-pursued for one reason or another.

I wish I'd studied abroad during college
I wish I'd taught English in Japan after college
I wish I'd stuck with an instrument during high school
I wish I'd learned the discipline/mechanics portion of writing

(I want everyone to appreciate the herculean effort it took for me to NOT make my second ILX Skee Lo joke this week on this thread)

Noted.

i always think about things i might have done when i was younger. get help for depression/anxiety in my teens and 20's. that might have changed my life in a big way. maybe get my GED like two of my best friends did instead of being miserable in high school for 5 years. oh so many things i could have done to make things easier later probably. but then again everything i did led me to where i am now and i kinda like where i am now. so maybe my years in the wilderness were worth it. who knows?

been a little bit taller
been a baller

ffs

mookieproof, what's wrong w/ what I said? do you think writing at the highest level of discipline/mechanics is just a matter of 30 Days to a Better Vocabulary or what?

I'm too young to have any idea what the things I might have done but didn't do are, I mainly wish I had insisted on being treated for depression before I was 19/20. My last few years have been good and getting better and I have a cat so I'm not sure if anything isn't optimal right now.

my only major regret is not kicking my family of rabid psychopaths out of my life sooner. who would've thought, people who think raping and trying to murder people is hilarious might not be the best people to have around in your life. regret practicing criminal law because there's some fucked up shit out there that doesn't even make the news because it's so messed up. wish i could forget some of that. kind-of wished i'd had a normal life that didn't make people poop their pants whenever i'd share it. 😎

on a lighter note, i wish i pursued comedy and music more, but at this point the stuff i was into has already been done better by other people, so that's that.

a good woman, financial independence, and enough free time to enjoy the world, that's the life for me. nature, travel, writing, a night out dancing with that special lady, that's all on the table still. everything else is a waste of time anyway. regret's kind-of a waste of time, it's not like we'll be worrying about this shit in the grave.

i wish i'd taken my obvious chemical imbalances and generally broken brain seriously and pursued treatment so i could've actually started doing any of the things i wanted to do with my life, all of which i was pretty certain of at a very young age (and still)

on a more hobbyistic note, i wish i learned woodworking/carpentry/building stuff, so many times i've thought to myself [xxxxx] would be so much easier if i could just build it or fix it my damn self

wrote that before finishing the thread, basically what silby said

also wish i learned to read music, i feel like i could still hypothetically learn an instrument but reading it is just beyond me. i think if i hadn't stopped taking piano lessons at like age 8 i would've been able to work from there. played other instruments in band thru middle school but never got the reading down, just played by memory mostly (badly)

somehow I ended up at a very out-of-the-way middle school, in a corn field, and got the chance to take a woodworking class at the age of 12 and that was definitely a highlight even many years later

qualx otm all round re mental health and music reading though I've heard Lionel Richie can't read music and look at him!

he's Lionel Richie!

I wish I'd done more with the electronic music I was writing in my early 20s. I was introduced to a friend of my (grown up) younger brother who on meeting me said 'aw you're the guy who made that wicked track - I still have it on my iphone'. I've also had people I barely know tell me they used that tune as their wake up alarm every morning.

I knew it was a great bit of music and I should have knuckled down and sent it out to a few labels cos really the IDM scene at the time was going through a stage when practically anyone could release anything.
But of course it was all down to self doubt. At the time I couldn't believe that anything I wrote was anywhere near worthy of wider attention beyond my friends and family.

Similar to qualx, I enjoy messing about with synths and Ableton but have no grounding in music theory. I had group music lessons at primary school, up to the age of eleven, but pretty much pretended to learn anything and frequently just mimed in group performances - something nobody noticed in six years of doing it.

sometimes I also wish I'd studied a different degree at a different uni, but then I would never have met one of my best and lifelong friends, so I don't mind too much

I wasn't allowed to take music A-level because I didn't do music GCSE because pre-GCSE music in my school was taught by two massive twunts who would spend the whole class getting us to copy notation off the chalkboard

treated for depression before I was 19/20

I was sent to the Dr when I was maybe 14 after some uncontrollable crying in school incident and I panicked and insisted everything was fine and that was the end of it. I do sometimes wonder if I'd have got help sooner/better if I'd been more honest, but then I haven't had much luck with treatment since, so, oh well.

I also regret not sending my not very good electronic music to a label in that period when small local indie labels were signing any old electronic rubbish to look like they were down with the kids.

(PS dog latin your stuff was actually good, unlike me, just wishing to have abused the desperation of others for possible coolness points!)

Learnt some practical skills like mechanical or plumbing or something. Wish I'd picked up some of my grandfather's woodworking technique since he wasa cabinet maker. Would be very useful.

Improved my cookery massively. So I could actually do something more complex than veg stews, omelettes, stir fries etc. Can use a breadmaker but I guess anybody with the time can.

Read a greater proportion of the books I keep getting. There's a lot of stuff I wish I could have already ingested and more news tuff all the time.

Traveled more, did hitch most of the way around the UK's main cities for a couple fo years but do wish I'd seen more fo mainland Europe and Asia etc. & the only parts of America and Africa I've seen have been where my dad was. New York and short trips to the Pocanos and London Ontario via Boston and Kenya which was mainly Nairobi, Kisumu and Kusa, his home village and Mombasa and the roads in between.
& Europe I saw from various trains on an Interrail pass 30 years ago.

I wish I was a fisherman, tumbling on the sea. Tumbling, tumbling, always tumbling.

I did get to stay in the house they recorded Fisherman's blues in thanks to knowing members of a band called Garland Sun who were recording there a couple of years later.

excellent!

i got to stay in a fishermans house which was often enough reason for the blues

i wish id had less of an attitude about it being a mandatory subject and just learnt irish because its beautiful

when i first learned how to play golf when i was a kid, i wish i had concentrated on hitting it as far as i possibly could first and then worked on the accuracy, rather than praticising hitting it straight first then trying to add distance, which is what i did. i think it was the difference between peaking at a mid/high single figure handicap and low single figure handicap.

there are plenty of other areas of my life where i should have taken a different path which perhaps would have led to me not working a barely above minimum wage job requiring minimal skill but none that i think of as much as the golf one tbh.

I have no regrets. I think regrets amount to just wishing you were a different person. Sure, I'd like to be smarter, faster, more talented, better looking, more confident from an earlier age, but all that basically means different parents, who would have had a different kid, and I'm not that person, so what's the point?

-punched several people in the face
-started therapy in my early 20s
-lived sans roommates earlier
-taken advantage of all the opportunities to socialize and explore in my early 20s instead of trying to cram it all into my mid 30s (particularly traveling)

other than that I'm perfect and should be emulated and studied

Wish I'd been more dedicated to art in school (and more encouraged by my teachers), so instead of getting stuck in a comfy boring well paid career I could have been a struggling penniless artist.

joined public service straight out of school and gotten educated along the way while being paid and promoted while doing so (and having almost half of my pensionable career done by now)

I have no regrets. I think regrets amount to just wishing you were a different person. Sure, I'd like to be smarter, faster, more talented, better looking, more confident from an earlier age, but all that basically means different parents, who would have had a different kid, and I'm not that person, so what's the point?

I do find this compelling, but it seems focused on regrets about my own life-goals, e.g. careers, relationships, intellectual/artistic stuff. Does it break down if the regrets are big enough? What about where regret crosses into guilt? If I was stupid and by being stupid I hurt someone else, it doesn't feel like a good response to say that that's the person I was and regret is illogical.

There's also luck, outside circumstances, cognitive limitations. Any decision is a risk. I could make a rational decision between two directions that I later feel unhappy about, without feeling that the problem is that I wasn't smart or confident enough to take the other path. That's a basis for regret.

probably wished i hadn't fucked my life up but then the kids are quite cool so i guess everything else was the price

At least once a year I wish I'd studied computer science and coding properly as aspects of my job that incorporate that are the ones I enjoy doing most. Then I think I could teach myself, but never do.

Does it break down if the regrets are big enough? What about where regret crosses into guilt?

I think of that as just guilt, remorse, different from regret. "I wish I hadn't said or done that" is different from "I wish I had" in my perspective

I have no regrets. I think regrets amount to just wishing you were a different person....and I'm not that person, so what's the point?

Parole denied.

ha

Also really not one for much in the way of kicking oneself over mistakes, or nostalgia either, for that matter, I really can't stand the way ruminating ends up making me feel. Much rather spend that energy trying to find a way to get on with things. Not saying this makes me better or worse than anyone, at all, just how I learned to operate.

rip van wanko OTM

I gotta say I am a ruminative motherfucker and there are serious things I resent and regret and wish happened differently but "I wish I stayed in science" has literally never been one of them.

being consumed with self-loathing and regret is working great for me!

http://67.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyea132L651qc67tzo7_250.gif

lol

the dishes

I wonder what it would have been like if I got a different haircut when I was in high school.

if only I hadn't summoned the Cenobites

it was the best move, really

I wonder what it would have been like if I got a different haircut when I was in high school.

Growing a beard at 17 was a mistake, admittedly.

http://deadspin.com/whatever-happened-to-the-nfl-combines-fastest-man-1682921832

I'm kind of happy where I am (where 'where I am' is literally in Melbourne Airport about to return from a fortnight's holiday with a girl I'm nuts about) so any of the more "that would have changed my life" feel like a bad deal - other things could have happened, I feel incapable of saying definitely "that would be better".

Mostly then just "I wish I'd spent more time talking to them while they were around" - my father more than anyone.

nostalgia is so gross. my family is extended uhb-sassed with nostalgia. 90% of my extended family gatherings end with a group of people sitting in a darkened room wistfully reminiscing about a not-very-interesting-in-the-first-place anecdote that occurred in 1930s-1960s and in which, often, none of the principles are still present/alive.

to the thread question: when i was a teenager/college kid/just out of college i used to think i was a nice person. and that it was really important to be a nice person. and that 'nice' (pushover, bleeding-heart sincerity, mawkishly sentimental) was a virtuous way of living. 'nice' as a personality trait also involved a lot of clueless passive-aggressive martrydom that lacked self-awareness. it was only in my mid-twenties that i realized that niceness was a bullshit kind of ethos, and that it was okay to be a little petty, venal and peevish. my parents, now in their '70s, are still into the idea of being 'nice' and it is sometimes hard for me to spend time around them now, because it is such a simplistic way of existing. i wish i'd figured this out earlier.

^ wish i'd edited that

Your story on another thread, about how you started your year with your students, is a great text to go with that subtext.

i.e. being nice, going along, can be a great way to just waste everyone's time. Just say what's up! We got shit to do. Respectful is one thing, "nice" is another.

I'm doing something right now that is like a textbook "what do you wish you'd done". That is, jumping into one of those quickly intense relationships that blindsides you and just following it for a minute. It feels sort of crazy because this person lives across the country. We aren't sudden boyfriends or anything there's just a connection. A few days after I met him I saw this job in my career path there and I'm applying for it this weekend. Whether or not I get an interview is irrelevant, just the fact that I'm doing it feels cool, logistically it's a huge stretch for me right now and I've only been in my current job for a year, but I'm not really risking anything yet and I just want to keep going down this rad exhilarating path that opened up out of nowhere for a minute even if it gets too rocky and I turn around or it leads to a dead end in the bushes where I have some sex and then move on.

Respectful is one thing, "nice" is another.

Yeah. Respect is good. Kindness is good. Compassion is good. They all come from a place of knowing and firmness. Niceness is just sort of flabby, mindless and pointless.