The road not taken: moments when your life might have changed

If I didn't take my current job in the '90s, chances are I'd be happier now. But I wouldn't have met my wife either, so it could have been heaps worse.

If we hadn't moved house last year, we'd have been burgled a second time.

If I hadn't stayed up until 3am watching Rage one Saturday night in 1998, I might never have bought any Stereolab ever.

If my wife didn't go abroad in 2000, I wouldn't have met loads of really good friends.

Man, that's a great question.. Too bad I can't think of any such moments. Sadly, there were moments when I wish I had the courage to make it a choice, but at the time, I wasn't mature enough to tell my family to fuck off and not make decisions for me.. I was happily content to do what they told me, as I didn't want to rock the boat.

Those days are now long gone, and so far all the choices I've made have been pretty linear and important. The decision to do all this travelling the past few months (as oppose to look for a job right away) will hopefully change me for the better (even though I will have time to look for a job after the travelling, but still..)

If Gear's roommate took Trucker Hat Guy into the bedroom, I might never have found this site.

OH my god is that how you got here?

Yep. A mate showed me the thread, so it wasn't even a Google thing.

Did someone just see The Butterfly Effect?

If I hadn't went to a certain youth camp in 1996, I wouldn't probably have met some of the people who are know my best friends. Then again, this would only mean I'd have a somewhat different set of friends. This also applies to choosing the high school I went to, and choosing what to study at the university.

Also, if a certain friend wouldn't have gotten me interested in anarchism, I probably wouldn't call myself an anarchist today. I'd still be left-wing anyway, I think.

If I hadn't walked into the Tiger's Head pub in Downham in 1995 I would never have met my first girlfriend, never have found myself a whole new and exciting group of mates, never have gone round France in my A-Level summer, chances are my life would be unrecognisable.

If I had answered one more question correctly in my A-Level music paper I would have been at Warwick University instead of Exeter, might have been much happier, may never have dropped out and moved elsewhere and met many of my current friends.

If a bloke called Dan had never asked about decent webzines on another message board back in 2001, I might not have heard about Freakytrigger, and therefore ILX, and therefore a lot of great people.

There are a few other things that MIGHT have improved my life had I actually done them, but I'll get round to that later. A lot of them seem a bit recent and close to the bone as well.

One of my biggest regrets was offering a really flimsy excuse to a couple of music producers when they asked me to come into a studio to sing some jingles and do some voice overs. I was rigid with fear and gave some ridiculous reason why I couldn't do it. They saw right through it, decided I would be unreliable and never asked again. The two went on to score some pretty good stuff for film and tv.

And I missed this and a similar chance a while later, mainly through fear.

- If my Dad had never bought "O Superman" twice in 1981 (I trod on his first copy as a one-year old and broke the record), I would never have found this site.

- I remember 5pm New Years Eve 2002 delibitating whether to go to a massive thumping drg-fuelled rave in London, or to go the boring but cheap option of simply going down the pub for a few pints. I opted for the latter and ended up meeting my first long-term girlfriend. If I'd gone to the rave I would have ended up with a comedown or worse. Funny eh?

Lots of things could have changed in my life....

If I had gone off to Johnson and Wales and became a chef, I probably wouldn't be working here or in a restaurant for that matter.

If I didn't go and visit my friend at college that one night I wouldn't have met my wife.

My If is: If I had gone out with the pretty girl whose birthday I shared in 1984.

Looking back, I must say that I now think 11 is too young for that kind of thing anyway.

Maybe it was 1985, come to think of it. But still that is too young.

I still share her birthday, by the way, and vice versa.

If I had worked harder and Maths and gotten a C, I would have gone and done Communications in DCU instead of English in Trinity and would never have met any of my mates and would have a completely different life.

And if I hadn't shot that beardy man in Sarajevo, that band would have a different name and we'd all be living in Communist Russia.

When I was 15 I had german measles and almost cancelled going to a party of a group of people I didn't know. I decided to chance it, and at the party I met two groups of wonderful people who I spent the best part of the next three years hanging out with, thus defining my teenage (and, indeed, my adult) years.

The depressing thing now is wondering what amazing things I've now missed out on because, say, I didn't go to that party in Bristol on Saturday, or because I stayed in the other week instead of going to see a gig my friend's band played, or whatever.

i feel like i have a lot of these. but i'm sure that everyone does, it's just that several of mine have had very obvious impacts on my life...

if i hadn't been a commitmentphobe who was living with a boyfriend, i wouldn't have (secretly) applied to get a MSc at LSE.

if i hadn't moved around ann arbor so much for the year before that, my acceptance materials would have arrived on time.

if my acceptance materials had arrived on time, i wouldn't have lived in chicago and i would have been in the LSE class of 2001 rather than 2002.

if i'd been in the class of 2001, i never would have met niall and kate, therefore making the majority of IRL friends i still hang out with in london. also, i wouldn't be in my current job, which i got through niall in 2002.

and those are all just in the last few years!

You moved to the other side of the world to get away from your boyfriend? Wow, that's impressive.

Very good question. These are not all my answers, some are too personal for me to talk about openly. I can say:

* I was accepted to three UC campuses -- UCLA was my first choice and I happily took it, but if I had gone to either Berkeley or Santa Cruz, then I'm not sure at all what course my life would have taken on a variety of fronts.

* I was only accepted to one grad school out of the five I applied to, and I could deferred going to UCI or simply decided against it (and in respects there are ways I might have been happier if I had done so). But if I didn't go, there would be far, FAR too many friends and people I would not have met -- Donut B., Stripey, Elvis T., Jake, the list goes on. Through Donut B., meanwhile, I encountered alt.music.alternative in 1993, and things went from there, if you like!

* On a wider scale, I could have not taken chances on meeting people via the Net and ILX on my overseas trips, and related to that it's possible I might not have taken those trips at all. I am very glad I have and I mean to keep doing so.

* If I hadn't single-handedly decided to become the regular music reviewer at UCI's student paper, and then parlayed that experience into being bold/curious enough to ask Tom Erlewine about an AMG job, then there's a LOT of writing of mine that never would have been, while the money for many of those trips and other things besides would not have existed for me.

* If I hadn't decided to try and participate in NaNoWriMo, I would not have found the confidence in my ability to write long narratives that held together and entertained people who read them. I had always been told I was a 'good writer' in the fiction sense but I had no real belief that I could ever carry something beyond a scene or a short scrap. My current work in finding an agent -- and then hopefully steps after that -- is a result.

Etc. etc. Very interesting question indeed.

Had I gone to a different university (and I really should have because the one I did go to was too expensive) my life would be vastly different. That choice has led with varying degrees of directness to job/location/girlfriend/etc.

Apart from that, I think having my mom teach me to read at a fairly young age was monumental.

Oh fuck this shit, fate fate fate all the way. No questions asked.

around this time last year or slightly earlier, i could have taken a job in which i could have worked from home and did programming stuff. it would have involved quitting my last job (which at the time was only recently made permanent). which may or may not have shifted my career path much closer to what i wanted to do.

If I don't fuck up this interview this afternoon things may change.

mookieproof, otm

If I'd not been bitten by the neighbour's dog and taken to the emergency room, I'd certainly be dead. The doctor there found the lumpiness in my side that was actually kidney cancer and I would have definitely been a goner if even another week had elapsed.

Seventh grade algebra - if I don't sit behind M*ndy on the first day of class, we don't become friends by cheating our way through the year (the teacher let us grade our own papers/tests).

If we aren't friends, many things change over the next few years, but the main one is that she doesn't get me a job at a restaurant she works at. Without that job, I might have paid more attention/shown up more my first semesters in college and kept on with my poli-sci/law school plan. I never would have discovered my interest in film and photography, and I'd have been miserable.

If only I hadn't missed that train I could have caught my talentless and frankly unattractive boyfriend with that scary domineering American woman and would have met a nice Scottish bloke who used to be Hugh Grant's ok-to-have-gay-friend and would have nice blond hair and be nowhere near as utterly stupid.

What Ned said re: Nanowrimo; if you count kid stuff, I'm sure I'd started 20 or 30 novels before finishing one. Sometimes I just got the first page written, you know, sometimes I got 20,000 words. Since finishing one, I've finished five, and I can identify the false starts much faster now that I realize what I'm going to need to have going.

Everything else is just photo albums.

Douglas's 's surely a good question.
And I regret that I am not even remotely in good enough form to consider properly answering it.
All in all, amongst various steps taken and propositions turned down, there's really only one "if" that, having decided it the way I did ten years ago, will certainly continue to haunt me for the rest of my life. A quite maddening either/or situation it was. And right now, as basically the same issue has suddenly popped up again lately, it's something I don't want discuss at all.

If I hadn't decided on a whim to go to CMJ my senior year of college (despite not knowing anyone else who was going), I might never have gotten to know NA.

If I had accepted that job offer and moved to Chicago right after college instead of going back to VA and the bf, I wonder if I would have stayed here this long. I don't think I could have afforded to live here then.

If I had never bought my first guitar, I would probably have totally different views about music in general. And I don't think I would have joined the college radio station either, which would play a big part in that.

If I had waited for my ride in March 1996 instead of getting pissed off and deciding to walk it, not one aspect of my life since would've occurred, besides the inevitability of aging.

If I hadn't been in so much of a pointless rush to cross the road on Saturday 24 October 1998 I wouldn't have been hit by that bus and I wouldn't have ended up the sad fuck-up you now witness.

Here's my own: in January, 1992, I knew I wanted to move out of my parents' place in East Lansing, Michigan--but I couldn't decide whether I wanted to move to New York (big city, grandmother I could stay with there) or Seattle (interesting music scene, woman I was kinda-sorta involved with & could stay with there). I didn't fully decide until I hit the I-80 intersection. I was in the left lane at the time, so New York it was. My life would have been VERY different, I think.

Mid-80s, Eindhoven station, all blurry following a Legendary Pink Dots show, I'm approached by a mysterious stranger with a mysterious package to deliver to Prague. I took the train back to Amsterdam, and that has made all the difference.

douglas, that story is so awesome! did you really do that?

I knew there was a related thread around somewhere.