I dated a girl in college, and we were deeply in love. So much so that we got engaged. The one problem was that her family didn't approve of her dating me because of my race. She had initially been hesitant to introduce me to them, but I had insisted that she do it. When they threatened to disown her if she married me, she said that we should just do it and live our lives together. But I was too much of a coward to follow through and tried instead to convince her family to accept me. They never did and our relationship feel apart.
I've never met someone that I care about the way I cared about her. Huge what if.
I had a similar experience. Her father threatened to fly over and take her back forcefully if she didn't stop dating me. She told him she stopped but kept seeing me.
Eventually she hoped to elope. She also had a deadline for leaving the country, visa etc... I wasn't as sure as you sounded tho and decided even though things were great we had not been together long enough to get married and she shouldn't give up her family for me.
Two years after she got back they made her choose a husband from one of 3 from a matchmaker. She said she wasn't in love with the guy but she was doing her duty.
Sorry that happened to you. I had a similar experience not being approved for being different with my first high school crush. We both liked each other as much as young kids can like each other. What surprised me was when it came time to ask her to date formally, she didn't seem interested. This was surprising to me based on all of our interactions and I found out a couple of months later from her friend that it was because of me being "different" and fear of how her family would react if she dated someone "different". She didn't want to upset me so she never told me, but damn it hurt just as bad to hear it from someone else.
So what's my regret? Well there's a couple but the biggest one is that instead of embracing being different and who I was and where I came from, I instead tried to hide it as best I could. I avoided anything to do with my native culture or language because I think I was so hurt internally that someone who appeared to have feelings for me would put them aside for fear of their family's reaction. I even gave up my interests that I feared were too nerdy and contributed to my being "different", after all I am on hacker news so there's some nerd in me, right?
Ended up going off to college in a big city school where different was normal and got back to my roots and interests and this put me on a wonderful path that lead to great success early in my career, stronger relationships with my family and culture, and a much happier life. It feels good to embrace "you", even if some small-town folk may think it's "different".
My secondary regret is that I never reached back out to her to see if she still had similar feelings or maybe tried to get a relationship going on as more mature adults. I've thought about her a good bit but I think what I've realized is that it's not so much her that I'm interested in, it's that all I wanted was to be accepted by her and that maybe if I were to be accepted, I could prove to myself that I'm really not "different".
Always had an obsessive personality. Raised Christian. Always had a bent for pushing boundaries. Got interested in the nuerochemistry of psychoactive substances. Got very involved in educating myself about drug usage, until I was finally comfortable trying them.
Queue ~6 years of polysubstance abuse, wasted money, and fake ass friends. Did everything under the sun I could get my hands on. I think the list of unique drugs I did was something like 40. I was high on at least something every day for years. Most days more than 1 thing.
I never got truly "hooked" on anything thankfully. I just loved being high. What I didn't realize was that the opportunity cost was enormous. Every second I was in my room fucked out of my gourd staring at the ceiling was a second that I wasn't out making friends. Being a normal person. It was a really solitary and lonesome existence, just retreating further and further into my own head each day. Additionally, being a "drug guy" just completely shuts the door to a whole strata of people : e.g. good luck meeting a woman that shares your Christian morals if you are a drug enthusiast.
Now I'm off the bullshit. Straightened my life out, graduated college, gainfully employed. Etc. But I feel that I've missed the boat on having a fulfilling social life. I don't really know how to meet people. And whenever I talk with people I can't help but feel like I'm some kind of alien.
I'm working on it. But it's so hard to know how to work on it. Especially now that I work from home, and live alone in a suburb.
Regarding social skills, I feel like I can relate to how you describe your situation. I was extremely socially anxious when I was younger and basically avoided any social interactions I could. Throughout highschool and college I never had any friends to speak of or dated. I mostly shut myself away with video games and other solitary interests.
I moved to a new city away from my family when I was 27 and that was when I finally pushed myself to start changing things as the loneliness really hit me. I started going to meetup events and work lunches with people. I started reading up on social skills and trying my hand at dating. Roughly 5 years since then I've actually done pretty well for myself, made some good friends, had some good experiences with dating, and I'm rather happy with how things have shaped out. I'm still kind of awkward socially but gotten more comfortable with putting myself out there anyway and found that a lot of people don't really mind.
Just chiming in to say how proud I am of you, as I’m went and still going though something similar. Its scary and hard and you get burned a lot but I wouldn’t trade the friends I made and the relationships I’ve invested in since becoming more in touch and open, including my family, are my absolute proudest accomplishments
I am of the opinion that people who have gone though this are more empathetic caring people
Since I'm getting out and working on something similar right now - is there anything(s) you'd recommend in particular for the reading part of learning?
The opportunity cost is something I've never thought of before. Thank you for that insight because it has made me start thinking about things I'm doing that, while not necessarily harmful, may be coming at the expense of things I'll regret deferring when I'm older.
Congratulations for putting that behind you. If you were raised with church as part of your life, you may actually have an advantage when it comes to developing friends at this point in your life. I've seen some strong atheists say that they envy the way churches can help one create strong friendships and community. That isn't to say it isn't still a lot of work on your part, but there may be a lot of opportunities if you can find a good church community to participate in.
It’s never too late. I consider myself very isolated and introverted, but over the years collected a small circle of friends who accept me for who I am and also have gone through similar things. I have an old coworker, a couple of friends from the gym, and someone I met at 35 that may become my best friend. I ask I don’t say this to brag but that just because you missed out before does not mean you have to stay lonely.
Just be open, put yourself out there, be polite to everyone but respect your own boundaries, and don’t take it personally if things don’t pan out right away. A lot of my close relationships are ones that were background characters for a long time too , but randomly we were brought back together. There’s no template to life and it’s poison to compare yourself to others. Just start taking control of what you want your life to be like and I promise it is a skill like anything else, you just gotta practice even if you fall
You will find your people. You looked underneath a stone not many people turn over.
I don't have such a drug story, but I do feel like an alien often. I tend to only be capable of socializing with people who deeply align with my goals and ambitions. Those being: calisthenics, software, fitness, coding, cooking, being organized, etc.
I don't give myself a hard time for seeking a 'strata' of people, etc.
Be selective. Find the people only you want. Be an alien.
Fellow alien here. Agree with Andre. Just embrace who you are and give it time. You've got a lot of life left to live and plenty of time to find fellow aliens to hang with.
Yeah, similar but not so bad. Spent a lot of nights and weekends with drinks and friends. Now I'm finding we're not so well connected if we're not all drunk and you can't keep on like that too long without great cost. Too many of my friends have slipped into alcoholism or major health issues.
I'm in a city so there are options, but figuring out the social world without booze is a lot.
(Please ignore my following questions if they make you uncomfortable or you find them offensive)
1. What was your favorite drug you ever tried?
2. What was your least favorite drugs you ever tried?
3. What was your best combination of substances?
4. Do you feel like any of your drug usage has affected your cognition in anyway?
5. Do you ever miss it?
I only ask these questions out of pure curiosity, and I do no intend to change behaviors with the information that you may provide -- as in, I am not going to try new substances depending on your answers. I personally use Cannabis, and I feel like I have definitely noticed both benefits and harm from it. There are no free lunches after all.
Anyway, as some random Internet stranger, I am proud of you, and I hope you are proud of yourself for how far you have come. It seems like you went to a version of Hell and came back, and that is not something many can say. I wish you the all best.
1) Good cocaine is hard to beat. 3-HO-PCE is the craziest I've done. Extremely powerful drug. You know the wolf of wall street scene where they OD on quaaludes? It was like that + psychedelia + constant distortion of time and space perception.
2) Plenty of real shitty ones. You eat the cotton out of a benzedrine inhaler and it gives you an amphetamine type high. constricts your blood vessels, makes you sweat bullets, and the taste and smell of it emanates from every inch of your body. Its awful. 3-FMA was awful as well. 0 euphoria or otherwise positive effects but was absolutely fucking wired for like 3 days. Hexen and other cathinone derivatives absolutely such. speedy high for 1 hour and then you feel like shit and redosing only helps like 50% so by the end of the day you're a shell of a person.
3) In general psychedelics + dissociatives was a favorite: Deschloroketamine + a synthetic tryptamine or phenthylamine. low dose benedryl and low dose cough syrup was crazy. Acid and cocaine was awesome, and one of the only experiences which I don't really regret at all. I don't wish, or feel the need, to replicate it though.
4) Yes, but not in the typical way people think - e.g. its not like I feel less intelligent or clearheaded. instead, the biggest effect is that I've basically hijacked my reward system. I suppose you could call it anhedonia, but not to a clinically significant degree. Additionally, I feel like I've made connections in my brain that were not previously there. Like sometimes seeing certain patterns or hearing certain music will briefly remind me of a feeling I had at some point while high. It's hard to explain, its not like a "flashback", but more like a traumatic stress response? its very uncomfortable, but its brief. Also my night vision is significantly worse.
5) No. When I think back to the type of shit I got up to all I feel is regret and disgust. I don't remember times that I was high fondly. And the thought of doing it again is repellent to me. A while back, a friend of mine got their hands on Ketamine, which I never got to try while I was in my hay day. I thought, what the hell, I'll cross it off the list. I did a dose of it and immediately regretted it. I just kept thinking "what the fuck is the point of this?" gave the rest of it away.
Just as a disclaimer - a lot of the shit I mentioned here are designer drugs. These have very little history of human consumption and as such are inherently very unsafe, because long term effects cannot be evaluated. I expect I will have some health complications later in life as a result. I cannot stress enough that doing this shit is a bad idea. I know you said you didn't plan to try anything, but to any other reader. Really. Stay away. Not worth it.
I've had a similar experience. It's hard sometimes for me to reflect on all the wasted time, but what's gone is gone. I do my best to try not to ruin today thinking about yesterday.
Just keep putting yourself out there, focusing on what you do have, and taking it day by day friend.
Not in my experience. You just need to belong to a group outside of work. It might be a church, a volunteer group, a community group, whatever. I have so many friends from outside of work groups.
I met many friends through having season tickets for my local NHL team, met friends playing adult "beer league" hockey, met friends traveling for away games in different cities, and I even have friends internationally whom I've never met in person but still remain in contact with.
I would love to hear your list of 40 drugs because I did a lot of them in my 20s but I still couldn’t name that many. My list would be nicotine, marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, LSD, shrooms, ecstasy, adderall, oxy, dmt, 2cb, tramadol, percocet, ayahuasca and mescaline. Other than that the only things I can think of is heroin, crack and meth. That’s only 18.
That's just from memory. I know there's some ketamine and psilocybin derivatives I'm missing there. I also counted alcohol, psuedophedrine, ephedrine, nicotine, and caffeine.
The list of "designer" drugs is endless. There are hundreds out there and more discovered each day.
If you're interested in learning more about this sort of thing lookup Alexander Shulgin. He wrote some books documenting his experience as a chemist synthesizing novel psychedelics. Many of these have since seen mass production in china and distribution in the western world. For a while there you could just straight up buy most that shit from the internet - not even the dark net.
Hi there, you're kind of me but in reverse. Raised Christian, initially very socially awkward as a kid and even in high school, it wasnt until my junior year in college that i really opened up and now that i'm "established" professionally and socially, I've been looking into dipping my toes into the world of psychedelics.
I'd love to chat more if you're interested. You can find my email in my profile.
There are a lot of people like you. Adults looking for friends out of college or work. Just expanding the social circle, hanging out online and if possible IRL at times.
I suggest joining communities for topics that interest you, for starters. You're likely to meet some like minded people and make a few a friends. This happened for me every time I tried a new hobby.
i feel like an alien too but without the drug part (maybe the internet). Not hooked on anything yet still unable to pursue meaningful relationships outside the preexisting few I have left. Lately I stopped expressing ideas to people, since most of them are just rejected or get swallowed up by the void. All i'm trying to say is that there *might* be something more to the social part.
You gotta keep trying. Also could be you’re in the midst of a social circle that isn’t empathetic or just doesn’t click. I had to move and explore until I found people I connected with
Me too, mostly. At least... in a lot of ways. It's weird having lived a whole life and done a bunch of crazy shit and then listening to people and realizing how fucking droll most of their lives are even at 30, how narrow are their experiences, even the ones that are "woke". I find it hard to relate. I even find myself condescending sometimes.
But nobody knows how to meet people, nobody has some magic playbook. You've got to press, and you've got to deal with rejections, because most people are too afraid.
At each and every point in my life, I was working with the information I had at my disposal, each information having its own "weight" in my mind. Every mistake I've made has brought some information in my mind that wouldn't have been brought otherwise. Fantasies of "changing the past" are seductive, but ultimately pointless.
The only way I could justify having regrets, is reminding yourself of some mistake that should not be repeated in the future. Alas, most regrets I see written by other people are things that will not repeat, e.g. spending your youth doing <X> instead of <Y>, not talking to your <Z> enough, not investing in <W> before its price went rockets... There's just no point.
> At each and every point in my life, I was working with the information I had at my disposal, each information having its own "weight" in my mind.
This. You play the hand you're dealt — and the hand you're dealt includes your "wiring" (brain anatomy, brain chemistry, etc.) and your "programming" (past experiences, etc.). And you try to learn what you can.
(Warning — tangent:) It all contributes to what I've come to think of as The Great Project [0] of helping to build a universe — where our Conway Game of Life moves (or our Boyd OODA Loop moves, if you prefer) are something like the following:
1. Aspire: Imagine some way in which the world could and should be different than (our mental model of) what it currently is.
2. Act — and while doing so: (A) remain open to new evidence and insights; and (B) for purely pragmatic reasons, seek the best for others as we do for ourselves (in part, because to a certain extent we all operate behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance).
3. Learn: Update the mental model of what the world is, and also the mental model of what the world "should" be.
Regret, like everything else, is an evolutionary corollary built out of destiny optimization that allows for counterfactual consideration of painful paths to avoid similar outcomes in the future. In the end, what physics decrees shall occur shall occur and the only thing we can do in those times of war is burn down the ships behind us and continue charging forward in this strange yet charming universe we find ourselves shackled within.
In the end, we must imagine Sisyphus—the final mirror—happy.
On the lighter end I certainly have situation where I'd like to know how it would have played out had I made different choices. It's minor things like I would what would have happened had I asked that girl out 15 years ago, but I was to stupid to notice that she liked me, or maybe I should have applied for that job six years earlier, because they clearly wanted to hire me back then already.
The thing is, every choice I've made, even "the wrong ones", have put me in a better position overall. Perhaps I could be richer, but I don't really care about that. Maybe I just view everything in a positive light and ignore all the good things that could have been, who knows.
I wish I didn't believe in regret but I feel it. I do my best to ignore it and face forward but I still often feel very strong regret for moments daily.
Since high school I wanted a spouse and kids (obviously I imagined a good relationship and good kids)
Now I'm in my late 50s and it's not going to happen. I was always hopeful today I'm going to meet someone. That hope has mostly disappeared.
I feel regret too, there are many experiences that, when I remember them, make my heart sink and make me think "I really fucking wish I didn't do it that way".
However, the perspective I've explained keeps me from dwelling on it for too long. What's done is done, I did the only thing I could do with the information that was available. There is no point in punishing myself (unless it's to remind myself of the lesson). That's what I meant by not "believing" in regret.
That perspective often helps me get out of the self-pitying mood.
Let's say you have two advisors constantly giving you advice about what action to take next, and all you ever do is choose between them. Over time you might learn that one of them gives better advice in some situations and the other gives better advice in others. In this weird hypothetical, regret is noticing that you followed the advice of the wrong advisor for the situation, and it turned out especially poorly.
What's going on in your brain is a lot more complicated than this, but I think it's still a meaningful concept?
In that particular example, regret would be justified, as it would be a remainder not to listen to the bad advisor.
However, if, at some point, both advisors decided to leave and never come back, and you started thinking about how one of them always gave you wrong advice, and regretting listening to him, then that regret is pointless.
I also don’t believe in regret. For me, I’ve always listened to my gut and I’ve always made the right choice. I believe in the power of listening to your conscience. Since I’m so attuned to my conscience, if I make a mistake I catch it and take the next chance to rectify it before life moves on. I never allowed myself to feel regret even if it meant pushing myself way out of my comfort zone or disregarding the advice of someone who has a lot of influence on me. It helps that I’m highly disagreeable (in terms of the Big 5 personality traits).
It seems you define regret as: if I went back in time I would do <Y> instead of <X> and of course this is a pointless exercise if you choose to define it this way.
Most people I think define regret more abstractly: back in time, <X> was a _mistake_, it shouldn't have happened, _I_ shouldn't have done it that way and consequences came from it either for myself or those I love.
It seems from your response that you're ok with admitting your mistakes which - by the above definition - sounds like you feel regret.
I don’t think that first statement is pointless, it just shows you have the ability to learn and to admit you’re not perfect. And regret just means you made a choice in the past, that you’d done differently being the person you are today, and you feel it would have made your life better had you choosen differently. But we all make mistakes, nobody’s perfect, I’d expect everyone to have some regrets.
A mistake is something that shouldn't have happened, regret is the same thing, with the addendum of wanting to change it or not wanting it to happen.
Time travel doesn't exist, ergo regret shouldn't exist. I think what op is saying is they don't ruminate on it and I agree, nobody should. unless you have an established pattern, then rumination is self invoked torture.
I get what you’re going for but I’ve found that attitude in other people distasteful. First it’s a normal emotion and simply refusing to experience an emotion probably isn’t healthy. It also means you are never really sorry even if you might say it. How can you truly be sorry for something without regretting having done it? It ends up translating to “I’m sorry for the outcome and that it hurt you but if I had to do it all over again I would still do it knowing that it hurt you” and that isn’t really an apology.
A regret is a mistake that you don’t want to make in the future only it’s projected into the past. “I regret having done that because if I went back to the past, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done that”
You’re also inviting other people not to regret their choices even when those decisions negatively affect you.
I don't believe in the past. It's much the same if you think about it.
>Fantasies of "changing the past" are seductive, but ultimately pointless.
If you were to jump in a tardis and were to go to the event that you want to change. 100% of the time you will discover the entire thing was a story in your mind. Something you didn't understand at the time and if you were to 'fix' it. You would end up only harming yourself of today.
>The only way I could justify having regrets, is reminding yourself of some mistake that should not be repeated in the future. Alas, most regrets I see written by other people are things that will not repeat, e.g. spending your youth doing <X> instead of <Y>, not talking to your <Z> enough, not investing in <W> before its price went rockets... There's just no point.
Regrets of current day are legitimate. Perhaps it's substance abuse, social media. You know in your mind these things are not good. Nobody brags about these things. You know if you were to quit things would be better, but you have current day regrets of not doing so.
Furthermore, perhaps you're a superhuman with no faults. You can also have regrets having not done more. PErhaps you could have started that business or try to get that book published.
>> Fantasies of "changing the past" are seductive, but ultimately pointless.
As are ones about making an unlikely future come to be. When I find myself sidetracked by those thoughts I now say to myself "Get out of fantasy land where unicorns fart rainbows" and it seems to stop.
Hm... Regret is an emotion, not a logical destination. People don't rationally analyze a situation and deploy the appropriate, justifiable emotion; reacting emotionally is an involuntary step in processing things. You might be able to control your outward response, but that's not the same thing. Someone can experience regret for decisions that they wouldn't change in hindsight.
My father was a alcoholic, who had long stretches of staying sober before always falling of the wagon again.
After he had been on a particularly long bender, which finally caused my mother to divorce him, me and him had a verbal fight where I decided I would not have more to do with him until he would seek the help we knew he needed (and we had been offering him for so long).
I'll add that he was a moody drunk, never abusive and when not drunk he was the sweetest person.
Some months later he fell badly while drunk, and hit his head. The resulting internal bleeding caused damage to his prefrontal cortex, which resulted in personality changes and loss of inhibition.
Within the year he had a heart attack, alone in his apartment, having ravaged his body with the lifestyle he lived.
I wish I had been less stubborn, more understanding, and would have helped him get through his illness at the time. But I was only in my early 20s at the time, with much left to learn.
Don't feel so bad.
I've seen, from a distance, more than one friend tear their life apart trying to help an addict, to no avail.
I think that your chances of making any difference at all were slim.
Let the guilt go. Coming from a person in recovery who's lucky to have gotten out of that hole, just know there's not really anything you could have done if your father wasn't interested in seeking help. No amount of being there or showing understanding or talking sense to him matters. Good on you for not losing your 20s and beyond to that endless pit.
+1. I spent some time in recovery, and someone once shared that "Our help isn't for people who need it, it's for people who want it." That always stuck with me.
Small comfort, but thinking probabilistically, your choice was likely the best thing for him. It could have been the wakeup call he needed to truly change his life. Unfortunately, in this case it was not, but you can only make decisions with what you know at the time.
Think of it this way: your experience with your father is probably what kept you away from alcohol. It's a very common pattern.
BTW, I realize "falling off the wagon" means going on a bender, but shouldn't it really be the other way around? I mean, if you go on a bender, that's like getting on the wagon. I always picture this wagon with everyone drinking in the wagon. Because no one who drinking's drinking wants to walk. Just one of those things that's always bugged me.
Generally, this is the type of regret I finally came to terms with. The bottom line is that you did not know the future when you made the initial decision. After the fact you have the information that would have made a difference but we CAN'T, no mater how hard we try, foretell the future. What you are are actually regretting is a fantasy. Look at the world around you and you'll see many places where you wished you could have made a better decision but you can't be upset over them. Again you can't know what the future will be. None of us can so don't beat yourself over something you had no control over. Additionally, in your case, changing someone is not possible unless they want to change. You can only learn from the situation and hope to make a better choice in the future.
I understand completely and feel the same way about my own father.
My dad was also an episodic alcoholic. He'd go months without any issues, then disappear for three days on a binge. He'd drink such a massive amount of alcohol he'd have to go onto a IV drip.
My 16 year old self became so disgusted by him I refused to tell him I loved him and shunned him. We tried to give him the "tough love" we thought he needed so that he would "hit bottom" and then take some control back. It didn't work, and he ended up dying alone in a hotel room.
I now see that he needed more love and support instead of tough love and isolation. I wish I had been more patient, understanding, and supportive.
1. Doing a job as a model when I was very young (17) in which I was sexually abused.
2. Not going to university
After first, I got totally lost and torture myself. A lot. I didn't put priorities in order nor seek for help. I wasted a lot of time doing shitty jobs for having some money, having terrible relationships and doing sports heavily to keep me distracted until one day I decided it was enough and did two HNCs related with computer science (which is something I was always passionate about). I cannot complain about the jobs I've had nor the amount of money I earn right now but I'm 33 years old and I if I could change anything, would be definitely those two points. The first was not by choice, but I should have been more cautious.
PD: Holy fuck. I think is the first time I feel brave enough for mention this "out loud" to someone.
Sounds like a really shitty experience. Just a reminder of something which you know anyway: it's the perpetrator's fault, not yours. I guess I want to say something trite like "don't hang onto regret (or what feels like it) for someone else's actions" but I realise that's way simplistic. It seems that you were just living your life, working a job. That's normal, and (again overly trite, apologies) nothing to regret.
Best wishes!!
Edit: On re-reading what I wrote, it might seem that I'm saying you don't have the right to feel regret. Not my intention, sorry if it reads that way. It feels, though, that you shouldn't have to feel regret for living a normal life with normal decisions.
To anyone full of regret, I'd just like to give a quote by Marcus Aurelius (a Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher)
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.
Life likely hasn't been perfect for almost anyone, but would you rather die right now (with likely unfinished desires, wishes and more regrets) or would you try to make the best use of what you have?
(It may be a bit difficult to fully live as per the quote even if you're already familiar with stoicism - it's quite hard for me too - but something that sometimes helps me is to literally visualize yourself dead as of now.
...I had no idea it was common here on HN, though I'm not surprised. It was just something that's helped me a fair bit and I hope(d) it could help others too.
Steve Jobs turned the ideas in that quote into a commencement speech after his cancer diagnosis. It concludes with:
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
It's a shame he never took the advice to heart. Jobs' last days were unnecessarily painful for both himself and his family, who desperately tried helping him only to be pushed away and insulted.
Jobs was good at echoing the wisdom of people smarter than him, but not so great at using those principles to fix his own life.
Buying a thatched cottage in Ireland.
It's very pretty, and it checks all the boxes (bike ride from train station), etc. but Ireland's insanely strict protection rules and ridiculous insurance payouts have resulted in every insurer of thatched buildings leaving the country. Additionally, when I applied for permission to build a separate house on the land (it's a few acres) the heritage officer insisted we only build an extension, despite neighbours being permitted to build separate houses on their land, in order to force us to live in the house and "preserve" it. It's a very Irish approach. I extended it just in time to find the extension (and original cottage) completely uninsurable, so unmortgageable, so effectively worthless. A quarter million euro to have a beautiful unsellable unrentable house.
That creates a remarkable set of perverse incentives akin to what's seen in Australia, where restoring old houses properly is so expensive that they tend to be left to rot and/or mysteriously catch fire instead. Is the issue widely known?
A similar thing happens in the USA with houses declared "historic". It's well known among realtors and other groups, but not extensively known. Some states/localities have funds to somewhat help with maintenance, but they get depleted very fast, and you often have requirements like "cannot replace the switches with modern ones, must use push button switches" and similar things.
At $15 for a switch vs $1, those things start to add up.
In some poorer places it gets so bad the fire department will basically "wink wink" tell you how to burn your house down.
Other areas have a much nicer version which is "remain visually similar" - basically you can't change how the house looks from the street but you can do whatever you want/need inside.
I don't think it's a good idea to do that without insurance, personally. Though paradoxically if it burned down it probably would be worth more. I'm more worried about personal liability if someone hurts themselves.
Reminds me of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, "and then one day you find ten years have got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun!".
Read through the thread. Look how many stories there are of people losing years and years to something that they now regret. The realization is that this is the norm, not the exception. We're all just fragile and fallible and trying to make our way through life as best we can, and we all end up messing up big somewhere along the way.
It's easy to look back on 10 wasted years and think you failed, you blew your one chance at life. But if you come to realize that looking back on 10 wasted years is actually a common human struggle, it can help you reframe your regret as just another one of the trials of being a limited, mortal human and not take it so personally as your own failing.
Everyone has a tendency to evaluate the past with today's knowledge and experience. That's a fallacy. You didn't so much "lose" 10 years, it just took 10 years to come to an understanding about a meaningful part of your life. And maybe you really needed all that time to arrive there.
In my book, regret means you've learned something about your past but you're still trying to change the past. Which you can't. What matters is how you're going to leverage your wisdom going forward in a meaningful way.
I take it to mean that everyone has a situation that they could have handled better, and it took them quite a few years to really fix the situation. Perhaps it was something that affected them mentally, and they finally overcame it, or perhaps it ended up being a physical or financial hardship.
Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone makes a few big mistakes.
The key is not to beat yourself up over it. Learn from the mistake and do better in the future.
It means that if you add up the regrets (for example, staying in a bad job or not doing X for Y years) then it will come up to about 10 years for everyone. Maybe your 10 years are still ahead of you, or perhaps some of them are behind you but you didn't realize that yet as you haven't seen the consequences yet.
Wow. That makes me feel so much better!! Seriously. 2011 to 2021 were those years for me. I've beat myself up over not making forward progress in life, if not regressing, for an entire decade. The idea that there's a saying about it is somehow comforting (assuming of course that the decade is now over). It's like when you stop and realize that "existential crisis" is a cliche phrase because so many others have experienced it as well, for centuries.
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I've never met someone that I care about the way I cared about her. Huge what if.
Eventually she hoped to elope. She also had a deadline for leaving the country, visa etc... I wasn't as sure as you sounded tho and decided even though things were great we had not been together long enough to get married and she shouldn't give up her family for me.
Two years after she got back they made her choose a husband from one of 3 from a matchmaker. She said she wasn't in love with the guy but she was doing her duty.
So what's my regret? Well there's a couple but the biggest one is that instead of embracing being different and who I was and where I came from, I instead tried to hide it as best I could. I avoided anything to do with my native culture or language because I think I was so hurt internally that someone who appeared to have feelings for me would put them aside for fear of their family's reaction. I even gave up my interests that I feared were too nerdy and contributed to my being "different", after all I am on hacker news so there's some nerd in me, right?
Ended up going off to college in a big city school where different was normal and got back to my roots and interests and this put me on a wonderful path that lead to great success early in my career, stronger relationships with my family and culture, and a much happier life. It feels good to embrace "you", even if some small-town folk may think it's "different".
My secondary regret is that I never reached back out to her to see if she still had similar feelings or maybe tried to get a relationship going on as more mature adults. I've thought about her a good bit but I think what I've realized is that it's not so much her that I'm interested in, it's that all I wanted was to be accepted by her and that maybe if I were to be accepted, I could prove to myself that I'm really not "different".
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Queue ~6 years of polysubstance abuse, wasted money, and fake ass friends. Did everything under the sun I could get my hands on. I think the list of unique drugs I did was something like 40. I was high on at least something every day for years. Most days more than 1 thing.
I never got truly "hooked" on anything thankfully. I just loved being high. What I didn't realize was that the opportunity cost was enormous. Every second I was in my room fucked out of my gourd staring at the ceiling was a second that I wasn't out making friends. Being a normal person. It was a really solitary and lonesome existence, just retreating further and further into my own head each day. Additionally, being a "drug guy" just completely shuts the door to a whole strata of people : e.g. good luck meeting a woman that shares your Christian morals if you are a drug enthusiast.
Now I'm off the bullshit. Straightened my life out, graduated college, gainfully employed. Etc. But I feel that I've missed the boat on having a fulfilling social life. I don't really know how to meet people. And whenever I talk with people I can't help but feel like I'm some kind of alien.
I'm working on it. But it's so hard to know how to work on it. Especially now that I work from home, and live alone in a suburb.
I moved to a new city away from my family when I was 27 and that was when I finally pushed myself to start changing things as the loneliness really hit me. I started going to meetup events and work lunches with people. I started reading up on social skills and trying my hand at dating. Roughly 5 years since then I've actually done pretty well for myself, made some good friends, had some good experiences with dating, and I'm rather happy with how things have shaped out. I'm still kind of awkward socially but gotten more comfortable with putting myself out there anyway and found that a lot of people don't really mind.
I am of the opinion that people who have gone though this are more empathetic caring people
Could you recommend some of the resources you read to learn social skills? I'm currently fighting the same fight you did, and maybe it could help.
Congratulations for putting that behind you. If you were raised with church as part of your life, you may actually have an advantage when it comes to developing friends at this point in your life. I've seen some strong atheists say that they envy the way churches can help one create strong friendships and community. That isn't to say it isn't still a lot of work on your part, but there may be a lot of opportunities if you can find a good church community to participate in.
Just be open, put yourself out there, be polite to everyone but respect your own boundaries, and don’t take it personally if things don’t pan out right away. A lot of my close relationships are ones that were background characters for a long time too , but randomly we were brought back together. There’s no template to life and it’s poison to compare yourself to others. Just start taking control of what you want your life to be like and I promise it is a skill like anything else, you just gotta practice even if you fall
I don't have such a drug story, but I do feel like an alien often. I tend to only be capable of socializing with people who deeply align with my goals and ambitions. Those being: calisthenics, software, fitness, coding, cooking, being organized, etc.
I don't give myself a hard time for seeking a 'strata' of people, etc.
Be selective. Find the people only you want. Be an alien.
I'm in a city so there are options, but figuring out the social world without booze is a lot.
1. What was your favorite drug you ever tried?
2. What was your least favorite drugs you ever tried?
3. What was your best combination of substances?
4. Do you feel like any of your drug usage has affected your cognition in anyway?
5. Do you ever miss it?
I only ask these questions out of pure curiosity, and I do no intend to change behaviors with the information that you may provide -- as in, I am not going to try new substances depending on your answers. I personally use Cannabis, and I feel like I have definitely noticed both benefits and harm from it. There are no free lunches after all.
Anyway, as some random Internet stranger, I am proud of you, and I hope you are proud of yourself for how far you have come. It seems like you went to a version of Hell and came back, and that is not something many can say. I wish you the all best.
2) Plenty of real shitty ones. You eat the cotton out of a benzedrine inhaler and it gives you an amphetamine type high. constricts your blood vessels, makes you sweat bullets, and the taste and smell of it emanates from every inch of your body. Its awful. 3-FMA was awful as well. 0 euphoria or otherwise positive effects but was absolutely fucking wired for like 3 days. Hexen and other cathinone derivatives absolutely such. speedy high for 1 hour and then you feel like shit and redosing only helps like 50% so by the end of the day you're a shell of a person.
3) In general psychedelics + dissociatives was a favorite: Deschloroketamine + a synthetic tryptamine or phenthylamine. low dose benedryl and low dose cough syrup was crazy. Acid and cocaine was awesome, and one of the only experiences which I don't really regret at all. I don't wish, or feel the need, to replicate it though.
4) Yes, but not in the typical way people think - e.g. its not like I feel less intelligent or clearheaded. instead, the biggest effect is that I've basically hijacked my reward system. I suppose you could call it anhedonia, but not to a clinically significant degree. Additionally, I feel like I've made connections in my brain that were not previously there. Like sometimes seeing certain patterns or hearing certain music will briefly remind me of a feeling I had at some point while high. It's hard to explain, its not like a "flashback", but more like a traumatic stress response? its very uncomfortable, but its brief. Also my night vision is significantly worse.
5) No. When I think back to the type of shit I got up to all I feel is regret and disgust. I don't remember times that I was high fondly. And the thought of doing it again is repellent to me. A while back, a friend of mine got their hands on Ketamine, which I never got to try while I was in my hay day. I thought, what the hell, I'll cross it off the list. I did a dose of it and immediately regretted it. I just kept thinking "what the fuck is the point of this?" gave the rest of it away.
Just as a disclaimer - a lot of the shit I mentioned here are designer drugs. These have very little history of human consumption and as such are inherently very unsafe, because long term effects cannot be evaluated. I expect I will have some health complications later in life as a result. I cannot stress enough that doing this shit is a bad idea. I know you said you didn't plan to try anything, but to any other reader. Really. Stay away. Not worth it.
Just keep putting yourself out there, focusing on what you do have, and taking it day by day friend.
I met many friends through having season tickets for my local NHL team, met friends playing adult "beer league" hockey, met friends traveling for away games in different cities, and I even have friends internationally whom I've never met in person but still remain in contact with.
That's just from memory. I know there's some ketamine and psilocybin derivatives I'm missing there. I also counted alcohol, psuedophedrine, ephedrine, nicotine, and caffeine.
The list of "designer" drugs is endless. There are hundreds out there and more discovered each day.
If you're interested in learning more about this sort of thing lookup Alexander Shulgin. He wrote some books documenting his experience as a chemist synthesizing novel psychedelics. Many of these have since seen mass production in china and distribution in the western world. For a while there you could just straight up buy most that shit from the internet - not even the dark net.
I'd love to chat more if you're interested. You can find my email in my profile.
I suggest joining communities for topics that interest you, for starters. You're likely to meet some like minded people and make a few a friends. This happened for me every time I tried a new hobby.
But nobody knows how to meet people, nobody has some magic playbook. You've got to press, and you've got to deal with rejections, because most people are too afraid.
At each and every point in my life, I was working with the information I had at my disposal, each information having its own "weight" in my mind. Every mistake I've made has brought some information in my mind that wouldn't have been brought otherwise. Fantasies of "changing the past" are seductive, but ultimately pointless.
The only way I could justify having regrets, is reminding yourself of some mistake that should not be repeated in the future. Alas, most regrets I see written by other people are things that will not repeat, e.g. spending your youth doing <X> instead of <Y>, not talking to your <Z> enough, not investing in <W> before its price went rockets... There's just no point.
This. You play the hand you're dealt — and the hand you're dealt includes your "wiring" (brain anatomy, brain chemistry, etc.) and your "programming" (past experiences, etc.). And you try to learn what you can.
(Warning — tangent:) It all contributes to what I've come to think of as The Great Project [0] of helping to build a universe — where our Conway Game of Life moves (or our Boyd OODA Loop moves, if you prefer) are something like the following:
1. Aspire: Imagine some way in which the world could and should be different than (our mental model of) what it currently is.
2. Act — and while doing so: (A) remain open to new evidence and insights; and (B) for purely pragmatic reasons, seek the best for others as we do for ourselves (in part, because to a certain extent we all operate behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance).
3. Learn: Update the mental model of what the world is, and also the mental model of what the world "should" be.
4. Repeat.
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.com/2006/06/metanarratives_...
In the end, we must imagine Sisyphus—the final mirror—happy.
The thing is, every choice I've made, even "the wrong ones", have put me in a better position overall. Perhaps I could be richer, but I don't really care about that. Maybe I just view everything in a positive light and ignore all the good things that could have been, who knows.
Since high school I wanted a spouse and kids (obviously I imagined a good relationship and good kids)
Now I'm in my late 50s and it's not going to happen. I was always hopeful today I'm going to meet someone. That hope has mostly disappeared.
I regret not trying harder in various ways.
However, the perspective I've explained keeps me from dwelling on it for too long. What's done is done, I did the only thing I could do with the information that was available. There is no point in punishing myself (unless it's to remind myself of the lesson). That's what I meant by not "believing" in regret.
That perspective often helps me get out of the self-pitying mood.
What's going on in your brain is a lot more complicated than this, but I think it's still a meaningful concept?
However, if, at some point, both advisors decided to leave and never come back, and you started thinking about how one of them always gave you wrong advice, and regretting listening to him, then that regret is pointless.
Most people I think define regret more abstractly: back in time, <X> was a _mistake_, it shouldn't have happened, _I_ shouldn't have done it that way and consequences came from it either for myself or those I love.
It seems from your response that you're ok with admitting your mistakes which - by the above definition - sounds like you feel regret.
Time travel doesn't exist, ergo regret shouldn't exist. I think what op is saying is they don't ruminate on it and I agree, nobody should. unless you have an established pattern, then rumination is self invoked torture.
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A regret is a mistake that you don’t want to make in the future only it’s projected into the past. “I regret having done that because if I went back to the past, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done that”
You’re also inviting other people not to regret their choices even when those decisions negatively affect you.
I don't believe in the past. It's much the same if you think about it.
>Fantasies of "changing the past" are seductive, but ultimately pointless.
If you were to jump in a tardis and were to go to the event that you want to change. 100% of the time you will discover the entire thing was a story in your mind. Something you didn't understand at the time and if you were to 'fix' it. You would end up only harming yourself of today.
>The only way I could justify having regrets, is reminding yourself of some mistake that should not be repeated in the future. Alas, most regrets I see written by other people are things that will not repeat, e.g. spending your youth doing <X> instead of <Y>, not talking to your <Z> enough, not investing in <W> before its price went rockets... There's just no point.
Regrets of current day are legitimate. Perhaps it's substance abuse, social media. You know in your mind these things are not good. Nobody brags about these things. You know if you were to quit things would be better, but you have current day regrets of not doing so.
Furthermore, perhaps you're a superhuman with no faults. You can also have regrets having not done more. PErhaps you could have started that business or try to get that book published.
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As are ones about making an unlikely future come to be. When I find myself sidetracked by those thoughts I now say to myself "Get out of fantasy land where unicorns fart rainbows" and it seems to stop.
Wisdom is gained from making bad decisions.
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After he had been on a particularly long bender, which finally caused my mother to divorce him, me and him had a verbal fight where I decided I would not have more to do with him until he would seek the help we knew he needed (and we had been offering him for so long).
I'll add that he was a moody drunk, never abusive and when not drunk he was the sweetest person.
Some months later he fell badly while drunk, and hit his head. The resulting internal bleeding caused damage to his prefrontal cortex, which resulted in personality changes and loss of inhibition.
Within the year he had a heart attack, alone in his apartment, having ravaged his body with the lifestyle he lived.
I wish I had been less stubborn, more understanding, and would have helped him get through his illness at the time. But I was only in my early 20s at the time, with much left to learn.
Condolences on your loss.
BTW, I realize "falling off the wagon" means going on a bender, but shouldn't it really be the other way around? I mean, if you go on a bender, that's like getting on the wagon. I always picture this wagon with everyone drinking in the wagon. Because no one who drinking's drinking wants to walk. Just one of those things that's always bugged me.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fall_off_the_wagon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wx77L9_D84
My dad was also an episodic alcoholic. He'd go months without any issues, then disappear for three days on a binge. He'd drink such a massive amount of alcohol he'd have to go onto a IV drip.
My 16 year old self became so disgusted by him I refused to tell him I loved him and shunned him. We tried to give him the "tough love" we thought he needed so that he would "hit bottom" and then take some control back. It didn't work, and he ended up dying alone in a hotel room.
I now see that he needed more love and support instead of tough love and isolation. I wish I had been more patient, understanding, and supportive.
1. Doing a job as a model when I was very young (17) in which I was sexually abused.
2. Not going to university
After first, I got totally lost and torture myself. A lot. I didn't put priorities in order nor seek for help. I wasted a lot of time doing shitty jobs for having some money, having terrible relationships and doing sports heavily to keep me distracted until one day I decided it was enough and did two HNCs related with computer science (which is something I was always passionate about). I cannot complain about the jobs I've had nor the amount of money I earn right now but I'm 33 years old and I if I could change anything, would be definitely those two points. The first was not by choice, but I should have been more cautious.
PD: Holy fuck. I think is the first time I feel brave enough for mention this "out loud" to someone.
Best wishes!!
Edit: On re-reading what I wrote, it might seem that I'm saying you don't have the right to feel regret. Not my intention, sorry if it reads that way. It feels, though, that you shouldn't have to feel regret for living a normal life with normal decisions.
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.
Life likely hasn't been perfect for almost anyone, but would you rather die right now (with likely unfinished desires, wishes and more regrets) or would you try to make the best use of what you have?
(It may be a bit difficult to fully live as per the quote even if you're already familiar with stoicism - it's quite hard for me too - but something that sometimes helps me is to literally visualize yourself dead as of now.
Maybe a stroke.
Would you be happy?
If not, you should do something about it.)
I do love this quote of course (and all things Aurelius).
Thanks to GP, too. That’s a lovely quote.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Jobs was good at echoing the wisdom of people smarter than him, but not so great at using those principles to fix his own life.
My heart tends toward the gutter. Not complaining though.
Good discussion of this at https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/oir-media-hourly-files-r2...
https://www.houseofantiquehardware.com/shop-by-type/vintage-...
At $15 for a switch vs $1, those things start to add up.
In some poorer places it gets so bad the fire department will basically "wink wink" tell you how to burn your house down.
Other areas have a much nicer version which is "remain visually similar" - basically you can't change how the house looks from the street but you can do whatever you want/need inside.
Could you AirBnB it?
"everyone loses 10 years to something, somewhere along the line"
I used to listen to that several times a year to motivate myself to do more and not let the months and years pass me by.
It's easy to look back on 10 wasted years and think you failed, you blew your one chance at life. But if you come to realize that looking back on 10 wasted years is actually a common human struggle, it can help you reframe your regret as just another one of the trials of being a limited, mortal human and not take it so personally as your own failing.
Everyone has a tendency to evaluate the past with today's knowledge and experience. That's a fallacy. You didn't so much "lose" 10 years, it just took 10 years to come to an understanding about a meaningful part of your life. And maybe you really needed all that time to arrive there.
In my book, regret means you've learned something about your past but you're still trying to change the past. Which you can't. What matters is how you're going to leverage your wisdom going forward in a meaningful way.
Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone makes a few big mistakes.
The key is not to beat yourself up over it. Learn from the mistake and do better in the future.
Thanks for sharing!
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