I wish I complained about how narrow my shoes always were but now my pinky toes are mangled
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Huh, that reminds me of something similar. My militray boot is a bit too big, but it didn't stop me from running, and it just feels a bit floppy like a flip flop. I should have complained back then, but I didn't, and I mildly regretted it.
Note that this happened after I grew up, of course. Conscripting a child is usually frowned upon.
I wish I spent more time on music/instruments. Probably wouldn't have changed much in major ways, but I'd have more hobbies rn. It's a struggle to learn when I have so little time
It definitely could have changed things signicantly. There's a lot of research out there for correlations between learning music instruments at a young age and brain development. Your life could have gone in a completely different direction as a result of learning an instrument.
To be clear, I did play instruments as a kid (trumpet, drums), I just stopped early and didn't explore others much. Probably mostly my ADHD, as I still pick up and drop hobbies like it's my job.
Currently learning guitar, but am using my fiancee's and only get like 30m/week of practice.
Haha it's the same for me with my ADHD. I have way too many hobbies and some of them are very expensive (e.g., woodworking and coffee). I found that it's not that I lose interest in my hobbies, it's just that as time goes on, it becomes harder to ignore inconveniences in hobbies. If I try to fix those inconveniences as much as possible and keep learning new things, I don't really lose interest. E.g., with my current espresso basket, the fit is so poor that knocking the puck out also knocks out the basket. This minor inconvenience could lead me to quit making espresso unless I just simply get a new basket.
Saved money from my first jobs. I mostly spent it on CDs which are nice to have a collection of, but kinda useless to me now. Ultimately it doesn't make much difference because it wasn't a lot of money in the grand scheme, but if I had invested it early it could have maybe made my life better now.
Most of us do something like that when we first get money we earned ourselves, myself included. Depending on when you did actually stopped wasting money, this may have had a massively positive impact on your life. If you learned that lesson fairly early, it translated into you making wise spending choices as an older adult. You are successful today because you wasted that money back then and made changes afterward.
Struggling taught me the value of saving. I was still in highschool and working for minimum wage when I moved out on my own, and that was when I stopped wasting money. I was more concerned with securing my next meal. Experiencing it at that age absolutely influenced my habits into adulthood, to the point I agree about calling it a personal success - that is to say I'm still poor, but nowhere near as screwed as I would be if I had to learn that lesson today.
Struggling taught me that if I don't use my money right now it'll be gone.
And I'm not saying that to contradict you. It's funny how different people learn different lessons from the same experience. I grew up dirt poor. If I didn't spend my money as a kid it might be called upon. And that's the lesson I took for years. I didn't really start saving seriously until I was closing in on 40. I have money in retirement now (and will likely retire early), but it's because I did without for a few years trying to play catch up while making good money. It's not a tactic I recommend. If I had started it back when I was 18 I could be really close to retirement right now.
Struggling taught me that if I don’t use my money right now it’ll be gone.
And I’m not saying that to contradict you. It’s funny how different people learn different lessons from the same experience. I grew up dirt poor. If I didn’t spend my money as a kid it might be called upon. And that’s the lesson I took for years.
This is something others had to explain to me as I didn't experience this first hand.
If I didn’t spend my money as a kid it might be called upon.
In case others are reading this there's a few extra points to gaining the understanding of this concept. An example of this may be:
You have come into $100 without it being allocated to anything. If you wait "too long" a bill/need will show up that will consume all of that $100 (and probably still leave you needing more). However, if you spend the $100 as soon as you get it, you can buy a nice pair of sneakers or a video game. The bill will still come, and you'll still be in debt at the end, but you'll have your sneakers/video game. So this mindset incentivizes spending immediately instead of saving. An additional angle on this is that you may not have the bill/need but someone in your life does, and if you have $100 and don't volunteer it, or refuse to "lend" it when its discovered, there are large social consequences. So again, spending it immediately is incentivized, because there are no social consequences for not having the money to "lend", only having the money and not "lending" it.
This is far more common that I had understood initially.
If I didn’t spend my money as a kid it might be called upon.
My friend's family was like that growing up. Use it or lose it. From what I can tell he had a hard time growing out of it, but seems to be doing better now. He was already used to being poor, but raising his own family was a new level of awareness and probably his "lightbulb moment". Finding a decent job certainly helped, too.
I wish I didn't slack off on math. Now that I'm doing gamedev I've had to re-learn a lot of it.
Same goes for English, actually. Not my native language
I wished I learned either to play the guitar or focused on learning Spanish outside a classroom.
Mine would be not slacking in learning Chinese because I never though I would be a weeb.
I thought "weeb" slur was refering to one way into Japanese pop culture, not Chinese.
Now I need to re-learn tons of Kanji
Kanji would be one of the three Japanese writing systems. The written language symbols in Chinese would be Hanzi.
That said, its never too late to learn any language, and any work you did before still helps today as you have a basis for understanding to build on. Depending on how young you learned what you did, you could have some very helpful hard wiring in your brain for other languages than your native one.
One of best moves I made was joining the US Army. The Army paid off my student loans and I got to live in Germany.
I do wish I had spent more time learning about the different MOS. That is the job you have in the Army.
I should have been an 88K. That is a watercraft operator. That way I could have the loan repayment and been a sailor.
I really wanted to join the Navy , but that branch did not repay student loans.
I wish I would have learned how to dance as a kid.
Retain my knowledge of the (west) Frysian language. At one point I spoke it fairly well, but I can only understand it now and not speak or write it. It wouldn't really have helped me in any way, but I guess it would've given me a bit more of a regional identity and it would be nice to preserve the language.
I probably wouldn't have started those fires.
But they've been burning since the world's been turnin' :o
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