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What's something that you missed out on?
An event, a moment, an experience, etc.
Can be big or small; significant or insignificant; serious or funny.
It doesn't have to be a bad thing. You could be glad you missed out on something!
What did you miss out on?
How do you feel about it?
I missed out on a normal teenage life.
I was raised in a very conservative home where prior to graduating I couldn't stay out late, go to parties, have romantic partners, etc. I didn't know the movies people referenced or the music people listened to. I also internalized these restrictions; I didn't go out and have a normal social life in my teens. I feel like I missed out on so many experiences that define one's teenage years.
I'm not religious now, and I'm not sure if there's even a God out there. I sort of made the mistakes and learned the lessons in my early 20s that most learned in high school.
Was it bad? Good? I have no idea. It's hard to for me to wish my formative years were drastically different when I'm happy with the person I am today. I do feel some FOMO; I'm a little bummed I missed out, but it doesn't bother me greatly.
I feel this one, I also missed out on the common romantic development experience. I grew up religious and internalised it even after I decided I didn't have (or particularly want) a relationship with God, and as a result didn't really start dating until I was 25 (right before getting really ill), and didn't really find myself or know what I wanted until I was in my 30s.
Our of interest, do you find that - even if you don't feel like you'd wish you had those experiences - you find yourself naturally drawn to seeking them a bit more than your peers do now? I've been wondering about this for a while, whether there's a causal link between my delayed romantic development and my tendency to lean towards atypical romantic structures - open relationships, kink that overlaps with promiscuity, etc. Apologies if this is oversharing or too personal a question, I find the topic interesting and don't personally know many others who've had social/romantic development delay in my life.
I've had primarily atypical romantic relationships (poly/open etc.) and I have no idea what connection, if any, there is to my earlier years, but I do think it felt like it sucked when I was far less sexually and romantically knowledgeable/mature in my early 20s than my peers.
I feel like my change in view of relationships was partly due to having a major break with my parents' ideology more generally. They were very conservative and very wedded to a particular sect that believed everyone but members of the sect were doomed. When I left, I feel like I questioned absolutely everything from God to monogamy to capitalism to the state, to gender and dove into the punk scene. I completely unanchored myself from everything I had known and jumped in the deep end.
Over a decade later I'm now comfortably a liberal with a stable life, a positive disposition, and primarily atypical romantic structures (poly/open), but it's difficult to attribute that last attribute to anything in particular. I pay taxes, do my job, donate to charity, and volunteer in my community, pretty basic, well-adjusted stuff, so who knows.
Similar story here. My parents pulled me out of school entirely because they thought the world was going to end any day. Decades later and the world is still here.
I used to feel like I missed something too. When I was younger, I always felt like an alien because I was raised in relative isolation from "normal people". That haunted me for a little while. Thankfully, I found a lot of good people who accepted me for my quirks and oddities.
Hope the same has happened for you and you can break free of any religious trauma you experienced.
Thank you kindly for your warm wishes. I got therapy far later than I should, but it helped a ton despite my skepticism about it. I eventually found my footing and life is going well now.
If you are happy with the person you are today, then at least the result was good even if you wish it had happened differently. It feels a bit cliche for my generation, but I still know people in their 40s who feel like they peaked in their teens and wish they could go back. I always find this confusing, as I am much more comfortable with myself today than when I was in my teens and I actually have money to buy things I want.
It's funny you mentioned this, I feel like some of the people I admired and envied the most in high school still live in my home town doing the same things they were doing back then.
Not to knock the humble way of living life, but time does give me some perspective on what really matters.
BitCoin. I learned about it when it was being used to buy a pizza for a couple of coin, and you could mine it with your home computer for free. I was a few years out of college, working full time, and felt like I had no time any more to chase the next fad. I also thought it sounded dumb as hell. Like it had no chance to ever be worth anything.
But since it cost basically nothing but time back then, if it had happened 2 or 3 years earlier, I would have absolutely bothered to have a wallet and use my PC to mine coins. I guess I'd probably be a millionaire if that happened.
Oh well.
By the pizza story time, it was next to impossible to mine. Unless you had a rig with a GPU running constantly. At least that was my experience.
I bought some bitcoin on one of the early exchanges, then ignored advice to use a cold wallet. The exchange got hacked and I lost it all.
I still have no idea how a cold wallet actually works from a security perspective.
Crypto wallets are protected by private keys, which is just a blob of data. When you use an online wallet or a crypto exchange, that private key necessarily has to be stored by the app or exchange in order to access and do anything with the funds, which means the private key is vulnerable to hackers. Once the hackers get that key, they control the funds in the wallet.
A cold wallet isn't technically any different from a hot wallet, it just means your private key is not stored anywhere online... the key is on a device that isn't accessible over the internet, like an unplugged hard drive or printed out on paper, making it completely inaccessible (to online hackers at least, obviously someone could still break through whatever physical security you have around whatever you're storing the key on to rob you and get it that way).
I was in college when a website promised to sell me a bag of weed for 3 bitcoin, about $60 at the time. I tried it out just for fun thinking there's no way this actually works but sure enough I got my bag of weed in the mail and it was good stuff too. I thought huh that's neat and never touched bitcoin again. It wasn't much longer and that website got raided by the FBI or something.
If it makes you feel any better, I reckon there's a good chance that you would have spent or sold them long before they hit the stratospheric heights they eventually reached.
Similar story. I heard about in 2010ish in my college computer lab from a buddy. I also dismissed it. I figured it's never going to replace our currency. I was right, but someone bought a car with it several years later and the value continued to rise. It is what it is. I'm just going to keep a more open mind now when I hear about new things
I was going to reply to @RNG but my reply was getting too long:
Yeah I’m with you there. My parents weren’t religious, and I could watch and listen to whatever I want. But I was never allowed to go out, at all, anywhere with friends. Which made it hard to have friends.
My mother, on top of being overprotective, didn’t understand the need for friends. She never really had friends and she had a big family growing up so she didn’t see the need for friends. She said I could have friends but only see them at school, it didn’t matter when I told her that that’s not conducive to making and keeping real friends.
It wasn’t until I got older that I tell her, and obviously now know, that the way to go up in the world and be able to get better jobs and stuff is by having friends. Which blew her mind that it wasn’t as simple as you go to college and you get a job guranteed outside of that.
It also didn’t allow me to build social skills. And I also had to learn a lot of basic social and romantic stuff in my 20s that most people had already figured out by the time they were teenagers. Which still gets me into some trouble when something basic goes over my head and my lack of response is treated as hostility. That’s less so now, and while I’m not autistic (I don’t think so anyway) there’s a lot of nuances and intricacies that still require experiencing them first hand.
And I think because my parents were uneducated immigrants, I didn’t really get a chance to dream super big. My father was always disappointed with his own life but encouraged big dreams. But I didn’t really have a connection with him, and frankly he wasn’t involved in my life enough for it to have made a difference. My mother never understood aspirations and never understood why you would want to move out of your hometown or be away from family or pursue anything greater. Like she didn’t know why I would want to drive as an adolescent which led to me teaching myself how to drive at 22. And certainly never understood why someone wouldn’t be happy with a simple life where you live in the suburbs and have a wife and kids.
So I missed out on a lot of basic building blocks on how to live my own life. And how I could have gotten a life I wanted or at least something closer to the life I wanted by now. Because I was so restricted by my mom specifically, but my parents in general. And not to glaze myself but I think I had a lot of potential and talent that I think could have been nurtured better had I had a different support system. But everything sort of just led into me being a burnout. Obviously a lot of that is my own fault. But it’s hard not to think if I had a more mainline childhood and adolescent experience things would be different.
This feels so familiar, I think I had quite a similar experience (though from quite different triggers - religion mainly). I pushed myself so hard when I got to the world of work and had internalised that not being able to do 'normal' things like keep up with an insanely demanding work was a personal flaw, and so didn't think to straight up quit when it got way too much for me and broke me, making me very ill for quite a while.
I don't know if you were referring to that kind of thing when describing yourself as being a burnout or if I'm just projecting a lot here, but I feel like I was 15-20 years late on understanding who I was as a person and be ready to start living a fulfilling life as a result.
Friend, I am sure you still have a lot of potential. Just do your best.
All of us walk a different path and the things we experience, for better or worse, make us who we are.
When AmongUs first came out I was bummed because I had no one to play it with. Now, years later, I have people to play it with, but no one wants to play it anymore.
I missed out on the traditional American higher education experience. I went to work right out of high school, and didn't decide to pursue higher education and a better career until years later. I'm definitely not the oldest one in my classes, but I'm often in the upper quartile. Sometimes I regret that, but I'm usually good about keeping in mind that I have so much context about life and being a working professional that so many of the learners around me don't.
I also missed out on being a trust fund baby. I'll sarcastically point the finger of blame at my dad for that one.
I felt like I missed out on a lot of things my Freshman year of university. Tried to do long distance with my high-school girlfriend whom I was sure was the one for me (she was one year younger than I was). She was a bit controlling, I spent a lot of time in my dorm talking to her. She wasn't a fan of me joining a fraternity, she also got super pissed during my initiation week as our pledges are required to turn in their phone for the week (and only get it back for legitimate reasons like 2FA in to a school/work related account or if you need it for school/work, but it gets turned back in after you're done using it) and would get annoyed when I went to events and try to get me not to go. I'd also spend a lot of my weekends driving back home to see her. We broke up after my freshman year and I found out she'd spent a solid chunk of that year cheating on me. This contributed in part to me going a bit off the deep end my sophomore year and not doing great in school.
Admittedly it was my fault for staying with her as she mentioned breaking up after my senior year with distance being hard and me being sure it would work out. There were red flags during the relationship that I only recognized in hindsight, but part of growing up is learning from experiences like this.
The weirdest part was my future wife having met her at a sorority recruitment event and my ex tried to become friends with her, but future wife wasn't a big fan of her. While we were dating she ran in to my ex at a party at a different fraternity where my ex tried drunkenly to explain how it was a totally reasonable thing to cheat on someone so that you for sure know you want to be with them which was why she was cheating on the guy she was dating now (the guy she cheated on me with).
We moved a lot growing up so I missed having consistent stable childhood friends.
My last 1.5 years of college were during early Covid so my social life kinda died. I still talk to the friends I had before but they all moved home or to New York, basically, and I have zero desire to move to either place. I guess I still got a semi-normal graduation, though (it was like ~6 weeks after the first Covid vaccine became readily available here). The only thing is our “college” graduations were still weird and only a few people on a tiny stage for the photo op even though we had the university-wide commencement with all ~10k of us and our families a couple days later.
I missed chance to eat corn dog. When I was young I refused. I don’t remember why. This was very surprising to friends as a child. They all ate corn dog for lunch but I did not. Now, I do not eat any meat because I became allergic. So I do not know how the corn dog tastes. I am curious, but I will never know (or I will know, very briefly).
Later I missed chance to spend life with the person I loved. She asked me to come with her to new city but I said no. That was the biggest mistake of my life. I regretted it and we became too different to try again. I never found another love which felt the same.
If I had to choose between the love, and the corn dog, I would choose the love. However, I still really wish I could eat the corn dog.
If it helps at all, corn dogs aren't really some transcendent food experience. The ones I've had mostly taste like sweet fried cornbread or a corn fritter, with the sausage mainly there for shape and saltiness. The corn flavor kind of overwhelms the meat anyway.
Childhood, childhood friends, etc etc...
I wanted to become an ice hockey pro. When I was 13 I was already training 3-4 times a week with a normal school and no time for anything else.
My way to the ice hockey rink was about 45 mins to an hour and usually my parents would get me directly from my school or I would go by train to training. During that I would have to eat. Sometimes work on my schoolwork. Then go training for 2ish hours. Drive back an hour home. Either eat or do homeworks again and sleep.
During the weekends most of the time I had a match.
It was also unfair because I had two sisters and they were most of the time just alone and unattended since I took up so much of my parents time.
I didn't hate it at the time. I just never learned a lot of stuff because I was always in this very rigid structure. Also I stopped with ice hockey after 13 years when I was 18. My mom still blames me for stopping to play ice hockey and if I only played again, everything would be better...
The funny thing is with my body and my physique I would have never become a "pro". I wasn't bad per se but I also wasn't the best. I was even in some regional selection but even there I only was average. Also since my height is reasonable (small) it would have been hard to be a good and successful defense. Most likely I would have made it to 3rd highest or even 2nd highest league if I kept on playing (not USA !!!).
I missed out on chasing my creative hobbies during my formative years in favor of my career and various forms of entertainment, and now I'm a jack of all trades, master of none, and that feels frustrating.
Now that I've been in the workforce for a few years, free time isn't as abundant as it once was. I now have to pick what I spend it on, and between my personal programming projects, Yu-Gi-Oh! and hanging out with my friends and partner, there's little time for everything else.
I always wanted to be an artist in some manner, be it writing or music - since I was a kid, I engaged in these in various amounts, but after short stints I would always move on to something else and I just couldn't physically make myself go back to them until I had a lengthy break. (I have since learned this can be symptoms of ADHD and am working with a psychologist to get assessment and treatment.)
So now I'm 26, a very skilled software developer, but a mid musician and a mid writer.
I'm still engaging in these hobbies ever-so-often, but the quality of my work is still far lower than my standards, and I can't help but feel like I wasted time; if I spent more time on these as a teen, by now I could have been so much better, maybe even have the courage to try entering the industry.
Thankfully, it's never too late, and as long as I persevere, one day I'll make something great. But I still can't help but feel melancholic about what could have been.
Some people shared that they missed out on a "normal" youth, which is regrettable. I feel the opposite - that I missed out on being myself.
My family were plenty permissive and always encouraging regarding unsupervised outings and drinking (you drink from your mid-teens here) and clubbing. Very encouraging. Forceful, even. In fact, I had no choice but to go rupture my eardrums, smoke about a factory's worth of second hand tobacco and weed and spend hours in a crowd of faces I couldn't possibly recognize (prosopagnosia), unable to even strike up a conversation, one the one hand because it was too noisy, and on the other because everyone was roleplaying a hardcore alcoholic more often than not.
I hated every minute of it, but it was the mold. Everyone had to fit that mold. Nothing and no one around me ever helped me realize that you could be a different person. So I spent all those years never really pursuing my own interests or meeting people who might share those interests. This is especially problematic in Portugal, where the culture makes it extra difficult to make friends as an adult. I have friends and they are good people, but it's exceedingly rare to have any interesting conversation with any of them because we are so different; we share no interests and we lead very different lives.
If I could do it all over again - and in fact, this would be my advice to any young person today - I would go abroad without thinking twice. High school abroad is a possibility for many, although I don't think I was mature enough at the start of high school for it to have been the right decision for me. What I needed at that time was to learn independence. But university, absolutely. Attending university nearby was my biggest mistake, and so what I missed out on was attending it somewhere else, maybe the UK or something (was still part of the EU at the time!) Just get out of the local framework and meet completely different people in order to broaden my worldview.
While we're on it, I would also advise a lot of young people who are like I was to not attend university right away after high school. This would have been impossible for me because, infuriatingly, we were still working on getting rid of mandatory military service at the time, so the only alternative to university was military service (which by all accounts was not a good time). Now that that's no longer a problem (at least until the far right wins an election) I recommend at least one gap year, which should be focused on employment (or volunteering) and - if possible - travel. This ties back to what I wrote in the other recent thread about higher education. I think my first real "employment" (not my first job; you know what I mean) helped me gain a lot of confidence. Everyone should have that experience as early as possible.
I also missed out on a normal teenage life, followed by missing out on anything resembling a normal college life.
I was relentlessly bullied in elementary and middle school, to the point of being suicidal at age 12, so I was moved into an online high school. This helped, a lot, but still resulted in missing out on the majority of a typical teenage experience, spent instead sitting in my parents' basement all day between doing schoolwork and gaming/programming.
Plus I just absolutely hated myself and could never figure out why (you're a girl, dumbass), so even when I did get out I'd still be reserved and awkward and barely able to socialize. Going out and seeing people in person maybe 5 days a month, instead of basically every day, certainly didn't help.
Fast forward to college and I had something plausibly resembling a normal freshman year, though still plagued by self hatred and negative self confidence. I managed to begin transitioning, followed by the pandemic deleting any chance at anything resembling a normal college experience. I "celebrated" turning 21 and having my first drink by buying a 6-pack of hard cider at Target. My graduation ceremony was held in-person, wearing a face mask, where the school deadnamed me despite multiple university staffers assuring me they wouldn't.
I had some good times in grade school and college, don't get me wrong, but today trying to think back on that time period hits me with a deep feeling of loss and emptiness. I still can't watch most media set in high school / college, as while I understand that they're not realistic depictions, they still remind me of the times I didn't have.
Clubbing. When I was the right age for it, I was way too broke.
I'm shocked that every comment isn't about bitcoin or apple stock.
Normally when a question like this gets posted on the other site, 99% of comments are "I wish I had taken bitcoin seriously back in 2013," or "god i wish I didn't sell my apple stock when it doubled from $1.90 to $4.00"
Would you rather:
A.
Be able to go back to a time where you randomly capture 50% of the buy lowest sell highest profit you missed out on, at least twice a day, for the rest of your life? Eg, you could have bought this stock at $1 and at its peak it's worth $100, and magically you were able to buy at $1 and sold at $50, but you'll be thinking about this for the rest of your life.
Or
B.
You don't make any money on this stock, but for the rest of your life you never feel any regret about not having bought this or any other stocks?
I almost wonder if people just feel that is a given with these type of questions, and yeah I definitely see that on other sites. I thought about writing that but did some thinking on something more about myself.
I did see a post on r/2007scape about what you would do if you could go back to 2007 and someone mentioned spending $15 to buy bitcoin because if you held on to them, you would have been able to afford to buy Jagex when it was up for sale for several hundreds of millions of dollars later on which was a bit mind-blowing to me.
I do enjoy thinking about it occasionally. If I spent money on stocks knowing what I know now, i.e. Nvidia since 2010 has had a ~60185% increase in stock price, and cryptocurrencies I would be set to enjoy life as a well off person.
I missed out on high school prom (which I skipped to go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show) because I didn't want to pay and didn't think it sounded that fun.
I did help my friends with their prom outfits, including one friend who wanted suit made entirely out of duct tape and several friends who crossdressed and needed help with things like tailoring and applying realistic facial hair. I also helped coordinate a date switcheroo for another friend (he had to keep his real girlfriend a secret from his racist mother, so we found another interracial couple who were willing to "swap" with him for the prom pickup and prom photos).
But despite all the hijinks, I never felt any urge to go myself. Various teachers and other adults told me it was just a one-time expense for an experience I'd never get to have again and I'd grow to regret it as I got older.
It's been over two decades, and I'm still waiting for the regret I was promised. (It probably doesn't help that my friends bailed halfway through prom because they were bored. They showed up to Rocky in their prom gear and we had a great time.)