Dropped out of college after one year. Original plan was to take a semester off, and I did in fact transfer to a different (more local) school after doing that, but because I had started a “life” (got an apartment,car, etc) I was working full time AND had a full load of classes. It was just too much, and I ended up withdrawing halfway through the semester with no credits earned.
I eventually went back to school 12 years later (which is 12 years ago now) because my job offered tuition reimbursement. I now am only 5 credits away from getting my degree, but I no longer have that job so I am going to have to come up with that money myself to finish up, not to mention finding the time. Compound that with the fact that I am now self-employed and a degree will make zero difference in my job prospects or income and you can see why its not a huge priority to finish up, although I will eventually because it seems ridiculous to be that close to a goal and not finish it.
So, even though I will eventually get my degree, my life would have undoubtedly been different had I gotten it 20+ years ago. But, as has been mentioned up-thread, that would have meant no kids (or at least, not these kids) so its hard to regret it too much.
I also can’t work up the vim to regret past decisions, even the bad ones, because they put me where I am now and I like this place. They were also a product of who I was at the time, and I couldn’t have been a different person, soooo…
Having said that, I spent most of my twenties doing things that people might call “regrettable”. And having typed this much of my post, I find that I still don’t want to write about them on a message board.
Me either. It’s not like didn’t make the best decision I could, within the constraints of knowledge, money, etc… that I had at the time.
The only ones that I halfway regret are the ones that I have more information about the situation now than I did at the time, and wish I’d made the opposite decision as a result. But I can’t really beat myself up about them because even at that, I did the best that I could.
That’s the trick, I think. Regret comes in when you just make a rash decision, or you do something you know you shouldn’t. If you do your best to make a rational decision with the information you have available at the time, it’s hard to actually regret that decision, even if it turns out not to be the ideal one as time passes.
I have a lot of regrets. I’ve made some bad decisions but they’re usually not the ones I made on the fly. The ones I mulled over and tried to reason out—that’s where I sometimes shot myself in the foot. I’d go with what I thought was right even though it didn’t feel right in my gut. I wish now I’d known they weren’t right for me. But not all of them were bad and I’ve got time yet to make more, and I feel lucky.
I was born with a lazy eye. As a kid I could have treated it by wearing a patch over my good eye. I hated the patch and kept peeling it off until my parents just stopped trying and thus I am essentially blind in one eye.
It’s really difficult to be sure what would have happened had you taken “the other path”. As an old guy, I wish I had done some things differently, but I can’t be sure what would have happened.
The majority of my current friends followed the same path: High school->Engineering College->Long-term career at Uber-Mega-Corp. Most of my coworkers have been at our company for 30+ years and have never worked anywhere else. They have large pensions, savings, stable homelife, and have spent their entire working life in a cubicle, in the same building, in the same town.
I was too restless (and truth be told, too immature) to do this, and dropped out of college the first year. Instead of spending the next decades advancing and building career/pension/nest-egg, I spent the time hopping from one career to the other. Driving trucks, flying planes, crane driver, working foreign construction sites, working on oil platforms and submersibles, and just “saw the world”. I finally went back to school and got a couple of engineering degrees, and grew up and started a real job, but I was decades behind my peers.
On the plus side, we’ve finally caught up (savings/etc.) by being very frugal on some things, and can retire early like all my friends. But it would have been easier to just tough out the 4 years of college and enter the world of cubicle drones a few decades earlier.
Would it have been better? I don’t know. It’s hard to put a value on experiences. My impulsive decision in 1977 to say screw it and walk away from school certainly had irrevocable consequences, and I’ve had occasion to regret it. But I don’t know if I’d change it.
It’s the incremental decisions that I screw up, and I think that’s fairly common: eat this cookie, buy that book, don’t exercise tonight, etc. Fiction turns on Big Choices: I think life more often turns on slow accumulations of patterns.
Quitting my PhD because I couldn’t find a commutable place to live. I really had tried as hard as possible to find a place, and spent three months doing so before giving up. My circumstances were a little more involved than just moving into a student house, just in case anyone decides to give retractive advice.
A week later I got a call from an agency saying they had a place. I’d already cancelled my scholarship, so I couldn’t take it. If I’d waited a week longer… Ah well.
I stayed at my undergraduate school for graduate work. There was a girl involved but we broke up that spring. Too late. I had a choice between Harvard and Chicago. Then I got married (to someone else). Best decision I ever made. Then moved to Canada. I still don’t know if that was the right thing.
Surrendered my only child to adoption, while no more than a child myself. A permanent decision I knew would change both our lives forever, and that I could end up regretting, every day for the rest of my life.
In the intervening years I was often judged a commitment phobe by people unaware of the difficult choice I’d made, and was living with.
Was it regret though? I’m not sure now. I regretted that my heart was broken and I had to live with such an unhealing and invisible wound, but the decision I made? Not really regret, so much as pain and sorrow, I think.
(Almost 30 yrs later, we were reunited and today are active in each other’s lives and share a very unique and special love. That child, being beyond magnificent, in every way, makes it clear, I had no reason to ever regret a thing, it seems!)
I regret not having made more decisions. I sometimes feel like I just let life happen. All in all life turned out pretty good. Not many regrets but life was so simple there just wasn’t much to regret.