All of us have “what if” moments. I won’t go into mine, I think they are useless.
Could I have been Secretary of State, married to a super model, and my life would have been perfect if only I had done this or that, or if this or that hadn’t been done to me? Probably not.
I have a perfectly good job, a wonderful spouse, and pretty good life. I wouldn’t change a thing. If any of my “what ifs” actually occurred. I would not have the life I have now.
Maybe I go to a better University and eventually become Secretary of State. Never meet my current wife. I meet another women. We marry. We divorce, I start drinking. Fox News gets me fired. I die miserable and alone.
People always fantasize about the positive effects of “what if”, never consider the negative.
What if my parents, instead of squeaking me in to kindergarten when I was just a few days shy of the age cutoff, had waited a year to start me in school? I probably would have done much better scholastically and socially. As it was, I felt small, overwhelmed, and bewildered in class for years. I was shy and backward even among kids closer to my age, so I would have benefited.
When I was old enough to grasp all this, I asked my mom why I hadn’t been held back. She always looked conscious and changed the subject when it came up.
I was offered 3 football scholarships coming out of high school. One of the schools I had no interest in but it was a D1a football program. The second one was home to a world class ecology and viticulture program and I was really excited about going to school there but little interest in playing football for them. The third school had several world class engineering programs that didn’t appeal to me but they would give me a track scholarship in addition to my football scholarship.
I chose the last school and picked my major more at less at random while drunk on spring break. I did a decade in that profession and made enough money to start my own business making booze but I’m self taught. I routinely wonder what would have happened if I’d studied viticulture and ecology and been making booze from the start. I probably would have enjoyed my career more but they don’t pay much so I don’t know if I’d be running my own business yet or just another poorly paid winemaker.
It’s not necessarily a better path but I wonder if following what I want to do at a younger age would have had a better result.
I’m assuming there was a lot of abuse and neglect there. Its hard because sometimes the kids are too terrified or brainwashed to speak up in those situations.
For me I have lots of regrets. People I wish I’d never talked to, times I wished I’d asked a competent adult for help when I really needed it.
But I guess I have a couple of financial ones I wish I’d done differently.
In the late 90s I asked my dad to borrow some money so I could put a flat $1000 in amazon stock. I never followed through.
Around a decade ago when bitcoin was around $500, a friend who knew a lot about economics recommended I invest in it. now its around 30-50k.
Of course in both those situations, I probably would’ve sold them long before they peaked.
What if, during the summer of 93 at a night swimming trip, I had said “Odette had the right idea.” Would have resulted in skinny dipping, breaking up with a long distance girlfriend, which would lead to: not taking 2 years off of grad school, I wouldn’t have done movie work, been out of work because of a writer’s strike, and probably would have a different career entirely.
There was an episode of Star Trek TNG that explored this:
TL, DR: Picard’s artifical heart is grievously damaged, threatening his life. Q gives Picard a chance to go back in time and relive the bar fight that damaged his real heart, necessitating the artificial implant. Picard does so, avoids the barfight, keeps his real heart, and returns to the present - only to realize that his newfound sense of risk aversion has completely changed his life, shunting him from a glowing career as a starship captain into a mundane job as a stellar cartographer. He asks Q to let him relive the barfight one more time, this time getting stabbed in the heart as he originally was, and finds that his present-day life has returned to normal. The name of the episode comes from the idea that if we are given the opportunity to pull at the loose threads of our life, we find that the tapestry tends to unravel in unexpected ways.
There isn’t much that isn’t pure 20/20 hindsight, requiring knowledge of the future, like what if I had bought some Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, or Google stocks at the right time.
I think I mostly made the best decisions I could at the time with the information I had.
I guess there is a “what-if” that could have gone differently if I had made different choices that wouldn’t require foreknowledge.
That would be to have kept up the pretense of believing in god. When I admitted my doubts to my parents, they were quite upset with me, and more or less disowned me. They kicked me out as soon as they were legally allowed to, and wouldn’t help pay for college.
If I had chosen to pay some lip service to something I didn’t believe in, then I wouldn’t have started out my adult life struggling and impoverished, and would instead would have gotten a college degree that they would have paid for, rather than trying and failing to attain one on my own, while working full-time, and living in rather squalid conditions that were not conducive to academia.
I don’t know what I’d be doing, or if I’d be using that degree (at the time, I was strongly considering computer science), but having a degree opens a whole bunch of doors that I have found closed to me.
Every decision I have made, every choice in my life has lead me to be here, sitting in the sunshine just outside of Sarasota FL, having a beer, with my loving and supportive Wife at my side and my daughters living well with their partners. Every bad experience I have learned from, every good experience I treasure.
I would not change a thing for the world.
I’ll give two such moments. In 1997, I spent a month at Stanford. There was an interesting talk on a new idea for a search engine. I had gotten to know the speaker when he took me on a day’s tour of SF (and we walked exactly halfway across the Golden Gate bridge). Had I only said to him, “Sergey, if you ever start a company with your search engine, let me invest $10K.”
The other one is more serious. When I finished HS, I got into several colleges but with no scholarship. Loans were not around in those days (1954). I had the vague idea that if I could scrape together money for a year at Drexel, I could then enter their work six months/study six months coop program. Looking for a summer job in the Help Wanted ads in the paper, there was one looking for a lab technician. So I called, went for an interview at what turned out to be a research lab at Penn, where I was told that this wasn’t for a summer job, but a whole program where you worked full time, went to school part time and it was arranged to finish in five years. You got your pay and half the tuition was waived. I jumped at it. What if I hadn’t seen that ad? I can only assume my entire life would have been entirely different–and not for the better.
What if we never moved across country when I was 7?
My Mother inherited a house in Southern Virginia at a time when my father was looking for work and we were renting in San Francisco CA. This was the very early 1970s .
My Dad got an offer to work on the Washington DC metro he had helped build BART -and my parents took the chance to move. Dad worked and lived mostly in DC. We lived in a smaller southern town near the bottom of Virginia.
All around it wasn’t the best experience.
We were a black family living in a racist town and so dealt with that. We hardly saw my Dad -weekends only so I missed out on a lot there.
It turns out that the house my mother thought was given to her outright was actually left to her and a distant cousin so my mostly broke parents had to take out an expensive loan in a town all the way across the country with no real friends and suffer financially for it.
My late Mother ended up living in an old southern house in a small town in a crappy neighborhood worth almost nothing.
After moving my Mother found out from my Dad that our God parents who owned a business were willing to loan him the down payment on a house near them in San Francisco.
Houses in that neighborhood -$30-35k back then are worth in excess oF $1.6 million now.
This value and all of their friendships - which fell by the wayside years after we moved - would have provided a lot more support over the years.
Also during that period my older brother could have attended a good state college with free tuition.
I think about this every few months.
Not for what I would have done - I turned out OK - but what it could have meant for both of my parents who essentially died without much after decades of work.
What if… I had pursued a career in veterinary medicine. I had wanted it all the way through college and after, but I turned down Cornell and UC Davis, for family reasons, so I went to the wrong school. Looking back on my life, I would most have enjoyed being a vet for a zoo or a zoo keeper. I did zoo keeping internships in high school and loved every second of it. So, wrong university, and wrong career.
If the university hadn’t failed to send in my deferment, I would have never joined the military and then made a career of it. Wouldn’t have met my first wife, nor had the kids that I have. And I surely wouldn’t have traveled all over the place and seen things I’d only dreamed about as a youngster.
Twenty-six years ago this coming Wednesday I was debating whether or not to go to a friend’s birthday party. I saw a can of Silly Strings for sale at a street fair, and thought that would be a good gift. I ended up going to the party, and met my wife of 25 years. I had struggled in the romance department, so it’s very possible I’d be single, bitter, and driving Dopers crazy with my complaining.
Off the top of my head, I can think of two potentially life-changing situations in my life.
In the middle of my sophomore year of college (this would have been in fall, 1972) I was talking to an Air Force recruiter and decided to enlist. At the time there was a program which after boot camp would have allowed me to finish getting a bachelor’s degree at Air Force expense, with the commitment of serving for (IIRC) twice the amount of time it took me to get my degree. I took the qualifying tests, getting scores which according to the recruiter would give me a wide range of opportunities. Then I went in for my induction physical, and it turned out I was not physically fit enough to serve. After all these years I can’t recall what (or if) they told me was the reason. I did, however, later receive a notice from the Draft Board that I had been reclassified from my student deferment to “unfit for military service except in time of war or national emergency”. I’ve sometimes wondered what my life would have been like if I had been accepted into the Air Force.
The other is also sort of college related. In my senior year I started thinking about what I was going to do with my impending BFA in Theatre. I ended up deciding to get a Master’s degree in Library Science. I figured that would open me to a number of possibilities; theater research, a job teaching theater or working at either a high school or university. I had applied to and been accepted at Catholic University of America in Washington DC (the alma mater of the head of my theatre department) but realized that my finances weren’t up to it. Again, what if I had either come into the money or qualified for a grant, scholarship, or something?
One question first: does Mithraism allow for abortion?
“What if” Jesus dropped dead on the way up to Golgotha? It was quite possible: He’d taken a hell of a beating that morning. Blood loss, internal trauma, heart failure. If He’d dropped out early and died: oblivion. Even if resurrected after three days: “must have just been a coma. Here Gladius, finish him off.” No miracle, no Church.
Asking because my existence would have been at least some cosmic otherwise; the Roman Empire replaced with another outfit besides the Catholic Church, with its influence on my parents similar to the Tommies old joke about the British Army: “They can fuck you but they can’t make you pregnant. Or maybe they can, but they can’t make you love the kid.
But the big one is if I had taken a job in Antarctica instead of the Colorado Mountains. Antarctica would be ‘cool’ to have on your resume, but I still have my job in the mountains, very lucrative, and met my wife through the job.
I would have gotten room and board, and basically minimum wage in Antarctica, and missed out on the job I still have.
If I had gone south, I have know idea what I’d be. I’d sure be different though. I made the correct choice.
If I hadn’t been doggedly persistent about certain, professional aspirations in the Air Force, I probably would have had a far more mundane, boring existence, and would have second-guessed myself for the rest of my natural life. I would not have been able to parlay that active duty niche-experience into a solid, second career, nor the opportunity to meet the now-wife, and “settle down” into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I too, made correct choices, and would do it all over again.