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Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

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Re: Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

#311

Post by pc86 »

suranyami wrote: post #70

Not leaving a destructive relationship sooner. Twice. The second one was the worst. I've since observed that behaviour in other couples, mostly with the men, but almost as frequently with the women that make the partner's feeling of self-worth completely revolve around them. It's toxic, left me with severe depression that is still an issue today. There is a certain type of internal self-talk that becomes a self-reinf…

I had to get out of an abusive relationship to see it was abusive, which I think is true for a lot - maybe even the vast majority - of people. She was emotionally abusive/manipulative, and that would occasionally branch into physicality. Never anything as overt as hitting/slapping, but certainly the occasional grab or shove.

I also had friends bring up the emotional part (nobody ever saw anything physical) but your mind gets pretty twisted when you're in a relationship like that. It's really hard to see it through an objective lens until you're already on your way out, or even far removed.

I don't know your specific circumstances but I'm confident you will continue to get better.

Re: Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

#313

Post by zmibes »

switch007 wrote: post #22

Not pushing myself to go to a better university Not saving enough when younger Not moving to Europe when it was easier to do so (I’m British) Oh well. Life is too short to dwell on such things. You can only change the future, not the past.

Still easy, don't remoan just do it

Re: Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

#314

Post by autospeaker22 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #266

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 f…

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".

Re: Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

#315

Post by Test0129 »

Not spending more time being young. I never really got the chance. Due to life circumstances I had to begin working basically as young as you can work in America. I've never had a free summer, never rushed a frat, never went to dances, etc. At the time it didn't bother me but now I'm older I've seen the effects. I similarly did nothing but school and work to pay bills in college. This has had such a profound effect on my self esteem the scale I have to measure it in is logarithmic. As a result in many ways I'm maladjusted to "normal" life. The song "Time" by Pink Floyd really resonates with me.

While I've moved on from losing the best years of my life (you're only young and innocent once) I overcompensated for a long time, and still sometimes to this day, by trying to do everything people invite me to do. Paradoxically this made my situation worse because more...stable people have a lot of people-oriented things they like to do and I approach all these things expecting to not keeping to do them. For example, going to the bar or clubs or whatever. These however lead to more regrets, like drinking too much when I was young and not taking better care of my health (thankfully nothing serious happened).

Now, the advantage of getting older is I can look back on this wide body of experience and use it to make calls on things. I know what I like to do. I know that I am not a very social person. Instead of trying to be a caricature of what I imagine a normal person is like I just work with what I have. It's been a long multi-decade process to get here but I am better.

Re: Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

#317

Post by RMPR »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #110

Years ago, I was suffering from painful defecation, had mucus and blood come out. I always thought it would get better by just eating healthier or whatever. Never even thought about visiting a doctor. When I finally went, the doctor tested my butt for STDs and what a surprise, it was chlamydia. A round of doxycyclin quickly got rid of the chlamydia, but the damage they did lead to a (peri?)anal abscess, which turned…

bad bot

Re: Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

#318

Post by darkteflon »

l33tbro wrote: post #117
user_7832 wrote: post #66

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 b…

Is quoting a stoic on HN the same as playing 'Stairway to Heaven' in a guitar shop? I do love this quote of course (and all things Aurelius).

Funniest thing I read today. Thanks.

Thanks to GP, too. That’s a lovely quote.

Re: Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

#319

Post by mrweasel »

bheadmaster wrote: post #140

I don't really "believe" in regret. 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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

#320

Post by robertk »

Loughla wrote: post #231
robertk wrote: post #158

Nothing. Free will doesn’t exist so I just accept what comes my way and naively trust the universe not to be too much of a d$&#. Hopefully that gets me to the finish line.

I legitimately do not understand the philosophical exercise of 'free will doesn't exist'. Yes it does. I could walk into the street right now. I could walk into the office next door and slap a co-worker. I could learn German. I could leave my life and walk to China. What is your justification that free-will doesn't exist? Other than biological needs like eating and sleeping, I have control over the rest. Or, rather,…

What you do and think is exclusively dictated by the input of information going into your brain coming from perception encoded as electrons and ions flowing through the atoms consisting of your neurons. If someone had a printout of the small sub-manifold of spacetime that is you they could read out everything you ever thought and did and it would all make sense (meaning, follow from Schrodinger’s equation). You have no choice and you cannot defy physics. Even if you run into the street, it was so decreed, because you were deterministically ordained to be contemplating free will and attempt to violate it with a “random” action, which in conjunction with the random seed you have chosen (the current state of your neural ion flows) led you to deterministically run into the street. With, as always, a perfect causal pathway and explanation — no matter how free and random it seems. What you do next, always, is decided exclusively by what in the universe happened just before, and no other auxiliary or theological inputs.
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