this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026

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How many of the choices you made in high school actually affect your adult life today? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

83 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Was talking about home economics as a school subject in another thread and i realised that for me personally, taking "Food Tech" (cookery gcse) would have impacted me pretty negatively, even though generally speaking GCSEs don't have much of an effect on the rest of your life or education.

So i wonder if anyone else has similar revelations? My post title is also phrased more openly than that, so it doesn't have to be school specific, but i am mainly interested in things from the teenage time period.

Another choice i made in HS, for instance: i remember being really glad to have a medium-size group of friends in high school, but in retrospect they were terrible people and i realise that there would have been huge benefits to spending more time alone and in the library - yes, i genuinely look back and wish i studied more, lol. Something which I'm always told never happens.

This one "affects me as an adult" because i ended up entering adulthood with several friends determined to force their personality to be cool, relying on manosphere influencers to determine how they should behave; a lot of these people i didn't want to know in the first place.

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[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I view life as a deterministic "chain reaction" of current events following from past events and me just being along for the ride so I assume all of it affects my adult life. An insignificant seeming change then could dramatically have affected the trajectory of my life. I wouldn't change anything because it all is what led to me being what I am now.

[–] Mountainaire@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Does that mean you absolutely love yourself in every way?

[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes. I'm absolutely flawless.

Anything else?

[–] Mountainaire@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well, now that borders on arrogance lol but I was going to say that that sure seemed like a healthy view, because there are certainly things I'd back and change if I could, even if it was mere exposure to certain ideas or my interpretation of them

[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I thought you were being a smartass - sorry about that.

No, there are thing I'd like to be otherwise but broadly speaking I'm satisfied where I am and I wouldn't want to start tweaking anything because I can't know the unforeseen consequences of it. This is good enough.

[–] Mountainaire@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Sorry, I had vaguely felt like my sentence back there could get misinterpreted after I typed it, but I didn't know how to word it in any other way, so I had just proceeded. Haha.

I can't know the unforeseen consequences of it.

This is... amazingly insightful (even though we should already know about this through all the time-travel dramedies we see, lol, but I guess I just forget to apply it to my own life regrets)... What a great neutralizer of negativity. Thanks for the reminder...