Best decision of my life was not taking up the offer of a place to study maths at uni, and instead going travelling with my dad around parts of West Africa that had never seen white people before, him recording musicians and me helping him to photograph them. He wasn’t happy I didn’t take up the offer (being from an academic background himself) so I made out I was just deferring it a year lol.
It made future job searching harder than it would have been but on the other hand I’ve seen so many posters here say their degrees were a waste of time.
Worst decision would have been spending three years with a bunch of straight nerds.
Worst decision of my life was to pursue a PhD because I was passionate about understanding stuff. Leaving my interesting, well-paid job to pursue my passion was a terrible choice.
We’re like mirror images. My passion right now is to punch the next person who tells me to follow my passion.
Just kidding though. It wasn’t a bad choice, it just didn’t work out. You make a choice you think leads to happiness and you the roll dice.
I went to grad school in math because I was good at it, but I hated the experience and bailed as soon as I got enough credits for my Masters. They had an accelerated program so it wasn’t too much of a waste of time. But I was much happier as soon as I was working in a normal job.
I was poor when I was 22 but well funded by THATS SOCIALISM. Government paid me to do academic work every summer of undergrad and I got a free ride for grad school (no tuition plus a Government grant to cover living expenses). So I more or less wasted a year after undergrad and before work, but it wasn’t rich parents that bankrolled it. It was taxpayers.
I honestly don’t think advice matters. “Follow your passion” is just insulting though.
I have a younger friend who is a big follow your passion person and who used to ask me for advice and I’d outright refuse or just ask questions to get her to think about the issues. She eventually found a path where she is successful and happy with but somehow she forgot about the intervening 12 years and all the other choices she made and how deeply disappointed she was by the outcomes.
I look at her and I can see how she’s been marked by the way she dived into things. There’s a deep sadness now that definitely wasn’t there before. I feel helpless because I feel like I know where she’s going and there’s nothing I can do or say.
I was 37. Not poor anymore, but not rich either. Poor before, and poor now. Maybe I should have called that cute secretary instead of going back to school.
I have a younger brother who bought in pretty hard to the passions BS, unfortunately without having any himself. So he spent the first 10 years of his adult life working shit jobs he hated because he was trying to find his passions. Now he has nothing to show for it except deep bitterness.
The people who I know who actually do bounce around are either poor or over 70. Yeah, the people I know with money do take intense trips to exotic locations once in a while that are very far from carefree bouncing. The one rich guy I know who is not old and doesn’t work much (retired from microsoft very young with a lot of money) is bored as hell.
And I know several poor bouncers who enjoy lots of freedom.
Sounds patronizing. Do you actually know any poor people? They have things they like or not too and some them go for the things they like and some don’t. Same as regular people.
