It's amazing how quickly someone's life can change. If you mess up big enough, you might see your life flash before your eyes. You may not be dead, but your reputation sure is. This is why you need to keep your wits about you--you truly never know when everything can come crashing down.
Here are some of the most extreme examples of people ruining their lives in an instant. Try not to cringe too hard.
Givemesomeluck asked: Have you ever seen someone ruin their life in just a few seconds? How did they do it?
​Some people like to f*ck around a little too much, leaving them with some serious, life-altering injuries.
The dangers of doing musical theatre.
I had a friend in university, a student of jazz vocalist, who had an incredibly bright future ahead of her. Mid-way into her first year / freshman year, she was out with some friends in a theatre on stage and for fun, they were swinging her or just fooling around.
I believe they somehow dropped her or lost grip. She hit her head hard. Got a bad concussion. Had to drop-out of school.
She now has chronic head pain, and is living back at home. She tried to return back to school, but could barely last through two classes, if even, before her pain would get too bad.
I've lost touch with her so I'm not entirely sure what she's doing now. But, my gosh, just her life entirely derailed because of that one silly accident.
EDIT: she was sitting on a stage and go pulled from her ankles by her friends which led to her head hitting the edge of the stage and hyperextending her neck.
Should have known better.
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One of my high school classmates (a kicker on the football team) was at a party at a friend's house on the very last day of school in his senior year. The house was on a lake, and he decided to run off the end of the pier and jump head-first into the lake.
The water was a foot deep.
He never walked again.
Ouch!
Kid in his teens tried jumping off a Leading Light at high tide to impress his mates and girlfriend, hit a concrete wave breaker back first. Shattered part of his spine and is now in a permanent vegetive state.
This is heartbreaking.
Camping trip with friends when we were around 17 y/o. One kid hammered in his tent pegs, then just tossed the hammer at someone else's tent for no apparent reason. A girl was in the tent and caught full power of the hammer toss to her mouth. Shattered several teeth in her mouth, which she then choked on. She died choking on her own shattered teeth while alone and bleeding out of her face in a tent, with no idea of what caused her injury.
Campsite in the middle of nowhere. It took over an hour for help to come. Kid got arrested and got suspended sentence for involuntary manslaughter.
​People can be really stupid sometimes. Like.....REALLY stupid.
People should know by now to not be dumb on Zoom.
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Un-muted zoom call. Trash talking a manager. HR posted a "thank you X for your years of service" email pretty much the next day.
This past fall, an attorney I know attended a Zoom meeting with video. You could see someone not entirely out of frame crawl under her desk and spend the duration of the meeting there. It was very obvious by her facial expressions and movements what was going on under the desk.
She lost her job, and from what I understand, the guy was not her husband, so her marriage may be lost as well.
This is called digging yourself into a hole.
A woman failed her drug test at a courthouse and I watched her run across a parking lot with 2 drug court employees on her heels. She hopped in someone's SUV and shoved the driver out of the vehicle.
The drug court employees stood in front of the SUV with their hands on the hood to stop her, and she revved the engine and then knocked them with the car before reversing and driving away over a sidewalk.
This was easily preventable.
Had a friend that thought he could jump over a bonfire, he almost made it but fell back into the fire, his arm going into the embers. Ended up with 3rd degree burns on over a fourth of his body. I think he's doing pretty okay now but that one dumb decision will affect the rest of his life.
It’s insane how quick everything can go wrong. Spoiler alert- it’s really freakin’ fast.
Yikessss.
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Tweeted that they had hit a cyclist when driving to work. By the time she had got to work the company had sacked her for bringing the company into disrepute.
That’s just plain dumb.
Waiting outside a club one rainy night. Some young lady decided to take one of the cop cars out front for a spin after getting tossed out. She ended up crashing into one of those concrete barricade things blocking the side door.
There's a crazy NSFL video going around Twitter where two teen girls ruin their lives. They try to carjack an Uber driver and he holds onto the door and they speed off and end up flipping the car and killing him. It was in DC, they got charged with murder.
PLEASE don’t do this.
I knew a guy, he and his friends were into that trend of going to really high places and taking pictures of them hanging from them. The guy I knew got to the top of one of those massive crane things and while taking the picture he fell. He died upon impact with the ground and now whenever I see pictures like that on social media I want to cry and beg these people to stop before they lose their lives.
​Circumstances just plain suck sometimes.
Oof.
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A friend of mine in college was sitting for campus placements, it's a rigorous step process and companies come in day in and out to select candidates for their role. This guy sat through all the rounds of X company and cleared them as he went on. The last round of interviews went on till 5 in the morning and he'd been sitting since 9 in the morning trying to get a job. After all the hardwork he got placed in the company and got a great offer letter.
He was on cloud nine and the happiest guy out there, after a while the HR casually asked him his plans after he joined the company and he went on to say that the job is just temporary and he wanted work ex before he went for his masters the next year as he'd already gotten accepted from a university of his liking. The HR immediately tore the offer letter in front of him and told him that the offer has been retracted. He sat in the hallway crying for messing up in the last moment.
This is really sad.
A few days ago.
A 15 year old kid from my town stole his mom's car at 4 in the morning. Picks up 2 of his friends (they were boyfriend and girlfriend), and goes joyriding. Decides to go 90 down a road with no streetlights and that has many sharp curves.
Runs off the road, slams into a tree at full speed. Front seat passenger (15 m) thrown from the car and crushed underneath it. Pronounced dead at the scene. Back seat passenger (15 f) Thrown through the windshield. Alive at the scene, taken to the hospital and placed in a medically induced coma. Pronounced dead 3 days later.
The driver walked away with a few scratches. His life is over, he hasn't been sentenced yet, but last I heard he's going to be tried as an adult for 2 counts of vehicular manslaughter while under the influence (the kid was drunk). One stupid decision that night ruined 3 young lives.
One bad night is all it takes.
Guy from work went to strip club, got drunk af, and spent like 14k. Managed to get some strippers in his car, which ended up in them stealing it. His wife found out, which led to a fight that got physical. He went to jail, got divorced, lost his job and his kids because of one drunk night out with some coworkers.
At least she had a fallback job.
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Less than a year ago I was a manager at a retail store. We hired a new manager, and she was one of the coolest people I'd met - around my age (early 20s), a pilot, married with a stepdaughter and three dogs, and a pole dancer.
I asked her why she was working at our little old retail store. We sell lots of band merchandise, gifts, and general pop culture items, so she said she wanted the employee discount to use in the upcoming holidays. Fair enough, not the first new hire who said that to me. She was a good manager too, so no reason to suspect.
Well, she got arrested in the middle of her shift less than a month into the job. Turned out she'd been going into the register, reprinting 1-2 week old customer receipts, and using them to generate fraudulent returns so she could pocket the cash. This is incredibly stupid because when I trained her, I explained how LP monitors all the registers throughout the day and how we organize our papers to prepare for monthly audits. This very system is what got her caught.
The craziest part? She only stole around $2,000. She was charged with a felony and most definitely can't be a pilot anymore. I haven't heard from her since her arrest, but it's likely she's in jail. I don't know how she'll get another job when she's out, but good thing she's an exceptional pole dancer.
A deadly mistake.
Third grade a friend of mine was chewing on a rubber ball you can get out of the machine for 25 cents. It popped into the back of his mouth. Startled, he gasped, which pulled it down into his esophagus. He suffocated on that little rubber ball. His mother was a substitute teacher at the school. The year he would have graduated, his parents did a full page memorial in our yearbook.
Stop doing dumb sh*t, people! Most of these things would've been easily preventable. It's so easy to get yourself hurt.
Be safe, friends. And think before you steal a cop car
Try not to follow the bad advice given here, because you don't want to get the results that these guys did.
U/Duckerton375 asked: What's the worst advice someone ever gave you, but you still followed?
The workplace can bring a cornucopia of terrible advice. Don’t follow these unless you want to get fired.
​Bad jobs are usually not worth it.
Stick with a job no matter how bad it is. I stayed with a terrible job working retail, dealing with horrible customers and sexual harassment. I was told I wouldn't find anything better.
"No, no, you misunderstand. I said you wouldn't find anything better at making you feel like complete garbage."
This gets really creepy really fast.
frustrated workplace GIFGiphy"After you put in a job application, you need to call them at least once a day every day until they hire you."
Note: this did not get me hired. It got me called out by the HR person I was calling and forbidden to ever contact their facility again.
I work for a law firm that employees over 1500 people in the home office alone. Once I received a call from the building security saying, "Insert Name is here to speak with the owner." Well we are run by a committee so that's odd. Found out they just applied for a job and wanted to talk directly to the person that would potentially hire them. Told him the firm will contact them to schedule an interview. They refused to leave without "talking to the owner." Had security escort them out of the building.
​This is absolutely not true.
"Sleep is for people who do not want success" great words from my uncle, it almost killed me.
Now I may be oversleeping.
​Interpersonal relationships are also a big breeding ground for terrible advice. Don’t listen to any of these.
Heartbreaking.
My father always tought me and my brother that "having friends is bad and in the end they will never be there for you" so everytime I told my father about my friends he would get kinda mad and give me the advice to stop talking to them.
Now I am afraid of people and have several trust issues, thanks dad.
​This won’t end well.
A Christmas Story GIF by filmeditorGiphyIn the fifth grade my teacher was talking about bullying, then she said "if anyone tries to bully you just agree with them." So the next time I got bullied I agreed with the bully and they bullied me more.
Dude one time I saw an anti bullying video that told the victims to just BE NICE TO THE BULLY. Like the bully was hurling insults and the victim was smiling and complimenting him. My first thought was about how much I hated the mere thought that this would work. My second thought was of how the people who came up with that method had clearly never been bullied.
​Oof.
When I met my now wife at the age of 19, one of my coworkers said that it's very important to start at the bottom with presents and work your way up, she still has the socks I gave her on our first anniversary on the wall over our bed as a reminder...
I'm still trying to teach my boyfriend about good presents and bad presents. Biscuits from the supermarket = bad present. Cheap unbranded laptop battery from China as my only present = bad present (and only lasted 2 months). Anything off my 7-page wishlist = good present. It's literally a list of things I want to receive as presents.
​Can tell you from experience that this is a bad idea.
Had a falling out with some friends. My husband recommended I reach out to an old friend who ghosted me suddenly in a manner that induced some pretty severe abandonment trauma. Went for it anyways because "it's been so long, surely they changed". Am now experiencing the same things as last time.
When you follow bad advice, it can lead to mistakes that you just can’t come back from.​
Buying a house is tricky.
for sale dancing GIF by Lisa VertudachesGiphy"Buy a home now before the prices go up!" -my FIL in 2006.
We bought in 2007 and paid $259,500 for our 1,300 sq ft house (we really couldn't afford it and had an 80/20 so we had 8% interest for one loan and 6% on the other) and in 2008 it was worth $97,000 so refinancing wasn't even an option. We watched all of our neighbors walk away or get foreclosed on but we kept paying our bills and as of this very moment our house is worth $462,000. I'm so happy we stuck it out, we both worked our @sses off and the house will be paid off in 2 years.
It worked out for us, it's a horrible idea. Especially since 1300 sq ft houses are $460+k
My heartbreaks for future generations, I honestly don't know how people are going to afford housing in the future.
It’s there for a reason.
"Never apply for any government assistance."
Cue years of suffering trying to work full-time with a painful disability. Quit a particularly terrible job, and wanted to apply for food aid until I could find another gig; a friend with lots of DHS experience recommended I apply for Social Security "just to get in the system." Turns out my disability was bad enough to get accepted the first time, which I wasn't expecting. Really could've used that support, oh, the 30+ previous years of my life.
Credit is important to have.
I was told to not get a credit card until after college. I was super fortunate to have my college paid for so I had no loans, car paid in cash, no credit card or anything to start building credit. Found myself out in the world at 22 years old with a credit score of 0.
So while a lot of this bad advice came from trusted people, oftentimes they were too misinformed to give that advice in the first place. Don't trust the word of one person--do your research, and make decisions for yourself.
It'll be way better in the long run