Life has a steep learning curve and one poor decision can drastically alter the course of your own.
This isn't to say that it's impossible to get back up even stronger—many people do this each and every day—but many more will have to settle for being older and wiser even if the way they originally wanted things to go didn't come to pass.
People shared their experiences after Redditor SweatyBag99729 asked the online community:
"What is the decision you regret the most?"
"Not being able to..."
"Not being able to communicate my thoughts in a clear manner. Not being able to show much emotions or being able to show any kind of affection. It's cost me many a relationship."
unwanted_species
We're sorry to hear this. Therapy can work wonders, especially with being more open about your feelings.
"Not trying what I want..."
"Not taking chances and seeing it compound. Not trying what I want because I might fail. Not asking that girl out because she might say no. Not living, I spent too much fearing what might go wrong and not enough time pursuing life."
accidentlycelibate
This can be very debilitating but you are not alone. Many struggle with this. Why not try? You have nothing to lose.
"I was bullied at school..."
"Not sticking up for myself more. I was bullied at school and abused at home. It took some time for me to recover from it all. If I had been able to spend that time and energy on other things, so who knows what I might have accomplished."
skunkwaffle
Bullying can scar children for life and the fact that society often looks the other way is horrible.
"Letting myself be isolated..."
"Letting myself be isolated and get really sad and overweight before doing something about it. Only really started living at 32 feels like i wasted a lot of my life."
CJNitroSpark
Many people have shared that their 30s are their best decade. You can be you! It's not too late.
"I was pressured into it..."
"Going to college. Like most millennials I was pressured into it, to the point that I never even considered careers that didn't require a college education. Now I'm working as a cook after giving up my teaching career, and I love it."
mgraunk
College isn't necessarily for everyone–it's great to hear that you're happy doing something you enjoy!
"My quality of life..."
"Not looking after my physical health. My quality of life would be many times higher now if I just did 30 minutes of exercise, ate more then once every two days, and brushed my teeth."
"Waking up in pain every morning can set your whole day up to be bad if you let it and also I can't remember the last time I smiled and wasn't immediately depressed, embarrassed and self conscious about my teeth."
"I'm not even 25 yet either."
Everyday_Hero1
The best time to start is now. Unfortunately, dental care can be so expensive in this country, so we feel you there.
"My family not going into the room..."
"My family not going into the room with my dog when he had to be put down. My dad told me it would be too hard to handle and I shouldn't have listened to him."
"I was the closest to him and I should have been there for his last moments. I let my dad know how much I regretted it and convinced him to go in with his dog years later. He's glad he did."
j1ggy
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Glad you were able to give your dad good advice.
"Doing so..."
"Not being honest about my depression. Doing so won't get me the help I desperately need. It's been getting worse over the years."
FromWhereAlien
If you're struggling with depression, there are many great resources out there, including SAMHSA's National Helpline.
It is a free, confidential, 24/7, 365-day-a-year treatment referral and information service and is available at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
"Looking past all the red flags..."
"Looking past all the red flags with my wife's oldest kid, and getting in a committed relationship with her in the first place. I count the years I spent living with him among the worst of my life."
mryoudidntask
Being a step-parent is hard–and even more so when you're dealing with kids who don't want you around.
"Failing to acknowledge love..."
"Failing to acknowledge love when it was right there in front of me. Also ignoring the personal issues I have that have slowed me down and prevented me from becoming a better man/human."
GreenSleeves7
We've all been there. Sometimes you're just not ready to accept it.
If you're struggling with feelings of regret, you need to know that you can acknowledge your feelings but that dwelling on the past won't do you any good in the long run.
Show yourself some kindness. You deserve that. And don't be afraid to craft new goals.
Have some stories of your own to share? Feel free to tell us more in the comments below!
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Woman Livid After Boyfriend Says She ‘Looks Good’ In Photo From When She Had Eating Disorder
They say it's never too late to try new experiences in life. But to what extent is that actually true?
There are exceptions for some people, of course, but I think I missed the window of learning how to skateboard in my wisened years. I'd like to keep my knee cap intact, please.
Curious to hear about all the coulda, shoulda, wouldas from strangers on the internet, Redditor Eddings_06 asked:
"For the adult users of Reddit: What is something you regret not doing while you were young, that you wish you did when looking back?"
Not all responses involved physical activity.
If only these Redditors embraced the power of knowledge when they were younger...
Intellectual Growth
"Wish I had taken education more seriously, and protected my creativity from the opinions of others, cause in the final day, noone else cares."
– skaote
Being More Inquisitive
"I wish I took actual education more seriously - rather than the game of education."
"Things have generally worked out pretty well for me school / career wise but I definitely approached it all as a challenge to win rather than really a learning experience."
"I think I'm still pretty smart (I hope) but especially once I got to college, what I struggled with most was the next-level thought. I struggled a lot in seminar courses where you just roundtable discussed because I just felt like I had no input. I read the assigned text. I could tell you whatever you needed to know about the assigned text but I hadn't learned how to really take in the information and *make* something of it. Even studying, I always did fine on most exams but it literally wasn't until my senior year of college where I studied with someone in a way that was just more than re-read your notes and regurgitate what you memorised and took the exam and thought like, 'holy sh*t - this is what it means to fully understand.'"
"Also an environment in which you're implied to need to show no weakness to be competitive. So I have a huge aversion to asking questions. It's not that I'm shy but I just don't have questions. If I don't understand something factually, I'll look it up later. Which was also a huge loss in college re: office hours or again seminars. I wasn't scared to ask or anything, I just didn't think I had any questions that I didn't think I could answer on my own. I didn't have that curiosity or next-step thought that my peers had."
"And that set-back I think still follows me now. I find I'm still less 'questioning' about stuff."
– PhiloPhocion
Communication Expansion
"Learning more languages / technical skills when my brain was still fresh."
Taking better care of their bodies sooner was something these people regretted not doing.
Eating Habits
"Also, a healthy diet. 'I can eat junk food and drink cola and booze all the time without getting fat! Guess I just have amazing genes lol.' Flash forward 10 years later and my doctor tells me to lose weight before it's getting dangerous. It's incredibly hard to change your habits after not giving a f'k for most of your life."
– Debrazzamonkey
Improved Regimen
"Yeah, I had almost no clue how to work out until I was in my mid 20s. I love working out now and do it almost every day but I get depressed knowing how far behind I am on my physical fitness and how much I've missed out. But I just did not have it in me to care or know how to put in the effort to lift weights."
– __M-E-O-W__
Starting to secure your financial future early in life would definitely pay off in dividends.
"Investing money instead of spending it on stupid sh*t that I no longer have anyway."
– FSMFan_2pt0
Establishing Credit
"Build my credit. At 25 I still don't really have credit. So many things I could do if I would have just built it."
– Penguin-1524
Get That Credit Card
"I wish I could go back to like 16 with a credit card. Be smart and buy a pack of gum or something small and pay it back right away."
"When I was car shopping for the first time, they told me my low credit time and no car history meant I need to pay 5%."
"If I ever have kids, I'll make sure they do that."
– bbhatti_12
My friends are generally impressed I'm bilingual. I'm also fluent in Japanese, although my communication skills have waned over the years as I don't get to practice much beyond everyday casual discourse with my immediate family.
My biggest regret is not working hard enough to have become tri-lingual. I loved learning French in middle school and high school. It's a beautiful language, but I kept making excuses not to practice it when I graduated.
I've forgotten most of it, and getting back on that horse at this point, is an insurmountable task. Quel dommage.
Bittersweet moments are usually wonderfully pleasant but yet wrapped in a blanket of sadness, longing or even regret. These experiences are uniquely human and often intertwined in nostalgic memories.
Human emotion is complex. The duality of bittersweet is what makes life interesting.
The comments from BlaasianCowboyPanda's post on Ask Reddit are filled with tearful moments from people's memories. Often, they involve loss, love, or regret.
Redditor BlaasianCowboyPanda asked:
"People of Reddit, what is the most bittersweet situation you've experienced?"
Better grab your tissues before reading any further!
Last moments in a hospital.
"About ten years ago just before she died of lung cancer, my mom called me by my childhood nickname, told me she loved me and then fell asleep. That was the last thing she ever said to me. I was 35 when she died and she hadn't called me that nickname in maybe 30 years. I still tear up thinking about it."
"Sitting in the hospital room, mom was about ready to pass away from cancer, everything was shutting down internally. The date was my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. The last thing dad said to her was 'Thank you for 40 wonderful years.'"
"Oh man. I'm always a sucker for the long love."
"Amidst a loooong illness in hospice and dementia, that meant he recognized no one, my Grampie still lit up every day when my Grammie showed up. He would turn to whoever else was in the room and say 'ah, I'm just the luckiest fella in the world to have the most beautiful woman in the world to love. I love you, Dolly.'"
"She got to be there when he passed away and she died a few months later. I think she was just waiting for him to go first."
Watching someone in pain pass.
"Holding my grandfather's hand as he passed away. It was incredibly sad to see him go, but also relieving to see that it was peaceful and that he had been released."
- mejok
"The only thing I can say is that being there with him at the end is a blessing. When my grandpa was dying in hospice care, nearly all of the immediate family (his wife obviously, his kids, and us, his grandkids) flew out to Tucson immediately. We spent days there, being with him (even though he was completely out of it), talking, reliving memories of him, and sharing stories that not all of us knew."
"Then when we were getting ready to head back to the hospice the next morning from one of the family members who went back earlier that morning, we got a call that he was doing worse, and that we should get back there ASAP. We all missed his passing, and his wife, my grandma, just completely broke down, saying that she gave him so many years, and he couldn't give her 20 minutes to get there to be with him at the end...god, that was so hard to hear."
"The only good thing about that day was that he was no longer in pain. But holy sh*t, it crushed all of us. We adored that man."
​Moving on, permanently.
"Breaking up with my then girlfriend because her dream of moving abroad permanently was coming true. I was happy for her but sad to see her leave."
"You are not alone my friend."
- SamOwl77
"Well.."
Bittersweet longing.
This is a longer story, but we promise it's worth it.
"I always looked back so longingly on my first love. It was the summer we both turned 18 and it was my first time falling in love and everything seemed magic. She was a lifeguard and I still remember her long legs splayed over the lifeguard chair, her long blonde hair, her tan skin, her movie star sunglasses. On that lifeguard stand up high she was a shrine to everything summer. And I loved summer. I had a manual labor job putting in swimming pools, damn that was so hot down there laying plaster with that Kansas City humidity."
"We fell in love that summer and did everything together, every waking hour we could we spent together. In the day we would go down to the creek together and wade in the water and swim and lay on the shore, she always wanted to ride on my back across the creek to get to the other side, our side, where no one ever went but us. Sometimes we would climb on those oversized hay bales by my house and stare up into that cloudless summer sky and talk about what the future would be and going off to college and running track and the Olympics and how we would always love each other."
"My favorite days though, God damnit I loved these days so much was when it rained. We both got off work when it rained so I would get an early call from my boss canceling my work and I would just lay there and smile and look at the ceiling and wait for my phone to ring, it was always her telling me to come over and we could spend the day together. Movies or the mall sometimes but usually we would climb over the gate to the swimming beach and go swim in the lake and feel the warm rain and dive under the water and come up over the dock. Best times of my life."
"I've always looked back on them so longingly. I've been in love since and been married and divorced and dating but it seems my thoughts always came back to her. Even though we live in the same city it was 15 years since I had seen her. Back when I got married to someone else I had an outdoor wedding and even from the front I could hear her sobbing when I said the vows that I wanted to grow old with my wife, that was from a movie my first love and I used to watch together sometimes when it rained. She left right after the wedding and I hadn't seen her again for 15 years. I longed to see her, I even contacted her one time and suggested meeting up but she said she was happily married and would never meet up with me, even to just talk and reminisce. I longed to see her again just one more time."
"Well it happened, I saw her again for the first time in 15 years. We were both at a U2 concert and we hugged and laughed and even danced when they played With or Without You. That night we all had a great time and we walked the women all the way to their car before going to ours. I realized when I saw her Honda minivan and sippy cups from her kids and saw her face that had gotten older that I didn't long for her. Don't get me wrong, she was still beautiful, incredibly beautiful. But she wasn't the girl on top of the lifeguard stand anymore. She had gone on with her life and had kids and drove a sensible minivan and wore sensible mom shoes."
"And then I realized I didn't long for her at all. What I had a longing for was me. When I was 18 and athletic and handsome, with my whole life ahead of me, that was what I longed for more than anything. A life before mortgages and bills and small backyards in the suburbs with fences, I longed for that part of me that was still back there with her at the creek. What it was like to fall in love and swim under the dock in the rain and laugh and hear the words I love you for the first time. I didn't miss her at all. I missed me. It was the most bittersweet realization of my life."
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Watching them grow up.
"Watching my babies grow. Obviously I want them to grow well but if I could just pause time for a bit."
"I thought this same thing this weekend. In Kansas City we have an amusement park and a water park that have combined into one now so its Oceans of Fun and Worlds of Fun. Its such an awesome day! You can ride a roller coaster and then go jump in the wave pool and go back and forth. My kids are getting older now and they don't need me as much, in fact there was an hour or so where I was sitting there all by myself."
"Don't get me wrong, I don't mind it, I read a book and even had a nap. But its bittersweet because they don't need you as much anymore. I tell them how I feel though. I tell them I love being with them. I get just as excited as they do to go to the waterpark. At the end of the day we went to the old time diner place in the park and had French fries and milkshakes and in the booth when we were all drinking milkshakes I told them, ah, this is one of the good parts of life!"
A tender moment with a mother-in-law.
"My fiancé's funeral. It was literally the first time I got to meet his mom. And she was such a sweet lady. When I tried to give her back my ring because it had belonged to her mother. She refused to take it, she told me 'My son chose you to give it to. And it would be rude of me to take back his choice.' She probably still has no idea how much it meant to me."
"I literally have no pictures or anything of him. But I still have my memories and my ring I keep in my jewelry box."
One final childhood moment.
"Recently had one last sleepover with my childhood friend before he passed from leukemia. It was just like being kids again."
"He couldn't do much at the point he'd reached, but we listened to music, watched Luca (which he hadn't yet seen), and just talked about life. And of course we stayed up way past bedtime haha."
It can be difficult to parse out feelings of loss, love, and nostalgia. There's longing wrapping up a lot of these sentiments. Longing for more time, whether it be with a loved one who's passing, a child growing up too quickly, or a lover that needed to move on.
What really ties it all together is love. Hold onto those moments tightly but know that you must let go.
Almost every movie, to varying degrees, is a gamble.
Even a good cast, solid director, and a high budget certainly don't guarantee an entertaining, engaging outcome.
I'm sure everyone reading has, at one time or another, found themselves surprised and sorely disappointed, sitting in a too-lit theater with a belly full of popcorn and two hours older.
But alas, Reddit is here to let us warn each other what we should steer clear of.
Redditor Youropinioniswrong12 asked:
"What movie do you regret watching?"
Many people talked about the movies that just plain sucked. There were a variety of reasons for the plummeting quality, but one thing was constant: they'd never watch them again. Ever.
A Popular Choice
"You guys know the bee movie, where a bee and human have a romantic relationship? It had 50% rotten tomatoes.
"Artemis fowl had 5%. Artemis fowl was just pure pain to see"
Unnecessary Adaptations
"I regret the 15 minutes I endured of the Cats movie. I wanted it to be good, having seen the live version a couple of times, but It just wasn't getting any better, that was all I could handle. I regret those 15 minutes for ruining the musical."
-- NicNoletree
Again, Unnecessary
"The Last Airbender (The 2010 film based on Avatar: The Last Airbender)" -- ChangeTheEnergy
"The play episode near the end of the Avatar show was unironically better than that awful, lifeless excuse of a film." -- DANIEL_CRESCENDO
This Was a Thing?
"The Emoji Movie. I was all hype about it and thought it would be relatable to this time period of technology…it was god awful"
Some regretted certain movies because they were so violent or graphic. These films make peak your curiosity, but they guarantee they're not worth it.
A Bit Too Early
"The Sixth Sense at age 8. Great movie as an adult but as a kid I slept with a blanket over my head for years after that" -- Tiffed4597
"after watching the ring, i put my TV on top of a shelf so if the girl crawled out of my TV, she would fall and get a concussion" -- 51SC
A Reason Not To Do Drugs
"Requiem For A Dream. It's a great movie, but holy sh** it will scar you for life." -- Zolo49
"This was the first movie that came to mind for me!! I think it's particularly painful to watch if you come from a lower class area or if you or especially a family member has struggled with drug addiction."
"The mental collapse that the mom goes through is terrifying to watch, and the scene where the girl sells her body for heroin made me want to throw up. I'll never watch it again. It had me scared of my fridge for a week." -- pronouncedbeck
Think That Was What They Were Going For
"The human centipede. That movie messed me up for a bit." -- jlaz_83
"Made it past the credits and decided I wanted to live a normal life. Shut it off... no regrets." -- MadeMeStopLurking
Mentioned More Than Once
"A Serbian Film. I beg you all to not watch this. Don't give into the curiosity." -- [deleted]
"My thirteen year old self thought A Serbian Film wouldn't be "that bad" and that I could 'take the gore.' Found it on YouTube, and literally threw up watching it."
"Fully vomited because of how much distress I was in. I wouldn't wish watching that thing on my worst enemy." -- AbyssCity
And a few lamented how horrible a film adaptation of a book was. Sometimes the road from book to movie is a bit too long and windy to work out.
Artistic License
"Those who wish me dead. I read the book before I watched the movie about a year before. ITS NOT EVEN THE SAME PLOT. Read the book and watch the movie. Freaking disappointment"
-- PatThePickle
All the Pieces Were There
"The Dark Tower. Read the entire series while deployed. Movie was disgusting." -- paulzzzzpaul
"The shame was I really liked the casting. Such a waste, a waste of source material and waste of acting talent." -- zantwic
"Fully agree. Bad movies come and go, but when they are based on such amazing source material, it just seems like shi**ing on your memories." -- VirtuosoApocalypse
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