Tell us your definitive "I really should not do this" moment.
Ever had one those moments in life when you know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, you are making a very, very bad decision, with a great chance for instant regret and a miserable, probably long lasting, outcome and notheless followed that path?
Yeah, that one. Care to share with us?
I'll start. I dated a person, after we had already dated for a very short time, during which I was cheated on and eventually was left for a fourth person.
Yeah, not my brightest moment. And yes, I was cheated on again and again was left for another person.
Having kids. I love my kids, but if I could go back and not have them I absolutely would. Never have kids until you're financially comfortable. Fuck, the struggle is fucking real.
It is a sad reality that I hate even thinking about. I love these little bastards to pieces, but the money thing is killing me. I'm in a spot where I'm "too rich" to qualify for any government help and too poor to be able to afford it on my own.
And for most people that day never comes and THAT'S PERFECTLY FINE. It is horrifying that something as extreme as creating a human from nothing is seen as something that people should just do. Baffling.
I feel this. I still don't have kids of my own, but my parents had some rough patches which I hope I learn from and don't repeat; thankfully I only realised most of that when I grew up.
Much respect to your parents and you. Raising kids has been the most difficult thing I've done in my life, and I've been deployed into war zones twice.
That time I came inside her while drunk. 19 years later, I don't regret the daughter I have, but the child support payments haven't exactly been easy...
A lot of these are kinda on the negative side (no judgement!), so I'll add a positive one. I met this girl, we started dating and we had been in that weird phase where like it wasn't exclusive but it felt like it was but it wasn't explicitly said you know? Anyways, I had these plans to go on a trip with a couple friends and some friends of friends and that same week me and the girl talked and decided it was official, nobody is dating anyone else, we're together/a thing/official.
Fast forward to that trip, and I meet this girl, I know nothing about her but she's cute and she's into me. We all get drunk around a camp fire, me and this girl go for a walk, and it's about as obvious as it's ever going to be this girl wants to hook up and I have the green light and I'm about to go for it. So I'm about to and then I remember...I shouldn't. I'm not single anymore. It doesn't matter if it's new it matters to me, I really like the girl I'm dating, we have a good thing going and it's dumb to risk fucking that up for some girl I just met. So I don't. I say I'm sorry I'm drunk and should go to bed and that's the end of that. We were cordial the rest of the weekend and I've never talked to or seen her again.
It's eight years later and that girl i liked is my wife of close to four years and we're just hanging out being boring together and I've never been happier.
I turned down a full ride scholarship plus living stipend at one of my state's top-rated universities because my mentally abusive high school girlfriend didn't want me to move that far away from her, who had only applied for the local community college. The whole time, I knew that i was making a mistake that I'd regret forever but didn't have the courage to stand up for myself. We ended up breaking up before I even graduated, but I had already turned down the offer by that point. I ended up going to the same community college as her. Ironically, she ended up dropping out of that college because she saw me on campus every day.
I have nothing but respect for community colleges and I genuinely believe they can provide a better education than conventional universities, but I know that my life would've went differently if I had taken that offer.
Where I live, back when I got my driver's license, there was always a several months long queue to take the driving test. When my turn came, there was a terrible blizzard. I knew I should just cancel it and wait several more months, but I didn't do that. It ended in several injuries and a totalled car.
I did it twice. I knew for certain the second time around, yet I still did it . Didn't get me a third time, though. No regrets now, a long time later, but those extra years were hard.
I once hiked Longs Peak in Colorado. It's an intense hike and has had a lot of people die on it over the years (quick search comes up with ~70 people). It took me and my friends about 12 hours to get up and back down.
Anyway, I was younger and dumber and wore my normal street shoes, which happened to have almost no grip left on them. I vividly remember a portion of the hike near the end where you came up to a ledge (overlooking vast nothingness), you turned to your left and climbed up a 45 degree rock slope. If I had lost my grip on that ledge, I would've tumbled down and out into space. I had lost my grip with my shoes multiple times that day before that last section.
I obviously didn't slip or otherwise die that day, but I think about it pretty often. In a multiverse scenario, I figure quite a few of my parallel selves were lost that day haha
Hey! Bad decision buddy!! I also climbed longs peak in sneakers years ago. Seemed like a good idea until we got to the scree section near the top. I remember a lot of slipping on the way back down, too. I think I also killed a lot of multiverse mes that day.
At least the views were worth it. One of the prettiest hikes I've ever done.
Once, I was pouring a can of petrol (gas, if you’re American) onto a fire, which spread up the stream of petrol into the petrol tank. I panicked, and my genius solution of how to extinguish it was to shake it around, kinda like how you might do to put out a match.
I poured burning petrol all over the ground and on my clothes, there was fire everywhere all around me. Luckily I was right next to the hosepipe, which I quickly turned on and doused everything in water before it got too out of hand.
Everything was fine, but it could have been a lot worse.
Edit: Don’t play with petrol/gasoline. Fire spreads through it way faster than you could ever imagine, it’s not like in the movies where it moves slow enough that you can stop it, it’s pretty much instant!
I was working on a weedeater (strimmer, if you’re a redcoat) when a very sadistic friend of mine noticed a puddle of gasoline on the ground and threw a lit match at the puddle.
The fire immediately raced over to me and into the fuel tank.
My instinct was to blow the fire out. That’s right, a fire, fueled by gasoline, in a plastic tank. I burned my entire face.
That erased the birthday candle instinct from my mind and I have been more careful since then when confronted with fire.
God damn. You dodged a bullet. I had a somewhat distant uncle die recently after a gas tank exploded while pouring it onto a fire. Burns over his entire body and he was too old to really regenerate. Died in the hospital after 50+ days of agony.
I wanted to buy a sailboat in Arizona, but it was too heavy for my existing vehicle. Boat transport services are really expensive, so I bought a rusty, 16-year-old van. Literally the third time I drove it (1. Get it home, 2. Register it), I hit the road across the continent.
Now, this would be a really good story if that decision had gone horribly wrong, but I'm on that boat in Wisconsin right now. The van made it. I did discover that it had no spare tire when the exhaust pipe broke on the Kansas Turnpike, and I looked underneath for the first time. It was a loud journey through Iowa that day, but I had earplugs.
I was hiking and drinking with my friends. It was a hot day and I was drunk and dehydrated and we decided to climb down this large cliff that had waves at the bottom. If we fell it would have been death 100%. I remember holding onto this little plant thinking haha if this comes out I'm dead.
In 2014 I realized I was wasting my life working as a software engineer at T-Mobile HQ. Their company was terrible when it came to basic hygiene. People snotting into the sinks, the bathroom always a huge toxic mess, people always sick, and getting other people sick. I shared a cubicle with some random person. I'd always just take my laptop to one of the small meeting rooms that was used for 1-on-1 meetings. I was clearly on a project that no one could give a fuck about. I spent that time on #UnrealEngine@irc.freenode.net and started working with the engine.
One random Tuesday, I was in the small meeting room and there was a row of 3 or 4 of them. I was on the far corner and two people in the one next to mine were talking loudly. About me, I heard my name pop up a few times and it turned out to be my boss having a 1:1 with her boss about my lack of performance. They were preparing to fire me. It was the evening so I ducked out the rest of the day and prepared to get fired. For some reason, I decided I wanted to leave on my terms and I'd quit. I was a contractor so it wasn't like I was going to get a severance. I quit with no prospects, I did have a few interviews for Unreal Engine jobs a week ago and a few months ago but hadn't heard back so I assumed they moved on. So I quit to become a game developer on that Wednesday but those 2 interviews both got back to me that Thursday. By Friday I was trying to figure out between two studios to join. I went with the Canadian one and realized I had to start a business to support the relationship.
So I went from a cushy software engineer job where I didn't have to do anything to start up an international business contractor working in one of the most volatile industries. Back at T-Mobile as I stepped into the elevator they said "We want people who want to work here." and it hit me. I just gave up one of the best-paying jobs I'd have in order to do something I actually want to do.
Overall I had a lot of "I really should not be doing this" moments in that whole process but usually followed by "But if I fucking pull this off I'll be amazing." I've been in the games industry for 10 years now. My business is now quietly still standing as I moved to an employee job recently on a project I am really passionate about.
On the sixth level of a scaffold next to a staircase in the shell state, which was still completely open (from above I could look down to the floor a few stories below and possibly also fall), I was supposed to glue polyurethane strips and a sealing sheet to the roof slab. However, the scaffolding had already been partially dismantled, which meant I was hanging on the scaffolding with one arm and bridged the distance of over a meter with my body and outstretched arm to do my work. No safety, I could have become goo very quickly... stupid sense of duty and disregard for all the rules. I knew full well I shouldn't be doing this right now, but let myself get pressured. But in the end it was a valuable lesson in self-esteem and fuck your boss's deadlines.
Had a similar moment, but refused to work on the basis of safety, and don't regret it one bit. Installing speakers on poles for a rooftop bar 20 stories up, and we needed 6-foot ladders to reach the mount. Boss said do the thing, I said you can fuck all the way off until I'm in a harness. Boss didn't want to wait for the harness that was already on its way, and did it himself.
He knew he'd be turbofucked if it took longer than his boss thought it would take because he didn't think to bring a harness in the first place, and even more turbofucked if it came to light that he requested we work without it, so he just did it himself to save his own ass. It doesn't matter if he survived, he was a stupid idiot for stepping one rung up on that ladder without a harness.
For reference, this is the same dude who said that driving 17 hours in a van to a job site was just the same as sitting on the couch at home, so we should feel lucky that we're getting paid for it. He was not a smart man.
I moved out of socal back to Seattle at the very start of covid. I do not envy you for dealing with those crazy folks in OC. The biggest example of selfish insane people even in a hugely left-leaning area. Huntington Beach is just a mini-florida.
Mine's quite tame, reading some of these, but I remember once using a stick blender to make soup, and I saw a bit of food stuck in the blade, and the thumb hovering over the go button twitched slightly, and even though I was alone I pulled a face as if to someone watching, because I knew I was millimetres from losing a finger. Now if I ever want to touch the blade, I unplug the thing first.
My grandmother had one of those old style fridges that was all steel in the basement that had something wrong with the wiring where if you didn't stand on a rug to when opening it you got zapped. I used to specifically not stand on the rug because I thought it felt funny, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with some of the small eccentricities I developed later in life...
I was in college and needed to attend an important virtual meeting about choosing my major. They provided a Zoom link, but when I clicked it, it didn't put me in a meeting, it said this is unavailable with your free tier. So, knowing this is a stupid idea, I begrudgingly paid this evil company $17 for a month of pro.
And guess what? It still didn't work. Apparently I needed to sign in with only my school account for it to work. Never utilized the month of pro either. But at the moment, it felt like a gun was being held to my head to pay Zoom $17.
I hate tech sometimes, and despite being a young person I prefer things in person rather than always online at the mercy of these companies.
Similar story about dating someone. I'm gay and she was my first serious girlfriend. Everything was cool just dating but then things got more serious and she wanted to get married. I didn't, but I was also young, had low self esteem, was inexperienced in dating, and didn't know how to cut things off. Over time I just realized she wasn't the type of person I wanted to spend my life with. So I kept pushing back the wedding date. We were together 4yrs and about 4months out from the wedding when I found out she had cheated on me. That was finally my wtf are you doing moment and I peaced the fuck out.
I often think back about how miserable I would've been had I married her, and I'm so thankful I got out when I did. Whew.
Edit: oh shit I also forgot how badly she wanted kids, like that was all she talked about and one of our biggest disagreements. Thank God I never got talked into that. Props to being a lesbian and kids not being an "oops" possibility haha. Childfree life for me!
I did the same. My story had a really dark twist though…. Luckily things are somewhat better these days, but it’ll be one of those things that I’ll remember in my deathbed…