What happened to all the baddies you knew growing up?
What happened to all the baddies you knew growing up?
I don't know if this is something people say in other countries, but in my country, there's this common cliché or "wisdom" where adults will assure you that the people who picked on you in environments like school will universally develop lives of hardship later on, one way or another getting into mayhem.
I asked my mother one day what happened to all those people growing up. I can sense she may have been sugar coating it, but she said something along the lines of "well, I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and became a teacher, and waited some more, and finally watched as my bullies had to go into retirement five years late, yay" (okay, not really like that, but it might as well have been).
Yeah, common theme in my experience that what we hope for is never "that" set in stone. No matter where in the community (or even long-distance communicating) you knew them from, based on life, how much approximate correspondence do you associate with that mindset in the first paragraph?
I've no idea, I haven't thought about them since I left school and now I can barely remember their names.
29There was a kid in grade school growing up that was a bully. He made a kid cry while we were waiting for our class picture to be taken in the 6th grade, and you can see that kid crying in the picture. I still think about it often.
The bully ended up being one of the greatest running backs my county ever knew. He was a game changer.
I randomly decided to look up the crying kid from the school picture a couple years ago. He is now a very successful man. I couldn't be any happier seeing that. It almost brought me to tears.
The bully was shot and killed in the streets a couple years after graduating high school.
25When we were both five years old, I knew one of my classmates would end up in prison.
Most kids can be jerks on occasion, and I can think of a few examples where that applied to me as well as it could to anyone. I haven't generally kept track of people who bullied me in school; I imagine most of them grew out of it, and a few didn't. This guy was something else, as if cruelty was the only thing that brought him joy.
At 19, he and two others beat a taxi driver to death. He was convicted of manslaughter and spent more than a decade in prison. A quick web search suggests he's out of prison and working as a car salesman now.
21No idea. I don't pay any attention to them. I hope they're happy and doing fine.
20My bully from grade school is serving up to life in prison for attempted murder (he shot two teenagers while he was an adult, something gang related I think) and also sex with a minor.
Not that he doesn’t deserve it, he absolutely does, but part of me feels bad for him. He never stood a chance. His home life was fucked, he was always on this path and nothing was going to stop it.
14There was pretty much only one guy I knew as a kid who was actually a bad person, rather than just another kid with all of the emotional instability and executive dysfunction that entails.
He wound up raping his girlfriend, shooting her, and then when the cops responded to a report of the gun shot he pulled a gun on them and got himself shot by the police.
14How would I know? I left my hometown.
I did see my high school bully occasionally in college. I was in my 5th year of undergrad and he looked like a grad student. But I was usually walking from my fwb’s dorm to class, so i was doing plenty fine myself.
I hope these people are better and happier but I don’t care to find out.
13A few years ago, my baddie killed himself. No idea what was happening in his life at the time. I hadn't seen him since high school, which was 25 years ago. I saw the obituary and thought it was surprising and interesting, but didn't feel bad, or good about it in any way.
12Fuck me if I know what any of them are doing with their lives. Part of me sure wishes that the shitty people from my past are getting what’s coming to them, but also what difference does it make to me what karmic justice may or may not await them.
My life is objectively better than when I had to deal with their shit. Why waste my mental energy on them?
12I don't even remember the names of most of my bullies.
10Many people who were assholes as kids turned out to become chill adults. I had a person who I considered a best friend suddenly turn on me in my last year of primary school. He always targeted me specifically and Istill remember coming home crying from the bullying. However, our lives diverged and we didn't really meet until late in highschool somewhere in a bar in the city. We were both already a bit tipsy (alcoholic age was 16 y/o at that point here), and when he ran into me he basically just acted as if we had never not been friends. It was like the old friend was back, rather than the guy who caused so much pain. It was like he never realized what he had done. At that moment I realized we both had changed so much since the moment that he was bullying me, and I chose to just be glad to reconnect with an old friend.
This story goes for quite a few people who bullied me. Pretty much all of them, when I met them years later, seemed blissfully unaware of the pain they caused and just greeted me as an old friend or classmate. And with all of them I also recognised that they had grown into chill people, and had changed so much that they weren't really the same person anymore. So I chose to also consider them old friends or classmates, and if I ran into them now I'd probably just have a nice chat about what our lives became.
10A few of them died from drug overdoses or landing themselves in jail on domestic violence, but most of them grew up and have families and are pretty chill these days. I've buried the hatchet with anyone like that from high school.
10Last I heard of her, she's still a baddie, but now she's a real estate agent that is into crystals and horoscope, and cats.
6I don't expect the odds of karma kicking them in the junk to be much higher than average maybe +5% to 15% max.
5One dead, the second one with his life just as stagnant as it was 20 years ago, and the 3rd one I honestly have no idea. 3rd one wasn't really bad, he just fell in with the wrong crowd. I ran into his sister a couple of years ago, but she didn't know his whereabouts either. But last time she heard feom him he was doing surprisingly well.
5One was in a car accident, ended up a quadriplegic.
Another one, last I saw, he was pumping my gas.
4One died in a car accident, the other main one had a lot of babies who now have their own babies. I moved continents and changed my name through marriage before I opened any social media accounts, so I have no idea what happened to the bulk of them.
4People who were bullies in high school earn more on average. I'd say they are probably doing better.
3One of them is in jail for a looong time. Gang activity including relation to murders. Not sure if he pulled the trigger, but he was the "leader", lol
3My grandma came in with a hot take on this.
"If she was a bitch at 17, she is a bitch at 70."
3I might have been a bully, at least to other bullies, and though I’ve had some hard times it feels like I’ve been more lucky in life than I deserve overall. So either the other shoe has yet to drop or karma simply isn’t real.
1