Started smoking cigarettes when I was 16.
I was perfectly aware how shitty the tobacco industry is, how addictive nicotine is, all its harmful effects, and how gross of a money sink it is. I did it anyway because I thought it looked relaxing.
Me too- but for an even stupider reason. I thought it would be cool to learn to blow smoke rings.
I did learn to blow smoke rings.
Quit in 2000 and don't regret it.
Marrying my wife after letting her plan the wedding. It alone put us $30K in debt, We were already around $40K in debt...all from her excessive spending prior to us being together.
Talk about stupid...
But it turned better than I could have ever expected. We're mostly debt free now, and the only reason we have any debt is because I don't want to pay it off immediately since it's a 0% interest loan and the money is contributring to earning interest. So, I consider myself extremely fortunate for how it all turned out.
Yeah, lucky/skilled, depending on how you look at it. But yeah, most marriages that start off with that kind of burden don’t last.
The pandemic was our life saver. She was a traveling nurse and hospitals were throwing wads of cash at them for like 2 years.
I rented a moving truck, to be driven 400 miles away. When I got the into the truck for the first time outside of the store, I noticed it the console said low tire pressure on one tire. I said “oh, I’m not messing with it now, probably just needs to be topped off” and drove away. Then it was fine for a couple days as I loaded the truck, then once I finished loading and left… I filled the tire up… it kept going low as I drove, though. So I had to stop 5-6 times in the next 250 miles and top it off. Finally I inspected it and there was a tear around the fill valve. This was in a very remote area of a freeway, basically the middle of nowhere, 60 miles in either direction to a town bigger than like 500 people. I stopped safely at a rest stop but it ended up taking the truck company’s roadside assistance 10 hours to fully get me back on the road. Then they ended up charging me for an extra day at the return site, giving me this huge run around on the phone, and I had to file a credit card chargeback for the extra day (thankfully, it was successful).
So obviously I should have told the rental place immediately “wtf this truck says it has a low tire” or at the very least, gone back before I left.
My wife was a Girl Scout leader and every year, after cookie season, she would have leftovers that went unsold and just sat in the garage until she decided to get rid of them.
It's so easy to eat an entire box of Girl Scout cookies when there are dozens more in the garage.
For this reason, I'm glad my daughter quit Girl Scouts.
I both want your former life, and am glad I dodged it. My kid went for dance instead of scouts.
I quit my job without any plan at all on what I was going to do next. I was the sole IT worker for an SMB and had been for the past decade. I was burned out, exhausted, and jaded.
Now I'm going back to school, so I guess it wasn't the WORST decision. I definitely could've handled it better, though.
I still maintain my boycott of Amazon over the one-click patent.
It's a hassle to buy stuff online without using Amazon. The patent expired years ago. Probably no other person is still boycotting them over it (not that it was ever an effective boycott in the first place). But I just can't bring myself to buy from them.
I still try to boycott Amazon, for a myriad of reasons. I don't think you're stupid for doing it!
I have a consistent disdain for Amazon, but I still buy from them periodically, particularly stuff that I cannot find locally and which I cannot wait for typical shipping from another source. But I cancelled prime to disincentivize buying from them.
Here’s the reply I was expecting to see and didn’t:
Continuing to live another day… and I keep doing it for some reason.