Was talking about home economics as a school subject in another thread and i realised that for me personally, taking "Food Tech" (cookery gcse) would have impacted me pretty negatively, even though generally speaking GCSEs don't have much of an effect on the rest of your life or education.
So i wonder if anyone else has similar revelations? My post title is also phrased more openly than that, so it doesn't have to be school specific, but i am mainly interested in things from the teenage time period.
::: spoiler Another choice i made in HS, for instance: i remember being really glad to have a medium-size group of friends in high school, but in retrospect they were terrible people and i realise that there would have been huge benefits to spending more time alone and in the library - yes, i genuinely look back and wish i studied more, lol. Something which I'm always told never happens.
This one "affects me as an adult" because i ended up entering adulthood with several friends determined to force their personality to be cool, relying on manosphere influencers to determine how they should behave; a lot of these people i didn't want to know in the first place.
:::
19 Jun 2026 02:55
All of them and none of them
19 Jun 2026 02:58
The wise Jesuaurus has spoken.
I feel like so many of my days don't actually contribute to the grander life narrative, myself - it's a bit frustrating.
I know the solution though
19 Jun 2026 03:03
Mostly not very much but I think who I socialized with and where I chose to go to college were things that had a big impact.
19 Jun 2026 03:06
Probably most of them, at least in small "butterfly effect" ways. But mostly, I paid attention in class and remember how to think without having to have answers spoon fed to me. So many people I work with, of a variety of age groups, just seem to lack that skill.
You mentioned home economics, and I only had to take one semester as a required elective (yes, you read that right) and just kind of coasted through it. While I didn't think much of it at the time, but I appreciate knowing how to use a sewing kit to make small repairs. I've patched several holes in my favorite "lounging around the house" robe and extended its life probably 3 times.
19 Jun 2026 03:08
I didn't start getting stoned out of my mind until my late 30s so I guess my brain developed normally.
Go me.
19 Jun 2026 03:15
I regret spending so much time playing sports. I didn't have enough time to figure out what I like and what I'm good at and where those things intersect so now I'm just kinda adrift as an adult. My parents forced me to play though because they were shitheads that thought my not terribly athletic self would get a full ride college scholarship through hard work so I had zero financial support for college as well, I was just glad to escape their manipulative bullshit. The lesson I
should have learned was that natural talent beats hard work every time, it sucks.
19 Jun 2026 04:11
The things you THOUGHT were the most important, never matter at all, but everything that you considered background noise (school, family, jobs, morals and values) that shit will determine EVERYTHING that happens after high school.
19 Jun 2026 04:28
I had a friend who discouraged me from going into software development after highschool. I was always into computers, but math isn't really my thing - I would definitely have crashed and burned fast if I tried to study computer science at university. Years later I ended up doing a trade school 'degree' (German
Ausbildung) in software dev, though, and that worked really well for me.
My professional life isn't going well due to medical reasons, though. There's a possibility that I could have avoided the worst of that if I never went to university and just went to trade school right away, my university years kinda fucked me up.
19 Jun 2026 04:28
I didn't start until I was almost 40! But I think I've more than caught up for lost time.
19 Jun 2026 04:30
I smoked weed in high school, a fair bit lol, I was definitely considered one of the "stoner kids" of the school.
In my 20's I stopped for the most part (only a joint here or there, maybe 2 or 3 times max per year), many of the kids I went to school with that were all anti drugs and anti drinking as kids became hard drug addicts in their 20's.
Now in my 30's I smoke again, much easier now that I can comfortably afford this habit
19 Jun 2026 05:05
The elective classes I chose played a huge part in who I became. More so than friendships or cringey moments or anything that happened in the mandatory classes.
I took home ec and made crappy fried rice and sewed an apron with the pattern upside down. I thought it was lame at the time. Today I cook every day and I can sew well enough to fix things. They are ridiculously valuable skills.
I took electronics and made a dumb little siren that pitched up and down when you held down a button. Once every couple of years, I need some simple bit of electronics and I design a circuit board, etch it onto copper, and solder on some components. If I hadn’t chosen that elective classes, I’d think that sort of thing was super advanced.
The hilariously basic “IT” class (I made a PowerPoint slideshow with animation and fart sound effects) is probably responsible for me having a career in software development.
19 Jun 2026 05:12
I'm curious how a cooking class would have affected you negatively.
19 Jun 2026 05:28
I went to the mental hospital when I was 16. Lost several friends due to them thinking I was crazy.its how you know who your true friends are. It affects me today because I started a habit of running to the hospital when life gets stressful. I've been out of almost a whole year now. It has been 17 years and 42 hospitalizations by now.
19 Jun 2026 05:50
Lemmy
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