I had this thought after remembering one time that my DT (digital technologies) teacher at high school suggested that some of the class could try join a hacking competition. Nothing ever came of it, but I thought it was interesting at the time.
What’s really interesting is seeing the choices I made, and asking “what if I did the other thing”. Just off the top of my head, I could be still at uni doing research on maths or physics, I could be working on designing new robots for who knows what, or branching off even earlier, I could have been a doctor like my parents.
I’m only 24, so it seems like I might be a bit young for this kind of thinking, but there’s still a lot of things I could have done differently.
I often regret a lot of decisions and long for the paths I didn’t take. Then I remember that I was very likely to take a path that would have gotten me killed. Be it through rape, accident, suicide, or - most likely - by drinking myself to death. My life right now isn’t what I thought it would be, a lot of things didn’t turn out as I had yearned for, but it is a nice life and I am so grateful. So when I get sad about the missed opportunities, I try to humble myself and be grateful and impressed by what I have achieved. I didn’t die. And if I think about what deep pit I got out of, then my “life career” is so much steeper than a lot of people’s. Going from the mariana trench to the coast is quite a climb, even if you’re just at sea level at the end.