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.
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.
The decisions I made in high school were things like to take AP classes(I started college with enough credits to be a junior, so instead of studying I partied and ended up finishing late, so I guess that decision didn’t help me out), to read books(this one helped a ton, I was a voracious reader all my life and I can tell the difference against people who don’t read. I still read today and I’m pretty sure it’s much easier now), to play basketball (I have always been in better shape that my peers and I’ve maintained that into my late 30s).
The decisions I made like who to date, kinda still affect me today. I definitely didn’t chase after girls who there was a mutual interest, but rather girls who were “easy” targets for me. This decision has haunted my dating life. It took me nearly a decade of work to undo the damage of this habit. I am engaged now, but man I made it so much harder for myself.
The friends I chose in high school are a mixed bag. I am still friends with them to this day and for that I am very grateful. But at the same time, we all went through dramatic changes in viewpoints, politics. But a lot of the people I hung out with in high school I don’t even talk to anymore.
Saaame. Just yesterday, when you posted this, i met someone who told me she needed to start reading more - i wanted to tell her it’s fine and by reading at all she’s so far ahead of many people in keeping good habits for life. You can just tell how “well read” people are.
Actually reading for fun made me an academic minor deity compared to other kids, in the days of social media roll-out. Now I have to imagine how much better the kids who don’t/aren’t allowed to use AI are doing compared to those who do.
There might be a bit of this in all of our lives.