[Haul4ss]

You can't, so don't bother thinking about it.

You can make changes today that will pay dividends in 10 years, so maybe focus on that instead.

I was widowed pretty young (as widowers go), so I have done my share of playing the what-if game with the past. Ultimately it is not a productive exercise, and I try not to do it. If I catch myself dwelling in unlived lives, I try to refocus on the one still in front of me.

[ImaCake]

> You can make changes today that will pay dividends in 10 years, so maybe focus on that instead.

Exactly this. No matter what your imagined and real futures turn out to be, the good ones all require effort and investment in the present. You can’t go wrong with making investments in your life now.

[Felony_Fred]

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. - Chinese Proverb

[ReactiveJelly]

And if you've been trying to plant the same tree for 20 years, the second best time to treat your ADHD is now.

[kibwen]

Technically I think the second best time would be 20 years ago less one Planck time. Which is to say, now would be the 11,700,454,120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th best time. :)

[qzw]

This is why nerds don’t get invited to parties. :)

[antisthenes]

I came to the same conclusion.

It's tempting to lay in bed after a bad life event, thinking about turning back the clock, but that never ever leads to anything productive or positive.

Best case scenario is you can't fall asleep until 4AM and screw up your sleep schedule for a week. Worst case is you start exhibiting learned helplessness and go into depression for a year or several.

I always try to refocus and think about what I can do for the people who were there for me during bad times, and how I can learn from my misfortune. (Sometimes, there's nothing to learn and it's just a bad stroke of luck. Even then - it's not going to help playing the what-if game)

Ultimately we are the people we are both because of good and bad things that happened to us.

[joncrane]

Exactly. Try to imagine the "what if" games you will be playing in your own head in 10 years, and try to optimize for that.

[snakeboy]

Reminds me of a touching moment in Before Sunrise.

[ljlolel]

And this is quantum time travel

[zappo2938]

I tell any young adult who will listen the mistakes I made. It's nice when they stop by with stories and whiskey the days before Christmas and see them come up strong, happy, and on a solid path towards success. It's only through the stories of our mistakes that we can escape the clutches of time.

[jdsalaro]

I agree, partially, I'm adamant about the fact that it's even more important to talk about successes, than failures.

"Vicarious learning from the experiences of others saves making errors yourself, but I regard the study of successes as being basically more important than the studyof failures. As I will several times say, there are so many ways of being wrong and so few of being right, studying successes is more efficient, and furthermore when your turn comes you will know how to succeed rather than how to fail!"

~ The art of doing science and engineering

[mkr-hn]

I've gotten a lot more out of studying failures. Especially other people's failures. People who are honest with themselves can warn you around the mistakes they made, but people who succeed rarely have much luck identifying which selection of choices got them there.

I think the reason is that success is usually cumulative: each little win builds on the last until it's obvious you're going in the right direction. Those wins often depend on random or temporary things you have little control over. For example: CED was the perfect format for the decade RCA started developing it in, but it took until VHS redefined the market to finish it.[0]

Meanwhile one mistake can send everything tumbling down. Study enough mistakes and you might know enough of what to avoid to stay afloat long enough to find the right chain of wins.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA

[jdsalaro]

I'm torn about your comment.

In principle, I agree with the fact that studying failures teaches one more, whether more is better when it comes to learning stands to be discussed, however.

What I mean by this is that, although you may profit from your parents sharing a plethora of don't-dos such as avoiding drugs, staying away from toxic relationships, not dwelling on your insecurities, et cetera, having regular abstract conversations about how "thinking deeply about my predicament, my objectives and how to reach them despite the former" might be much more useful to you.

In short, the first approach teaches you, potentially, numerous, isolated lessons about specific circumstances you will likely never face. Yes, you certainly learned more things, but whether those things will be useful to you, particularly, is unclear and only time can tell.

If you and your parents, however, have a thorough discussion about what allowed them to lead a happy life, as in the second scenario, both pushing and pulling, trying to discover what it really was and looking to find consensus regarding attitudes, processes, ideas, roadblocks, etc, you might learn a framework what will be useful forever, regardless of the concrete circumstances you are faced with.

Nevertheless, this comment of yours is spot on:

> people who succeed rarely have much luck identifying which selection of choices got them there.

Therefore, I really emphasize that not only the mentor should share the reasons and methods behind their success, the listener must be able to understand why and whether they were as useful as the mentor portrays them.

[zappo2938]

Maybe. Trying to emulate other people's success always ended in failure for me whether in life or opinionated coding frameworks. Americas Test Kitchen approach to recipes when they first explain all the ways they failed is infinitely more valuable to me than just the one successful recipe.

[cprayingmantis]

Agreed.

I did give a considerable amount of time to thinking about the what-if scenarios one day and when I looked down those other paths of what might have been I realized I would have to give up something I had come to love to pursue those.

Who I am may not be the best but I made these choices. I can't travel to past to berate that version of me. If I'm dissatisfied it's up to me to change that for future me.

[dave_sid]

Any alternative choices I could have made in my youth would have prevented me from having the children I have now, so there’s no significant decision I would ever like to change.