A dream is something you need to asume that you may never reach it. Or Maybe not in the form of you imagined. With the time I have been around, there were some things that after I had accomplished I realized they were actually dreams I wanted and I never knew. Some others became real dreams by valorating what happened.
I wanted to be a story board artist. I wanted to work in Animation. I just never could get work (and to be fair, I’m not the best artist). It broke my heart. I regret choosing a creative field for school. My lack of talent and forethought is something I regret. I live with the reprocussions of that choice every day. I cried when I watch Arcane. Not because of the story, but I so wished I could have been apart of that quality of artistry. Now I’m doomed to the same job I wanted to avoid because that’s a I can do (customer service based). I’ve had multiple breakdowns since college and probably will until I die 😂
I didn’t think animation would be easy, or even fun, all the time. But I wonder nearly every day how it would of panned out if I made different choices, if I was smarter, more talented, more motivated, just a better human being. Since I’llikely be working until I die, I often think do “skipping” to the end.
As a random internet stranger I just wanted to say to keep hope and that I sincerely hope you’ll find your way. The past is the past, fortunately, and all you have is the now. I always found peace in the saying that we make choices with the information we have at the time and we are always doing our best. You can’t be angry at a past self that didn’t know. Also! Life doesn’t have to be grand to be worth living and your life is very worth living. Hope this doesn’t come off as patronizing because it’s not meant to be, the feelings you are talking about are familiar to me too.
But they are just feelings, and we can nurture them, be kind to ourselves, and, if we want to, slowly let them go.
I remember my mother asking me what I wanted to be when I grow up and I answered I wanted to be a doctor because I liked learning the human body in school. Never really done anything towards that path though. Didn’t have great grades for it too.
I have a few times in life, but I’ve always found a new one.
Each time I’d get deep enough into something, tech advancements always made that thing functionally obsolete.
Once again I’m watching my skill set being phased out, but am working on my big last hurrah project right now that I’ve dreamed of for years. Having a great time doing it, but have already started the process of replacing it over the next 18 months.
The one plus side now is that the company I’m with has already invested in my training for the next big thing. I’ve been through it enough times that I don’t feel like I’m losing something or wasted my time.
I’m not really sure. I wanted to develop games, I left the idea behind because I needed income and at the time it wasn’t really an industry worth pursuing. Now it’s easier than ever to make games, but the market is oversaturated. Also my current industry is dying and I’m just kind of bored? So it’s going alright. Can’t say I regret it, can’t stay I’m happy either.
I’m not getting a Nobel. It’s mostly a political prize.
I’m not getting a second house in the Northern Hemisphere, somewhere around the Alps, so I’d get two autumns + winters per year. It sounds fancy but eventually it would become a chore.
I’m not marrying and having children. I simply don’t see the point any more; I don’t even care about romantic relationships any more.
I’m not going to make “the final” reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, the one that will solve all issues with the current ones. It’s fun to do some “backyard science” here and there, but other people are better skilled at this than I am.
Two chicks at the sane time, man…
You answered the first part of the question.
Do you regret giving up on it or are you still hunting? We need answers, tell us, smotherpucker.
Sounds like someone’s got a case of the Mondays
I wanted to be a filmmaker but was forced to choose a different path when my grandfather (who had set up a small college fund for me) refused to pay for school unless I chose something more practical. I caved and majored in journalism (my mom was a photojournalist before I was born) but was so heartbroken I dropped out in my first year. I tried a second time to go to school but I couldn’t stay engaged after learning the thing I had been working towards since middle school was no longer an option.
I ended up going to work in tech instead. In my late 20’s I thought I would figure out making short films on my own wrote a script, bought some gear, but when I looked at how bad I was at social media and how much I wanted someone to see my work, I thought the odds were against it.
A few years ago some unrelated mental health issues made it impossible for me to work and I am writing a script for an audio drama which is hopefully cheaper to produce and a zine about Utopia while I recover.
Bailing on my dream wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Most of my problems and regrets are related to the undiagnosed and untreated mental illness that destroyed my already struggling career a few years ago. Not making the elder millennial version of Point Break sucks, but maybe if the audio drama works I can parley that success into a streaming series (Archive 81 style).
Can’t give up the dream if you never had one.
You can share my dream of 3 cat girl girlfriends (they love you).
I always wanted to be a biologist. I love nature, I find it beautiful and fascinating. I’m passionate about environmental protection, have been since I was a child. Studied, got my Master’s.
Finding work is so hard. What jobs you can get, are unstable, pay is ridiculously bad, and your values are constantly being ridiculed. The state of the environment is so depressing, and the future isn’t looking any brighter.
I don’t work in that field anymore (couldn’t afford to anymore…). The whole thing breaks my heart. I wish I didn’t care as much…
This post is sadder than some of the warnings we get the world is about to end.
I really wanted a wife and kids. Once puberty hit, I had one goal, be the best father\husband I could be.
Put myself through college, got a good job, bought a house (specifically close to schools so they could just walk to school)… One problem… I’m clearly not attractive because everyone I dated in my 20s cheated on me. So I gave up. I’ve spent the last 10+ years having to constantly remind myself this. I hate it every day.
Aww dude.
Look man, that’s a damn rough shake, but one thing worth considering is that people aren’t really done “growing up” until their mid 20s at best. It was probably a lot less that you weren’t the catch you thought you were and probably a lot more that you just got unlucky drew a lot of people who weren’t as ready for a relationship as you were.
Take it from me, job hunting was miserable for me, but it taught me an incredibly valuable lesson for myself. My worthiness has nothing to do with if people are rewarding me for the effort to be a worthy person. I had a perfect résumé, and gave a perfect interview, but I never got hired until I stopped barking up the tree I thought I was gonna spend my life climbing, because all the qualification in the world just isn’t gonna mean shit against pure bad luck, and it sounds like you sir had a whale’s load of bad luck.
If it’s been 10+ years since giving up, it might be time to start looking again. Stay the ever loving fuck away from online dating though, shit will retraumatize you in minutes, look for social events in your area that suit your personal hobbies and interests, but also, go looking for friends and not necessarily lovers, depending on your interests folks you find attractive might feel put upon if someone’s getting the moves on immediately after meeting them at a fun hobby thing.
Fun thing about friends to lovers is that if you realize it wouldn’t work romantically, you still got this cool friend person to do fun shit with!
Hugh Grant was married to supermodel goddess Elizabeth Hurley and cheated with Divine Brown.
Nobody thinks of Elizabeth Taylor and says, “Man, her husbands must have been so ugly! She divorced them all!”
Cheating has nothing to do with how you look. There are countless examples of people cheating with less-attractive options. As the poster above says, it’s about the type of person you’re currently drawn to/currently drawn to you (speaking from the same experience). If you’re up for a book and can overlook the cheesy-sounding title, check out Attached: The New Science of Adult Dating/Attachment by Amir Levine for some really helpful insights into that stuff. It was so spot-on for me years ago that I read it in a single night, just stayed up and finished it, because it hit so close to home.
I’m not sure you’re thinking of this in the most helpful way. A lot of times we are attracted to the kind of people that make us feel comfortable, and what makes us feel comfortable is what we have experience with. So for example if we have a toxic relationship with our parents, or with a first relationship, often we become attracted to people who embody similar toxicity. So its likely not that you are unattractive, but instead need to rethink why you have been attracted to the people who cheated on you. Maybe they all have attributes in common? Anyway, being cheated on sucks, and I’m sorry you have to deal with that.
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Honestly convincing my dad is the hard part, he’s still pulling for me to be a tech wiz set for life with a developer job, but I haven’t written an original project since before the plague hit, and I haven’t had much real hope of beating the HR bot resume roulette wheel since before even that.
Now I’m wondering if I should try back for an IT cert in my management training or just lean into having been good enough at arithmetic and go for a cert in accounting to focus less on career ambitions and more on just having food on the table and putting my dream energy into something else outside of work hours.
I wish I had a dream
No regrets. The dream was unrealistic; the path to it filled with shitty pay, shitty people, and shitty tasks - all for a 0.001% chance of success. I realized I preferred having a normal life and enjoyed my youth instead. My current life is more enjoyable than chasing the dream ever was.
I wanted to work for NASA one day. I realized I was a dumb motherfucker so now I’m a cybersec drone.
But my job is extremely chill WFH, so i get to explore my other interests so much more. It was never meant to be, that’s okay.
Now I just want to get good at something and use that to do stuff that I can be proud of, that I can show to other people and they can be impressed by.
I feel like all my life people just do things so much more easily than what comes to me and I don’t have any talent, so that doesn’t help, I don’t want to be some schmuck that just watches TV or scrolls social media poisoning herself with alcohol all her life.
