My best friend was a fucking degenerate in high school. Drugs, alcohol, fights, got his girlfriend pregnant at 16, was in and out of jail for all kinds of stupid shit… I fully expected him to die young or end up doing hard time.

He’s now a department head at a very large university, even has his own published textbook. I’m incredibly happy for him.

A closeted gay acquaintance that I knew from shared extracurricular activities, is now a judge who ran as a Republican because that’s the only party people will vote for in the redneck town we grew up in.

One of my friends in school was super popular. She was in cosmetology, was always immaculately dressed and had a stabe boyfriend for years in school and after we graduated. Her family life was rock solid but in 1988 she went off the rails and into a super depressive mode, stopped talking to everyone and killed herself. NO one, to this day, saw it coming. It came out of the blue within 4 months. She was carrying something emotionally bad that ate her, or some sort of wild metabolic disorder sent her into a spiral… no one knows.

Hell of a path NO one saw coming.

A friend I met as an adult. He had a pretty rough life growing up, his family was homeless and roamed around a lot, he was supposed to be ‘homeschooled’ but was really taking care of his parents during that time, so he never really had an education, obviously never went to college, etc.

He fell into learning programming as a teenager and started working when he was 16 as a web programmer. Now in his 30’s, he makes more money than anyone I’ve personally known and I’m so freaking happy for him. A lot of bullshit people like to brag that they’re ‘self made’ when they own companies, or are CEO’s, etc. And this guy is like the most humble, kind and well adjusted person I’ve ever known, and he did it all himself. Super greatful to be his friend and have him in my life.

German here. A friend from Grundschule (grades 1-4) is the son of Turkish immigrants.
His parents both didn’t speak German, so he struggled with the language.
They also sent him to a Turkish language Islam school in the afternoons.
As a classmate, I helped him with his homework, and I think I was the only German friend he had.
When my parents bought a new PC (a 386!) I hauled our old 286 to my friend and helped him install games on it.
Then I went to Gymnasium (the secondary school that prepares you for university) and he went to Hauptschule (the most basic secondary school that usually leads to a job involving manual labor, driving a forklift if you’re lucky, or unemployment).

20 years later I met him again.
I had failed to finish a university degree twice in a row and was unemployed at the time. It was still a year before I accepted reality and took up jobs washing dishes or cleaning out houses after their inhabitants had passed away.
In the meantime, he had finished Hauptschule, switched to a school qualifying you for college, finished an MBA, founded an IT consulting company, hired 14 employees, married and had 4 children.
He told me that with the computer my family gave him, he could do the taxes for his parents and learnt a lot about IT and business early on.

A guy I grew up with playing music and working odd jobs for his dad is now a hardcore right wing influencer.

His family was very progressive (still are as far as I know) and we lived in a staunchly blue part of the country. Hell, we wrote songs that were hyper critical of the govt and authoritarian systems.

Now he’s screeching to a million plus followers and participating in counter protests as a pro-maga mouthpiece.

I am sure it has to be for money. He was always an egomaniac. Between that and the dopamine hit of a good grift, it has to be. I just can’t resolve in my own heart that he’s truly gone to the dark side.

A guy with good grades was accepted into a prestigious architectural school.

He works for a local brewery now.

He wasn’t a friend, but he was an acquaintance. There was this guy named Robbie, who was dating the principal’s daughter, and everything seemed bright and shiny for them.

They were like our small school’s power couple, Robbie and Shannon.

After high school, Shannon came up pregnant, and everyone was excited and startled because they hadn’t gotten married yet, and then it came out that the kid wasn’t Robbie’s.

Robbie took a nap on a train track.

The weird thing is, he survived being run over by a train. It was a huge event in our suburb.

But then he went deep into drugs and just fell apart. I don’t think he made it to 27.

The one who became sergeant of a French special forces unit really surprised me. I thought he was gonna become a brilliant mathematician.

Edit because this is bringing back memories and I’m bored af: I have 2 best friends. Him, and another guy. They are diametrically opposed and never could really get along for more than a couple of hours. The other guy became a successful businessman (the ‘has 3 new sports cars in the garage’ kind), which I always knew was coming, but I know how he got his seed money, and how that’s the real reason why he can’t live in our birth country anymore. He was the street smart one. I met him at a martial arts tournament (kicked my ass btw). The other best friend, the subject of this comment, was always pretty much Sheldon Cooper. Archetypical book smart. We were in the same elementary school, high school, and college. Smartest guy I have ever known, but super awkward, which never bothered me the slightest.

And so we were in college together, and after another night of him drinking way too much, to the point of resulting in a head wound that I treated in my room with my mother who’s a nurse on the phone, he decided he absolutely needs strong structure, dropped out, enlisted 2 days later. A year later he was in the special forces. 2 years after that he was sergeant. 3 years later another grade bump, and now he teaches strategy at the top military academy we have. Turns out he wasn’t just a brilliant nerd, he’s the kind that’s brilliant at anything he sets his mind on. I don’t call “best friend” just anybody :)

The girl who got into every prestigious university for hard sciences is now working in the performing arts. I assume she was studying to placate her parents and then chose her own path as soon as she could escape.

Fuck it, I’m gonna skirt the rules a little and say me: I’m alive past 25 years old.

pretty much all of my high school friends went off the deep end, except for myself.

my best friend went to jail for heroin positition and beating his girlfriend.
most of my other friends dropped out of college and burned out on drugs to the point they looked/sounded like homeless mushmouths, or if they were women, they got married at like 20 and popped out kids and never had jobs.

one of my girlfriends became a nun another one became a stripper
another became a nun then left the covenant became a trad wife
another one became a poor broke hippie and married the guy she dated after me who was poor broke musician, and they both became addicts.

a lot of other people i was not friends with, even if they did graduate college and get jobs, lived at home, married very young, and basically inherited their parents homes and never left the area. they never lived on their own or had lives outside of the town. that includes some of my relatives, they all ended up working for their parents even if they graduated college.

I grew up in a shitty town that was in the lower quartile of economy/education. i was maybe like 10% of people who grew up there who ‘made it out’. and when people learn what town i grew up in they tend to give me the cold shoulder because it’s not a ‘good place’ and ‘good people’ don’t come from there… which is pretty much true. it sucks to that i will never live down the fact my parents were broke and that town was the best place they could afford to live.

on the flip side, anytime i met anyone from my past… they think I’m major pretentious asshole now because I went to an ivy league school, got a good job, lived on my own my entire life, got a graduate degree, lived abroad, and now live in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. and they start telling how ‘disappointed’ they are I’m not famous or super rich some bullshit. because they are miserable twats who hate their lives and made bad choices. I didn’t. i have never been back to that down since my parents sold the house when i was 21.

not a friend, but the biggest asshole drug dealer at my school and his trailer park family ended up being Mayor of Toronto and Premiere of Ontario.

I just assumed they would be incarcerated by 21.

Not necessarily a friend but someone I often spoke to back then. We met once again some years ago (just around when Covid hit).

He mentioned, he’s trying to get his life back on the rails; he got send to jail twice and then he went to the gym and got much more healthier (lost a lot of weight). I was surprised that he got send to jail, let alone twice.

A good friend in school always had really good grades. She worked hard, had mostly As and wanted to become a scientist since 5th grade, later she was mostly interested in biology and wanted to go into genetics. She graduated with really good grades, the second best student of our year, and would have probably made it into a field of her choosing. When I looked her up years later she had studied art and works at an art gallery. I’m happy for her if that’s what she wanted, but she had talked about studying biology nonstop from 5th grade to graduation.