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I was a physics student for some time (got to quantum and realized it was not for me lol) and one of the smartest, most hardworking students I ever met was a 27 year old who had been in and out of rehab since he was 18. He is working on his masters now.
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.
shared extracurricular activities
😏
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.This one might be the most heartwarming. All it took was a little hand-me-down.
Proves that all you need to be a successful founder is grit, determination, a good work ethic, and connections to a privileged family that can hand you the means to get you started.
Hah! You had me going for the first part.
All it took was a little hand-me-down.
If only OP had kept it for himself, he might have been the IT boss.
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.
Not to judge your friend, but an egomaniacal dopamine addicted grifter IS the dark side
You’ll get no argument from me on that. It’s definitely a case of the mask is fully off now.
We’ve moved on at this point. There’s no room in my life for hatred and facism.
I mean, certain strains of the right are critical of government and what they see as authoritarian systems. That gives me an idea how it started.
A guy with good grades was accepted into a prestigious architectural school.
He works for a local brewery now.
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 :)
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.
That’s really sad.
Fuck it, I’m gonna skirt the rules a little and say me: I’m alive past 25 years old.
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.
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.
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.
A quiet nerdy guy I went to school with died at 19 in a freak magazine explosion aboard a ship he was serving on. Wouldn’t have expected him to be in the navy, much less have such a random, rare, or young end.
I’m 52 and shocked by the number of high school classmates I’ve lost. A girl I dated a few different times in our lives died. She lived hard for parts of her life and I guess it wouldn’t shock me if she fell back into drugs and accidentally OD’d, but I always wanted better for her. Maybe it wasn’t drugs. Doesn’t matter I guess. We weren’t right for each other but I kept trying to save her whether as a friend or something more. Guess I didn’t.
I’m 52 and shocked by the number of high school classmates I’ve lost.
Oh man… I hear that one. I graduated in '82 and on the 40th reunion, I was shocked at the number of my classmates that had died who were fine on our 30th reunion. The 45-65 years seem to be when a lot of the “premature deaths” people fall.
I’m twenty years your junior. My cohort has seen/continues to see a lot of opioid deaths.
I do not doubt it.
When I was a kid - now we’re going back to the mid-70’s after the Vietnam War ended - there were public service ads on TV to avoid opiates all thr time, though I think it was mostly heroin or morphine.
Gotta thank the billionaire Sackler family for the mid-90’s wave of Oxy addictions that seems to have kicked off the current wave.
I’m in my mid-40s. I moved for my final year of highschool, so it’s a bit weird. When Facebook came out, I did reconnect with some, but I quit it around 8 years ago now and lost contact mostly. When I look up my first (rural) school classmates by name now and again, I get so many obituaries. Some freak accidents, many cae accidents, some military, and others still drugs and violence (not much else in tiny truck stop towns). My graduating class was like 180is people and easily a tenth of them are gone (it feels more like 1/5 even).
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.
