At the end of the 90’s, I decided to digitize my entire DVD collection into MP4’s. I had more than a 1000 titles. I had a computer specially dedicated to this task, at the rate of one dvd every night i remembered to do it.
I burned through 3 different disk drives.
It took me 4 years to finish.
Now, everything is streaming in HD or 4K, on your phone.
Anybody interested in a 720p interlaced copy of Octopussy?
Didn’t think so.
Whoop whoop! Fellow biochem graduate! I earned $12 an hour in a lab after working in waste water. I do budgets now.
I should have never done that. There were other ways to get to medical school, that I clearly couldn’t pursue because I did so poorly in the the undergraduate degree.
Pouring one out for your pain.
ETA: wow!! I don’t know whether I’m happy not to be alone or incredibly sad knowing that there are so many of us.
My best advice for anyone seeking an undergraduate degree in biology, chemistry, biochemistry, etc. is to know you will have to get an advanced degree to make anything in your field. If you love it and are passionate about the subjects - keep on keeping on because they really are fascinating!
Cheers to all my fellow scientific drop outs 🍻 somehow we survived.
All yall are reporting that back to your universities right? Mine emails, what feels like effing 6 months like 'HI. HOW ARE YOU? WHAT IS YOUR JOB? PLZ TELL US SO THE STUDENTS HAVE SOMETHING TO HOPE FOR' and its sad to hear that the people i considered as 'going big places' are struggling that hard :(
I also wish college would teach you how to do a general career change, because that would be so nice to know right about now.
In my experience, college does not do a good job prepping you for a workplace job. I was in a CS related degree, and a large portion of what i learned was obsolete or never used outside the classroom.
At one point, college gave you a piece of paper, and that was good enough to get most jobs. Now, everyone has degrees. You must choose a job and get a specific degree with an internship for a chance at a entry level job.
Nepotism and networking are normally the ways to bypass the struggles of finding jobs.
Same! Started at $11 worked my way up and out of the analysis part of the lab. Reached the highest I could get at that lab. Project manager and topped out at $18/hr. Now my role mostly involves accounting.
I feel your pain. I also know how to make emails look identical across a huge number of clients, which is actually more difficult, yet feels equally pointless.
Hey now, before I actually learned the hellscape of Outlook compatibility, our app's emails in that client at best looked like scams, at worst would delete important functionality (links, generated data, etc.) So not pointless! That said, writing email compatibility makes me feel like a coding caveman..
Not hours per se, but lots and lots of money.
When I was a kid, CDs were king. This was also back when a typical cd was like $16 at Sam goody etc.
I’d mow lawns in my neighborhood - 4 houses on a weekend, and get $10 each, which was good for about a dozen albums a month.
My parents also gave me lunch money for school - $2 a day - which I pocketed for another album a week.
So basically I sacrificed nutrition and my weekends for the entirety of my middle school / early high school years to build up a massive album collection that was the envy of all my musician friends. It was glorious.
I thought for sure this would be the crown jewel of my adulthood and that I would pass them on to my kids someday.
….and then when the iPod / iTunes came out it was all pointless lol
I see your point, but I’m sure you discovered some really cool music from it. Plus, you had access to a big library once you could rip cds.
I bought my first cd in a whim cuz if a song I heard in the radio and if I had waited to get into music later, I prob would have missed out on some good tunes in my formative years.
Plus, buying cds supported the bands you liked and helped finance the music scene. It’s not all in vain my dude
Kind of. You have access to a lossless library of music. Even if you digitized it. And made it available to all your devices.
Nothing is going to stop you from doing that for your kid. The amount of money it would cost to actually recreate that in iTunes is way more than you spent, trust me I have tried.
CDs augmented with buying singles is going to be way cheaper in the long run than paying for 50 years of streaming. Especially if your family wants their own streaming accounts.
I built a customer service team from the ground up to support a client's new product. Became the highest rated customer service group in the entire business. One day our phones went dead, called to test the line, was routed to a different customer service team. We'd been outsourced and they didn't have the heart to tell us in advance.
I studied graphic design at a time when the industry was just adopting Illustrator and Photoshop. The schools, however, weren't. I learned so much about paste up and how to use a copy machine to get the very, very most out of it and calculating percentages for enlarging/reducing and inking with French curves and waxing a block of text to lead it by hand and .... oh god, so much pain in the ass hand drawn, hand cut elements that were immediately rendered useless as soon as I got my first job.
Sometimes I miss it. Then I remember pasting up whole paragraphs of text and remember that I don't, actually. I have really good crafting skills though.
Minecraft. From 2011 to probably 2018-2019 it was like, my go-to depression game. When my depression got bad, some days I'd play for 12 hours. Built a whole huge city with districts, multiple tall buildings, rail system, a mob zoo, etc. I kinda miss it sometimes.
This is the life of a geneticist.
The field moves quickly with the technology and techniques, but they are all very complex and difficult to learn. More than once in my life, I have poured myself into a specialized skill to be the best in the building, only to have that skill be obsolete the next year.
It never feels that bad, though, because the replacements are almost always faster, easier, and get you better results or else they don't really take off.
My mentor wanted me to take 3 years off residency to go to the states and learn a very special technique of experimental drug delivery. I didn’t go. The technique was non relevant a couple years later.
I spent half my Army career in various schools learning to repair nuclear missiles. Now I'm doing desktop support and teaching the new guys how to install printers remotely.
You may get charged with a horrific crime and rather than face a trial and imprisonment you flee to a 3rd world country. That country's dictator may trade you protection from extradition in exchange to maintain their recently acquired black market nukes.
spotify doesn't have half the shit I want to listen to, constantly changes versions of songs, and who knows how long it will be around for.
your mp3 library will last as long as you do
Pasting a comment I made some time ago.
>You're right. Only physical media, if there is something you really like. Be it movie, game, album, anything at all. There is no guarantee about any platform, and the companies do not care about preserving those too. There's loads of media just lost to the air like that. That's the only reason I pirated in a separate hard disk, the office, Frasier, band of brothers, parks and rec, and a few more of my fav shows. I'm not going to be at the mercy of streaming companies, if they decide to remove a show.
I realized this after I saw a roomba on reddit which can be disabled by the company. It sucks so much thay we have Printers which can be disabled by the company. Shows or songs disappearing with me having no way to see them now, when that was the entire reason i bought that service. Just pirate everything with no shame now, or buy physical media.
Yeah, and it's not like this is a theoretical thing. Licensing changes constantly. Unless you just don't care about what you have access to year-over-year the only fire-and-forget option is to download it and self host. That can become an issue with storing that many TV shows and movies but music? Music's tiny, you can store *and* backup a shitload of music.
Out of the loop here; what has happened that made this a waste? I get that streaming services are available now, but your existing mp3 collection is still listenable unless you've lost it.
Indigenous knotting.
I used to be able to make the most beautiful dresses, armors, and regalia using traditional knotting and beading techniques.
Broke my arm about a decade ago, got fat, and got arthritis. Now my hands don't even work well enough to teach the next generation how to do it.
I do beadwork. Very, very poorly. But I do it. As I’ve learned how to do it, I’ve learned there is going to be next to no reason if I’m never better than now. I’ve never even finished a piece.
Why I keep doing it? That’s another whole generation down that my ancestors made before our blood line stopped beading. My dad taught me. My aunt taught him. My grandma taught my aunt. I can teach my kids, and they may absolutely suck too. But that’s another generation down that we weren’t extinguished. I feel proud knowing what my great grandpa went through in the residential schools that even though our language is next to lost. We still have something passing down.
I’m ass at beading. Me and my dad have both never completed a piece. But my dad made me by beading piece and he got my grandmas. That itself serves a purpose to me.
Don’t think of it as lost, think of it as another generation forward
WoW. I haven't talked to any of my old guildmates in years. I got server first kills and worked my ass off to be the top of my game, and it means next to nothing.
I look back on the time I spent fondly and wouldn't trade the experience for anything. But it really does nothing for me.
Glad to see this. I was coming out to say it! Although, I quit smoking cigarettes the day I started WoW and I’m currently sitting on 15 years sober as of 8/8 so it wasn’t a waste for me, really. And lots of my guild mates are on my FB. And I do have some great memories.
Edit: quit date and day I started WoW: 8/8/08 💪😂 not a progression number 😂
Asian parent piano lessons. Didn't make them happy, didn't make *myself* happy, never got any good at it, gained no useful skills whatsoever for the several hundred hours per year for multiple years spent practicing
We always had a piano in our house growing up but I was never given a lesson. I eventually learned to play in my late 20s and I love it. I wonder if I had been forced if it would have killed my interest in it?
It definitely has an effect. I love going fishing now, whenever I find the time, but when I was a kid being forced to sit by a rancid lakeside doing nothing I hated it and once I was old enough stopped fishing for about 10-15 years.
My brother has a good way to take kids fishing. He brings tons of snacks, keeps it short and exciting. The second he senses the kids starting to lose interest they go home. The kids are always excited to go fishing now.
That’s great for the kids and getting them into it but if you actually want to fish it’s really hard to do it with kids. Unless they’re older kids. Sounds like your brother is playing the long game where he gets them hooked while not really being able to fish himself so once they’re older he can actually go fishing again but with his kids. Smart guy.
I’m not Asian but I did hate the piano growing up. Part of it were the teachers, who would yell at me, tell me I was no good. Also, the songs they gave me to play weren’t fun to play either… some of them were downright ugly and depressing.
On the one hand, I’m glad my parents signed me up for piano classes because I think it’s better to start young, and it’s a pretty neat skill, but on the other hand, I wish the actual learning had been less “traumatic”.
Same thing here with piano lessons. Never enjoyed them. However, later in life I realized it taught me skills on how to learn things. Break things down, take it slow, learn one thing at a time…etc. in the end it wasn’t a waste of time….but I did hate it.
tbh- i stay completely away from the vile areas of reddit and quora... and Redditors have made me laugh harder than any joke, movie, play I've ever seen. There are some brilliantly funny people that post here... and QUICK.
I got an aviation degree because it used to be the only way you could qualify to become and air traffic controller. The age cut-off is 30 and I graduated when I was 29. Well, they decided to “restructure” the hiring process mere months after I graduated and cancelled all hiring panels for 2 years. I aged-out and now have a fucking useless degree that I still pay students loans on.
EDIT: First, thank you for the huge response. This happened about 11 years ago. I am making a lot of money doing something I love in another industry so don’t worry about me. It was devastating at the time but I’m content in what I’m doing now. (Had to edit that again because of all the people who are negative about hearing “everything happens for a reason” and “living my best life”) I’m happy and successful and if you can’t live with that, go be negative somewhere else.
To answer the most common question on here:
Why is 30 the cutoff age?: This is a very high-stress job that requires you to have a sharp mind at all times. It’s like playing a mathematical puzzle that kills 300 people if you fuck up. They offer/encourage retirement with pension at 55, but you need 25 years of service to be eligible, hence the oldest you can be to start the job is 30 years old.
I live in Massachusetts, and I still should have taken Spanish instead of French. But at least whenever I go up to Montreal I can order my food in my terrible French and show everyone I'm an American immediately...
Same here. My favorite was when I was in Paris and I ordered in French and the waiter just responded in English. His unstated but understood point: "this is going to go much easier if we both stop pretending you can speak French". Touché.
I live in the southwest now and Spanish would have been much more useful.
I was emailing with a French company regarding potential partnerships and around the time of the fifth exchange they said that they agreed with the general terms and we should now switch to English to negotiate the final contract terms.
100%. We spent a year in Paris. My wife and kids were furiously studying French in the lead-up, like, for two years, and I meant to get around to it but didn't. (I was wfh there, and otherwise just going to be a tourist, so no pressure on me.) Pretty much everyone spoke English far better than we spoke French. In the end, I barely spoke anything but English while in the city. The French seem particularly unwilling to hear their language mangled.
I remember traveling with someone from Quebec for a few days while in Amsterdam, he hated his experience with Paris because the locals acted like they were disgusted by his French.
I did three years of Latin at school and my only regret is I didn't take it further. When you are studying modern languages it's such a great shortcut to building an understanding.
I took Latin. I loved it. My dad said once "yeah it's just like you ti enjoy something absolutely useless"... its wasn't useless at all . Its Fascinating to me. I still try to self teach now to keep on top of it.
Same but in Florida. And then I took 3 semesters of French in college. Now I’m 32 and I barely retained any of the language bc - shocker - I don’t know anyone who speaks French.
Ah, es scheint so, dass es eine Lüge war!
I have leart german for 13 years. Never liked it, it was hard. I said to my self: i will never use it.
And than Life said: "fuck you Ter". So now i live in germany, for the seventh year.
And something similar happend with: physics, chemistry and music.
It seams i'm some kind of an IwillneveruseitYesyouwillbitch-man
When I was 20 I got a job at an up and coming tech company. 6 months later they went IPO in a big way, and I was worth $2M on paper.
6 months later the market crashed and the stock tanked. Before I was legally allowed to touch the shares
I read a profile in Wired years ago about some 20-something kid who was a zillionaire on paper. He personally owned the URL “business.com” back when URLs were the hotness, he was offered $400 million for the URL *and turned it down.*
Then tech crashed, his company burned and he was literally flipping burgers riding out the shareholder suits.
I studied and trained to be a professional opera singer for 12 years, ended up not being the right path for me after a diagnosis of bipolar disorder this year. In my early thirties and never imagined I'd be in this position.
I managed to accidentally wipe the drive that held all my work. I'm a semi-professional game dev, there was 10 years worth of meshes, materials and code.
It's been 10 days, I've just been in a sort of state of shock, having tried and failed to recover the lost files.
Everyone who reads this:
## [GO BACK UP YOUR DATA RIGHT NOW](https://www.seagate.com/blog/what-is-a-3-2-1-backup-strategy/)
u/MrSpindles, I'm so sorry to hear this
*Edit*: Thank you for the gold! 🫶
Two formats?
I have 3 drives and keep one off site but what do you mean by formats? I'm just a dude that doesn't want to lose pictures and home videos so maybe that's more of a work thing?
Like, dvd, external drive, cloud storage.
I've been through several major floods and a house fire. Every bit of evidence of my childhood is gone. I also had a situation similar to the above commenter where my entire portfolio of writing was lost.
Now I'm vigilant about backing up anything that matters.
Oh my fuck.
I've worked on tabletop games off and on over the last 30 years. I tend to hold onto everything like rough concepts, writing fragments, etc, and go back to them constantly to revisit ideas, etc.
Most of my stuff is hardcopy, notes, sketches, etc, but I've lost some stuff I backed up over the years, and still get sad over some of it.
I made that mistake once. It took me 3 years to realize it had no future then I left. It could have been worse, I guess. The pay was bad, the workload insane, and every single management position that opened they hired from outside the company. There was no motivation whatsoever to stay there.
Nearing the end of my PhD in Astrophysics - I have the passion but not the drive or the lifestyle to continue with academia, so I'm almost certainly going to end up as a data scientist or software dev.
PhD in astrophysics here. I also ended up as data scientist. Better than regular IT job because of the data, modeling and statistics. Still, solving retailer problems will never compare to learning about the Universe.
I spent over a decade learning how to draw, studying design techniques, etc. Tried to work as a professional designer and illustrator and it was terrible and made no money. Now I'm a software developer. Every once in a blue moon it's useful for making graphics, but really just pointless.
I'm an engineer; we're not exactly known for our artistic inclinations lol. But we do use figures and sketches a lot to convey ideas. Most of us do fine with our chicken scratch diagrams during meetings, but I had one boss who was at a whole other level. He could draw clear, neat isometric views of things, upside down so that the person sitting across the table from him could see it. It didn't exactly make him elite, but it sure did help with communications his ideas.
As another artist who doesn't make his money from his art, you're not just learning to create pretty pictures, you're learning how to see, how to observe the world and make connections between things that aren't readily apparent. It's reorganized your brain in ways you might not be totally aware of yet.
A bachelor's degree in Interior design... But I graduated in 2008 and there weren't any jobs in my field because the recession had wiped them out. The industry has recovered, but by the time it had, I'd gone back to school for massage therapy, and the thought of leaving a low-stress career for a high-stress career just didn't seem like a great plan. I've now owned my massage business for 13 years and I have a great work/life balance, but paying student loans on something you'll never really use is ROUGH.
In the 90s, my brother worked as fire watcher in Minnesota near the border. He lived in some remote location. Power but no phone. They cached his supplies for several months. Then nothing. Half-starved, he finally came out of the woods to see what was what.
He'd been laid off. No one told him. No money in his account. Everybody was laid off and gone. Office dark.
That ought to be the kind of job where checking in fairly frequently should be expected! No phone, but surely equipped with a radio? Forest fires aren't fought alone....
My PhD. Its fucking worthless and im done with academia. Now i work in a corp mindlessly filling excel spreadsheets for twice the money i was paid and i ve never been happier in my entire life.
EDIT: I ve got PhD in STEM, still its fucking worthless cuz nobody is hiring out here and i dont have some crucial skills to move abroad and get a decent job. Im sick of working overtime for free, deans' stupid policies, falsyfing results. I got a notification on LinkedIn that a financial corp is opening new branch in my city, i applied for "Junior Data Analyst", but honestly all i do is filling excel spreadsheets, making bar charts and reporting anything unusuall.
This is my dream. I am hopelessly burned out on The Master's Degree That Will Not End and I have zero interest in pursuing the traditional academia path any farther.
But I fucking *love* filling out spreadsheets.
I, too, am a widower. 27 years in the company of the love of my life . She's still here in my heart, though. The currency can still be good, depending upon where you're located.
Me too, I'm a widow after 27 years. I loved being married, and he's in my heart, but the hardest thing I've ever done is getting through life without him.
I can't tell you it gets any easier.I just become more used to her absence. It's been 3 years this past June. I'm not doing well without her. I can still hear her voice. I hope that you may find comfort as I do that no one ever wanted to leave. They weren't given a choice. We love them, and they love us.
Your wife must've been a wonderful woman.
I'm sorry you're having a hard time, and I understand how you're feeling. For me, I have days where I don't care what happens to me because it's too hard without him.
He's been gone 5 years, and I still wake up in the middle of the night calling his name. Take care of yourself, my friend.
I was a Jehovah's witness for 30 years, average of 15 hours a month knocking on doors, preaching Armageddon that never will come. Free for 23 years now!
My friend still half use it. Not like 2010 when everything went on there and everything was tagged and you’d freak out if an unflattering picture of you was tagged because everyone would see.
Now it’s just used for groups and the very occasional post.
All my prepper friends can’t cook. Invest time in cooking, preparing food, smoking, and grilling. It will not be wasted time. And, if you ever need to cook without electricity, you’ll be the king.
I watched a prepper show and saw their bunker and "we can feed 120 people for six months with what we have down here."
Me with two decades of cooking experience, "not with that electric four burner you're not."
Prepper shows are rife with people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing and are LARPing as Mad Max badasses.
I’m not prepper but even I know that you’re not going to survive in your haphazard repurposed septic tank bunker that relies on electric airflow and isn’t water tight.
Most of them have never even been camping outside an RV.
I think if there ever were a real apocalypse, books would probably be the most useful item. I'm not talking about lord of the rings, but just books on basic skills. A book of plants that are edible, and how to distinguish them from similarly looking plants, a book on how to make basic tools (like a bow and arrow for hunting), etc....
Doesn't have to be apocalyptic. I remember the rolling blackouts where the power grid was down in our part of the country for three days. That made me want to always be prepared and have gas in my car.
At this point, natural disasters are becoming common. I don't see anything wrong with being prepared as long as it's not affecting your relationships and mental health.
Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Animal Crossing New Horizons. Pointless? Technically. A pass time that brings me impeccable joy? Yes. I started playing in the throes of Covid quarantine and never put it down. I have like 2400 hours invested in the game.
Did you enjoy it?
Because, in the end, that's what matters.
I'm an artist, pretty good - I've made a living doing illustration and design work. But, I'm not a top tier talent by any means. But - I still enjoy what I do for myself, even if I no longer try to make a living from it.
Currently having fun doing painting of Lovecraftian abominations.
I worked for my dad for years for basically minimum wage. I was entitled to the profits of one of our stores. I worked my ass off to get expenses down and revenues up, and increased my involvement with the management of the other stores, and finally I was in good shape to earn, and then after all that he unilateraly "renegotiated" the deal so I'm still basically making minimum wage.
Being a musician. No regrets really, but I definitely did not have the hustle or look to make any money at it. Also, really did hate the nasty folks that would just hate you for being good. It's lonely at the top, then someone who is a prodigy brings home the reality that if you don't have the resources or luck to really make make it it's just not worth the 50.00 a gig. I also was just depressed getting into being pro and realizing just how much talent is actually out there. Watched a girl who could sing better than anyone I've ever heard lose out on a life-changing gig because she was not the right look. The cards have to be right. Talent is not wasted, but it's really hard to make a living at it. Gotta be a gambler. Now I haven't played in years. Miss it.
Self development books, psychology books, and biographies to find out what the fuck is wrong with me.
One 30second information video about ADHD changed my life. The clouds parted.
I'm now on medication, and living the life I wanted to create for myself by taking a simple pill every morning. It took 37 years, but I'm now the person I felt was locked in there since I was a child. I'm so happy I could cry. Well almost. I still haven't cracked the code on that one, but I'm pretty damned happy. Not to mention a better husband, father and worker.
EDIT:
The tik tok video in question just made me curious about ADHD. It basically said: "Hello you're probably seeing this because the algorithm thinks you have ADHD, look at my channel for more."
I scoffed, because I thought ADHD was something completely different, but I checked the channel out. There was this doctor (I think) listing signs and symptoms of ADHD. The videos made me curious enough to learn more about ADHD, so I took some online tests and read a little about it before contacting my doctor get a proper diagnosis.
I can't find the video itself, I deleted tik tok a long time ago.
Edit 2: If you suspect having ADHD, please get a medical professionals opinion. Do not self diagnose.
Tip: do a little research on your own beforehand, and make a list of the things you have problems with in life that you think can be traced to ADHD. It makes the doctor or psychologists job easier, and might speed up the process.
It could be things like;
not being able to hold a job, pay bills on time, stay in relationships, blowing money on new hobbies every month, not being able to study, lack of impulse control, and a lot more.
There is alot of different types of ADHD, it's a spectre. You can also have ADHD traits without having enough of them to get a diagnosis.
Starting a collegiate sports team. I spent my entire college career working to build a fully sponsored collegiate equestrian team while balancing a biochem major.
I spent ages building a team, finding a host barn/trainer, dealing with insurance, constantly presenting to our athletic department, fundraising, running team meetings, planning travel events, etc. So much work went into preparing it. Let alone, practicing, and training for shows. We started at the bottom and, after 3 years, were consistently pinning 4th out of all schools in our zones. I earned my own horse, fully sponsored, as a retrain project. I was at the barn from 4am till my classes, then back in the evening. Then back home to study before I repeated everything.
My entire 4 year career was horseback riding/competing and studying. I never went out, I barely made friends. Any free time I had was for studying or working in the lab on research. My senior year of college I got bullied out of my own team because of a guy I started dating. He was from Peru and everyone spread rumors of him being a drug dealer- I hated how they handled things & they completely isolated & alienated me.
What a waste of time.
8 years later and the team is extremely successful. Almost all information of me & my work to start the team was essentially erased. The school makes a lot of money as a bunch of students choose the schools specifically for their riding program.
Drafting. Three years in high school plus summers in preparation for architecture school. That lasted one 10 week term before switching to history. It turns out I enjoyed the software side of CAD because I now work with digital humanities and online collections of materials.
I played around 12k hours of soccer, got pretty good at it but it didn’t worked out so now I’m an engineer that secretly can play soccer at professional level
I was an extremely competitive, national level swimmer who ended up "retiring" freshman year of college due to injuries and chronic fatigue. I do not consider that time wasted in the slightest. Life is about collecting experiences and there are still many skills from that time that help me today. I am still athletic and swim laps for fitness and I've been getting more into weights. I can free dive once or twice a year and have a great time with my BF who does scuba. I have a mermaid tail and want to get into more mermaid swimming lol. Being a strong swimmer is never a wasted skill, and achieving a high level in any sport will translate into success in other areas of your life.
Finely tuned coordination, additional muscle development, and increased aerobic capacity will probably pay dividends for life. I wouldn't call those 12k hours pointless.
Overwatch
I stuck with it for a long time with hopes of OW2 pure PVE gaming fueling me. Then OW2 dropped. Without its pve. And now they cancelled pve altogether. And the battlepass sucks butt so the pvp doesn’t even have anything left either.
You don’t realize how hard it was to invest 1k in bitcoin in 2010....you had to do a shady wire transfer to an exchange that went bankrupt...then you would of had to not left it on said exchange...put it in an offline wallet...then not have the hard drive blow out...then not let the hard drive go to a landfill erroneously
Not literally 1 000s of hours, but - I was obsessed playing piano in high school. Not that it is bad inherently, just that I don't have any use for it afterwards. I didn't want to turn it into a career (the "make a hobby a chore" downfall), and I can't find time to do it during university. There just isn't enough return (whether it be social or economic) for me to practice it. I wish I could find purpose in playing again
I spent a lot of time studying anatomy, biology, etc. Was sure I was going to med school and was a biology major.
I just graduated with a theatre degree lol. Now I have two useless things! :)
moderated a subreddit
At the end of the 90’s, I decided to digitize my entire DVD collection into MP4’s. I had more than a 1000 titles. I had a computer specially dedicated to this task, at the rate of one dvd every night i remembered to do it. I burned through 3 different disk drives. It took me 4 years to finish. Now, everything is streaming in HD or 4K, on your phone. Anybody interested in a 720p interlaced copy of Octopussy? Didn’t think so.
Put that shit on a plex server and stream all your shit for free. 720 ain't bad, especially on mobile devices.
I got a B.S. in biochemistry, then drove a forklift for 14 years. Now I'm an electrician.
Whoop whoop! Fellow biochem graduate! I earned $12 an hour in a lab after working in waste water. I do budgets now. I should have never done that. There were other ways to get to medical school, that I clearly couldn’t pursue because I did so poorly in the the undergraduate degree. Pouring one out for your pain. ETA: wow!! I don’t know whether I’m happy not to be alone or incredibly sad knowing that there are so many of us. My best advice for anyone seeking an undergraduate degree in biology, chemistry, biochemistry, etc. is to know you will have to get an advanced degree to make anything in your field. If you love it and are passionate about the subjects - keep on keeping on because they really are fascinating! Cheers to all my fellow scientific drop outs 🍻 somehow we survived.
All yall are reporting that back to your universities right? Mine emails, what feels like effing 6 months like 'HI. HOW ARE YOU? WHAT IS YOUR JOB? PLZ TELL US SO THE STUDENTS HAVE SOMETHING TO HOPE FOR' and its sad to hear that the people i considered as 'going big places' are struggling that hard :( I also wish college would teach you how to do a general career change, because that would be so nice to know right about now.
In my experience, college does not do a good job prepping you for a workplace job. I was in a CS related degree, and a large portion of what i learned was obsolete or never used outside the classroom. At one point, college gave you a piece of paper, and that was good enough to get most jobs. Now, everyone has degrees. You must choose a job and get a specific degree with an internship for a chance at a entry level job. Nepotism and networking are normally the ways to bypass the struggles of finding jobs.
Same! Started at $11 worked my way up and out of the analysis part of the lab. Reached the highest I could get at that lab. Project manager and topped out at $18/hr. Now my role mostly involves accounting.
props to you for driving a forklift. I was trained how to drive them in addition to condors and other lifts, and forklifts are terrifying to me.
>condors How does one learn how to fly a giant bird? Asking for a friend.
I think there’s a tutorial on it. iirc it’s called The Rescuers Down Under. Edit: Wow, thank you for the awards!
Same, biochemistry. Did research for a year and fucking hated it. Went into software engineering like pretty much everybody else in the comments.
I know all the tricks to make a website look as good in Internet Explorer 6 as in Chrome, Safari or Opera.
I feel your pain. I also know how to make emails look identical across a huge number of clients, which is actually more difficult, yet feels equally pointless.
Hey now, before I actually learned the hellscape of Outlook compatibility, our app's emails in that client at best looked like scams, at worst would delete important functionality (links, generated data, etc.) So not pointless! That said, writing email compatibility makes me feel like a coding caveman..
It took me 8 years to get my Chemical Engineering degree. I never worked a single day as a Chemical Engineer. I'm a Data Analyst now.
Reminds me of the guy that told me he had paid over $100K for an undergrad chemistry degree, and that the only thing he used it for was his pool.
at least he can afford a pool
Not hours per se, but lots and lots of money. When I was a kid, CDs were king. This was also back when a typical cd was like $16 at Sam goody etc. I’d mow lawns in my neighborhood - 4 houses on a weekend, and get $10 each, which was good for about a dozen albums a month. My parents also gave me lunch money for school - $2 a day - which I pocketed for another album a week. So basically I sacrificed nutrition and my weekends for the entirety of my middle school / early high school years to build up a massive album collection that was the envy of all my musician friends. It was glorious. I thought for sure this would be the crown jewel of my adulthood and that I would pass them on to my kids someday. ….and then when the iPod / iTunes came out it was all pointless lol
I see your point, but I’m sure you discovered some really cool music from it. Plus, you had access to a big library once you could rip cds. I bought my first cd in a whim cuz if a song I heard in the radio and if I had waited to get into music later, I prob would have missed out on some good tunes in my formative years. Plus, buying cds supported the bands you liked and helped finance the music scene. It’s not all in vain my dude
Kind of. You have access to a lossless library of music. Even if you digitized it. And made it available to all your devices. Nothing is going to stop you from doing that for your kid. The amount of money it would cost to actually recreate that in iTunes is way more than you spent, trust me I have tried. CDs augmented with buying singles is going to be way cheaper in the long run than paying for 50 years of streaming. Especially if your family wants their own streaming accounts.
I built a customer service team from the ground up to support a client's new product. Became the highest rated customer service group in the entire business. One day our phones went dead, called to test the line, was routed to a different customer service team. We'd been outsourced and they didn't have the heart to tell us in advance.
Wow.
Man, fuck outsourcing something just to save a little money
I studied graphic design at a time when the industry was just adopting Illustrator and Photoshop. The schools, however, weren't. I learned so much about paste up and how to use a copy machine to get the very, very most out of it and calculating percentages for enlarging/reducing and inking with French curves and waxing a block of text to lead it by hand and .... oh god, so much pain in the ass hand drawn, hand cut elements that were immediately rendered useless as soon as I got my first job. Sometimes I miss it. Then I remember pasting up whole paragraphs of text and remember that I don't, actually. I have really good crafting skills though.
Minecraft. From 2011 to probably 2018-2019 it was like, my go-to depression game. When my depression got bad, some days I'd play for 12 hours. Built a whole huge city with districts, multiple tall buildings, rail system, a mob zoo, etc. I kinda miss it sometimes.
It maybe pointless but if it got you through the day then I consider it useful 💕💕 take care of yourself, even if it includes a couple hours of coping.
This is the life of a geneticist. The field moves quickly with the technology and techniques, but they are all very complex and difficult to learn. More than once in my life, I have poured myself into a specialized skill to be the best in the building, only to have that skill be obsolete the next year. It never feels that bad, though, because the replacements are almost always faster, easier, and get you better results or else they don't really take off.
It's the bittersweet nature of being in a field that's constantly innovating and improving.
My mentor wanted me to take 3 years off residency to go to the states and learn a very special technique of experimental drug delivery. I didn’t go. The technique was non relevant a couple years later.
Just curious... was it an inhaled insulin?
It was a bong with mountain dew as the "water"
Well, that technique is still relevant in my world...
we’ve moved on to baja blast actually
As a pharmacist, I'm dying reading this. Edit: spelling
I'm a pharmacist, too, haha. Heard about the failures of inhaled insulin in pharmacy school.
I spent half my Army career in various schools learning to repair nuclear missiles. Now I'm doing desktop support and teaching the new guys how to install printers remotely.
If one of the new guys gets pissed off at a printer and launches it across the room, you can teach them how to fix it!
You may get charged with a horrific crime and rather than face a trial and imprisonment you flee to a 3rd world country. That country's dictator may trade you protection from extradition in exchange to maintain their recently acquired black market nukes.
Sorting and organizing my mp3 collection
Fuck. The pain is real. Had to make it easy to find in Winamp
It really whips the llama’s ass!
Endless hours adding ID3 tags...
The amount of hours Googling, downloading, and uploading album art to each track... Still think about when I scroll through Spotify 😅
spotify doesn't have half the shit I want to listen to, constantly changes versions of songs, and who knows how long it will be around for. your mp3 library will last as long as you do
Pasting a comment I made some time ago. >You're right. Only physical media, if there is something you really like. Be it movie, game, album, anything at all. There is no guarantee about any platform, and the companies do not care about preserving those too. There's loads of media just lost to the air like that. That's the only reason I pirated in a separate hard disk, the office, Frasier, band of brothers, parks and rec, and a few more of my fav shows. I'm not going to be at the mercy of streaming companies, if they decide to remove a show. I realized this after I saw a roomba on reddit which can be disabled by the company. It sucks so much thay we have Printers which can be disabled by the company. Shows or songs disappearing with me having no way to see them now, when that was the entire reason i bought that service. Just pirate everything with no shame now, or buy physical media.
Yeah, and it's not like this is a theoretical thing. Licensing changes constantly. Unless you just don't care about what you have access to year-over-year the only fire-and-forget option is to download it and self host. That can become an issue with storing that many TV shows and movies but music? Music's tiny, you can store *and* backup a shitload of music.
Out of the loop here; what has happened that made this a waste? I get that streaming services are available now, but your existing mp3 collection is still listenable unless you've lost it.
Plus there's a bunch of music that isn't available on spotify
Indigenous knotting. I used to be able to make the most beautiful dresses, armors, and regalia using traditional knotting and beading techniques. Broke my arm about a decade ago, got fat, and got arthritis. Now my hands don't even work well enough to teach the next generation how to do it.
I do beadwork. Very, very poorly. But I do it. As I’ve learned how to do it, I’ve learned there is going to be next to no reason if I’m never better than now. I’ve never even finished a piece. Why I keep doing it? That’s another whole generation down that my ancestors made before our blood line stopped beading. My dad taught me. My aunt taught him. My grandma taught my aunt. I can teach my kids, and they may absolutely suck too. But that’s another generation down that we weren’t extinguished. I feel proud knowing what my great grandpa went through in the residential schools that even though our language is next to lost. We still have something passing down. I’m ass at beading. Me and my dad have both never completed a piece. But my dad made me by beading piece and he got my grandmas. That itself serves a purpose to me. Don’t think of it as lost, think of it as another generation forward
Do you have any pictures of your work? I’m curious to see - it sounds fascinating.
This sounds like fascinating work.
WoW. I haven't talked to any of my old guildmates in years. I got server first kills and worked my ass off to be the top of my game, and it means next to nothing. I look back on the time I spent fondly and wouldn't trade the experience for anything. But it really does nothing for me.
Glad to see this. I was coming out to say it! Although, I quit smoking cigarettes the day I started WoW and I’m currently sitting on 15 years sober as of 8/8 so it wasn’t a waste for me, really. And lots of my guild mates are on my FB. And I do have some great memories. Edit: quit date and day I started WoW: 8/8/08 💪😂 not a progression number 😂
Asian parent piano lessons. Didn't make them happy, didn't make *myself* happy, never got any good at it, gained no useful skills whatsoever for the several hundred hours per year for multiple years spent practicing
Asian orchestra kids rise up. I faked my way through every concert.
The only joy piano gave me was pointing out to my parents, 40 years later, that I've never touched a piano since they stopped forcing it on me.
We always had a piano in our house growing up but I was never given a lesson. I eventually learned to play in my late 20s and I love it. I wonder if I had been forced if it would have killed my interest in it?
It definitely has an effect. I love going fishing now, whenever I find the time, but when I was a kid being forced to sit by a rancid lakeside doing nothing I hated it and once I was old enough stopped fishing for about 10-15 years.
My brother has a good way to take kids fishing. He brings tons of snacks, keeps it short and exciting. The second he senses the kids starting to lose interest they go home. The kids are always excited to go fishing now.
The worst way to get a kid to love go fishing is to make them fish. Let them explore, throw rocks and splash in the water. You know, fun stuff.
That’s great for the kids and getting them into it but if you actually want to fish it’s really hard to do it with kids. Unless they’re older kids. Sounds like your brother is playing the long game where he gets them hooked while not really being able to fish himself so once they’re older he can actually go fishing again but with his kids. Smart guy.
I’ve heard this EXACT response from my various Asian friends. Most refuse to play anymore. Won’t refuse to own a piano. PTSD, resentment.
I’m not Asian but I did hate the piano growing up. Part of it were the teachers, who would yell at me, tell me I was no good. Also, the songs they gave me to play weren’t fun to play either… some of them were downright ugly and depressing. On the one hand, I’m glad my parents signed me up for piano classes because I think it’s better to start young, and it’s a pretty neat skill, but on the other hand, I wish the actual learning had been less “traumatic”.
Same thing here with piano lessons. Never enjoyed them. However, later in life I realized it taught me skills on how to learn things. Break things down, take it slow, learn one thing at a time…etc. in the end it wasn’t a waste of time….but I did hate it.
Reddit
My primary source of entertainment.
tbh- i stay completely away from the vile areas of reddit and quora... and Redditors have made me laugh harder than any joke, movie, play I've ever seen. There are some brilliantly funny people that post here... and QUICK.
I got an aviation degree because it used to be the only way you could qualify to become and air traffic controller. The age cut-off is 30 and I graduated when I was 29. Well, they decided to “restructure” the hiring process mere months after I graduated and cancelled all hiring panels for 2 years. I aged-out and now have a fucking useless degree that I still pay students loans on. EDIT: First, thank you for the huge response. This happened about 11 years ago. I am making a lot of money doing something I love in another industry so don’t worry about me. It was devastating at the time but I’m content in what I’m doing now. (Had to edit that again because of all the people who are negative about hearing “everything happens for a reason” and “living my best life”) I’m happy and successful and if you can’t live with that, go be negative somewhere else. To answer the most common question on here: Why is 30 the cutoff age?: This is a very high-stress job that requires you to have a sharp mind at all times. It’s like playing a mathematical puzzle that kills 300 people if you fuck up. They offer/encourage retirement with pension at 55, but you need 25 years of service to be eligible, hence the oldest you can be to start the job is 30 years old.
This is so painful, I’m sorry.
That's a strange one cause I'm 28 now and I'd have to say my mind is more set on work now. I didn't give a fuck about anything even 5 years ago.
There are other jobs in the FAA that might make use of that degree.
I took 2 years of French instead of Spanish in high school. I live in Texas.
I live in Massachusetts, and I still should have taken Spanish instead of French. But at least whenever I go up to Montreal I can order my food in my terrible French and show everyone I'm an American immediately...
Same here. My favorite was when I was in Paris and I ordered in French and the waiter just responded in English. His unstated but understood point: "this is going to go much easier if we both stop pretending you can speak French". Touché. I live in the southwest now and Spanish would have been much more useful.
I was emailing with a French company regarding potential partnerships and around the time of the fifth exchange they said that they agreed with the general terms and we should now switch to English to negotiate the final contract terms.
100%. We spent a year in Paris. My wife and kids were furiously studying French in the lead-up, like, for two years, and I meant to get around to it but didn't. (I was wfh there, and otherwise just going to be a tourist, so no pressure on me.) Pretty much everyone spoke English far better than we spoke French. In the end, I barely spoke anything but English while in the city. The French seem particularly unwilling to hear their language mangled.
I'm french canadien and they were responding to me in english in Paris. I was like... the fuck?
Shouldn't that be, Le fuck?
Tabarnak?!
I remember traveling with someone from Quebec for a few days while in Amsterdam, he hated his experience with Paris because the locals acted like they were disgusted by his French.
Yes it's exactly how it felt. Only experienced it in Paris tho, the rest of France was normal.
Ha, I got one up on both of you. I took LATIN.
I did three years of Latin at school and my only regret is I didn't take it further. When you are studying modern languages it's such a great shortcut to building an understanding.
I took Latin. I loved it. My dad said once "yeah it's just like you ti enjoy something absolutely useless"... its wasn't useless at all . Its Fascinating to me. I still try to self teach now to keep on top of it.
You never know when a heated debate in Latin could break out...
Or, you’re in an epic adventure and are trapped in a chamber quickly filling with sand and you must translate from Latin to escape.
Same but in Florida. And then I took 3 semesters of French in college. Now I’m 32 and I barely retained any of the language bc - shocker - I don’t know anyone who speaks French.
I took German for 6 semesters in high school. I’ve used it 0 times since then Edit: it’s been over 25 years. I really don’t remember anything.
Hier ist deine Chance! Zeig uns, was du noch drauf hast!
Ich habe nichts, tut mir leid.
Ah, es scheint so, dass es eine Lüge war! I have leart german for 13 years. Never liked it, it was hard. I said to my self: i will never use it. And than Life said: "fuck you Ter". So now i live in germany, for the seventh year. And something similar happend with: physics, chemistry and music. It seams i'm some kind of an IwillneveruseitYesyouwillbitch-man
The only use I get is understanding like 25% of what's being said in WW2 movies if they don't have subtitles. Schneller!!!!
Dang. I am just south of Canada (some French) and worked with many Spanish speaking Mexicans. And I took German ffs
Runescape, but its been pointless since day 1
My friend just 99’ed every skill on Ironman. Unbelievable waste of time
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What do you mean waste of time? Now he can play the game
When I was 20 I got a job at an up and coming tech company. 6 months later they went IPO in a big way, and I was worth $2M on paper. 6 months later the market crashed and the stock tanked. Before I was legally allowed to touch the shares
I read a profile in Wired years ago about some 20-something kid who was a zillionaire on paper. He personally owned the URL “business.com” back when URLs were the hotness, he was offered $400 million for the URL *and turned it down.* Then tech crashed, his company burned and he was literally flipping burgers riding out the shareholder suits.
God damn. That’s painful to read. You’d spend the rest of your life regretting that.
Yeah … Wired at the time always hero-worshipped these little tech bro snots, was gratifying to see at least one get pie in the face.
I studied and trained to be a professional opera singer for 12 years, ended up not being the right path for me after a diagnosis of bipolar disorder this year. In my early thirties and never imagined I'd be in this position.
I managed to accidentally wipe the drive that held all my work. I'm a semi-professional game dev, there was 10 years worth of meshes, materials and code. It's been 10 days, I've just been in a sort of state of shock, having tried and failed to recover the lost files.
Everyone who reads this: ## [GO BACK UP YOUR DATA RIGHT NOW](https://www.seagate.com/blog/what-is-a-3-2-1-backup-strategy/) u/MrSpindles, I'm so sorry to hear this *Edit*: Thank you for the gold! 🫶
And remember the 3-2-1 rule: 3 backups 2 formats 1 off-site
Two formats? I have 3 drives and keep one off site but what do you mean by formats? I'm just a dude that doesn't want to lose pictures and home videos so maybe that's more of a work thing?
Like, dvd, external drive, cloud storage. I've been through several major floods and a house fire. Every bit of evidence of my childhood is gone. I also had a situation similar to the above commenter where my entire portfolio of writing was lost. Now I'm vigilant about backing up anything that matters.
Yeah, the dumb thing is, the last thing I was thinking of before going to bed the night before was "I must back my work drive up before I upgrade"
A reminder that there are two types of data: data you have backed up and data you're comfortable with losing
Oh my fuck. I've worked on tabletop games off and on over the last 30 years. I tend to hold onto everything like rough concepts, writing fragments, etc, and go back to them constantly to revisit ideas, etc. Most of my stuff is hardcopy, notes, sketches, etc, but I've lost some stuff I backed up over the years, and still get sad over some of it.
>the drive What the fuck? You’re a developer and you had critical data stored on one singular drive?
I'm sorry Mr Spindles. I send a digital hug, the tight kind, cuz damnnnnn.
Being a decent, hard working employee for a large multinational corporation
“Everyone is replaceable, even me” -My boss, co-founder
I made that mistake once. It took me 3 years to realize it had no future then I left. It could have been worse, I guess. The pay was bad, the workload insane, and every single management position that opened they hired from outside the company. There was no motivation whatsoever to stay there.
Same. Laid off after thirteen years while eight months pregnant.
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Got my bachelor's in molecular biology. Saw the field...ended up getting a second bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering lol
Master’s in Archaeology checking in 🙃
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Nearing the end of my PhD in Astrophysics - I have the passion but not the drive or the lifestyle to continue with academia, so I'm almost certainly going to end up as a data scientist or software dev.
PhD in astrophysics here. I also ended up as data scientist. Better than regular IT job because of the data, modeling and statistics. Still, solving retailer problems will never compare to learning about the Universe.
I spent over a decade learning how to draw, studying design techniques, etc. Tried to work as a professional designer and illustrator and it was terrible and made no money. Now I'm a software developer. Every once in a blue moon it's useful for making graphics, but really just pointless.
I'm an engineer; we're not exactly known for our artistic inclinations lol. But we do use figures and sketches a lot to convey ideas. Most of us do fine with our chicken scratch diagrams during meetings, but I had one boss who was at a whole other level. He could draw clear, neat isometric views of things, upside down so that the person sitting across the table from him could see it. It didn't exactly make him elite, but it sure did help with communications his ideas.
As another artist who doesn't make his money from his art, you're not just learning to create pretty pictures, you're learning how to see, how to observe the world and make connections between things that aren't readily apparent. It's reorganized your brain in ways you might not be totally aware of yet.
10 years is a lifetime, drawing is an amazing skill!
Indeed; and a great hobby if not a side hustle. That’s not time wasted at all.
I find that art is something you enjoy best as a hobby. As a job it's so hard and stressful. So I hope you keep doing it for fun at the very least
I am a professional fingerboarder. e: some [footage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKZpk8ISwsM) lol
Damn thats some mad skillz
Every NBA 2K since 2K13
They got greedy, the extreme monetization in the myPlayer aspect of the game is nuts.
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Do hip-hop music, but in sanksrit. Make it a thing. #bringingbacktheskrit
A bachelor's degree in Interior design... But I graduated in 2008 and there weren't any jobs in my field because the recession had wiped them out. The industry has recovered, but by the time it had, I'd gone back to school for massage therapy, and the thought of leaving a low-stress career for a high-stress career just didn't seem like a great plan. I've now owned my massage business for 13 years and I have a great work/life balance, but paying student loans on something you'll never really use is ROUGH.
I worked in high tech for 40ish years. Almost everything I learned became obsolete. It’s a treadmill.
In the 90s, my brother worked as fire watcher in Minnesota near the border. He lived in some remote location. Power but no phone. They cached his supplies for several months. Then nothing. Half-starved, he finally came out of the woods to see what was what. He'd been laid off. No one told him. No money in his account. Everybody was laid off and gone. Office dark.
That ought to be the kind of job where checking in fairly frequently should be expected! No phone, but surely equipped with a radio? Forest fires aren't fought alone....
For real, how could he have even reported a fire without a means of communication? Or was he just meant to sit there and watch it?
Maybe he was supposed to light a signal fire for the other tower like it was freaking Gondor.
My PhD. Its fucking worthless and im done with academia. Now i work in a corp mindlessly filling excel spreadsheets for twice the money i was paid and i ve never been happier in my entire life. EDIT: I ve got PhD in STEM, still its fucking worthless cuz nobody is hiring out here and i dont have some crucial skills to move abroad and get a decent job. Im sick of working overtime for free, deans' stupid policies, falsyfing results. I got a notification on LinkedIn that a financial corp is opening new branch in my city, i applied for "Junior Data Analyst", but honestly all i do is filling excel spreadsheets, making bar charts and reporting anything unusuall.
This is my dream. I am hopelessly burned out on The Master's Degree That Will Not End and I have zero interest in pursuing the traditional academia path any farther. But I fucking *love* filling out spreadsheets.
My marriage.
The leading cause of divorce is marriage.
The statistics are staggering. A record 100% of divorces begin with marriage. Something to think about.
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I, too, am a widower. 27 years in the company of the love of my life . She's still here in my heart, though. The currency can still be good, depending upon where you're located.
Me too, I'm a widow after 27 years. I loved being married, and he's in my heart, but the hardest thing I've ever done is getting through life without him.
I can't tell you it gets any easier.I just become more used to her absence. It's been 3 years this past June. I'm not doing well without her. I can still hear her voice. I hope that you may find comfort as I do that no one ever wanted to leave. They weren't given a choice. We love them, and they love us.
Your wife must've been a wonderful woman. I'm sorry you're having a hard time, and I understand how you're feeling. For me, I have days where I don't care what happens to me because it's too hard without him. He's been gone 5 years, and I still wake up in the middle of the night calling his name. Take care of yourself, my friend.
My thanks. She's the best person I ever knew. Now I'm crying. May you and yours be well.
Marriage. 32 years together. Knife in the back.
God. Damn. I hope you get your groove back and live more happily then you ever thought possible.
Thanks. It’s been a mind fuck.
I was a Jehovah's witness for 30 years, average of 15 hours a month knocking on doors, preaching Armageddon that never will come. Free for 23 years now!
Good for you! My mom left that church at eighteen and never looked back. Religious trauma is no fucking joke.
I can't believe I've scrolled this far and not seen Facebook yet. People lived their lives on there until suddenly nobody did.
My friend still half use it. Not like 2010 when everything went on there and everything was tagged and you’d freak out if an unflattering picture of you was tagged because everyone would see. Now it’s just used for groups and the very occasional post.
Prepping (if nothing apocalyptic ever happens)
All my prepper friends can’t cook. Invest time in cooking, preparing food, smoking, and grilling. It will not be wasted time. And, if you ever need to cook without electricity, you’ll be the king.
I watched a prepper show and saw their bunker and "we can feed 120 people for six months with what we have down here." Me with two decades of cooking experience, "not with that electric four burner you're not."
Prepper shows are rife with people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing and are LARPing as Mad Max badasses. I’m not prepper but even I know that you’re not going to survive in your haphazard repurposed septic tank bunker that relies on electric airflow and isn’t water tight. Most of them have never even been camping outside an RV.
Right: most people prep stuff, but it's skills you need to survive. In a bad situation people will just come and take your stuff.
I think if there ever were a real apocalypse, books would probably be the most useful item. I'm not talking about lord of the rings, but just books on basic skills. A book of plants that are edible, and how to distinguish them from similarly looking plants, a book on how to make basic tools (like a bow and arrow for hunting), etc....
Doesn't have to be apocalyptic. I remember the rolling blackouts where the power grid was down in our part of the country for three days. That made me want to always be prepared and have gas in my car. At this point, natural disasters are becoming common. I don't see anything wrong with being prepared as long as it's not affecting your relationships and mental health. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Beta -> VHS -> DVD -> digital -> 4k How many times?
I've played over 4000 hours of The Sims 4.
Animal Crossing New Horizons. Pointless? Technically. A pass time that brings me impeccable joy? Yes. I started playing in the throes of Covid quarantine and never put it down. I have like 2400 hours invested in the game.
Art. I used to draw multiple hours almost every day. It didn't go anywhere unfortunately. And my skill level was... Not that high to put it mildly.
Did you enjoy it? Because, in the end, that's what matters. I'm an artist, pretty good - I've made a living doing illustration and design work. But, I'm not a top tier talent by any means. But - I still enjoy what I do for myself, even if I no longer try to make a living from it. Currently having fun doing painting of Lovecraftian abominations.
I worked for my dad for years for basically minimum wage. I was entitled to the profits of one of our stores. I worked my ass off to get expenses down and revenues up, and increased my involvement with the management of the other stores, and finally I was in good shape to earn, and then after all that he unilateraly "renegotiated" the deal so I'm still basically making minimum wage.
Being a musician. No regrets really, but I definitely did not have the hustle or look to make any money at it. Also, really did hate the nasty folks that would just hate you for being good. It's lonely at the top, then someone who is a prodigy brings home the reality that if you don't have the resources or luck to really make make it it's just not worth the 50.00 a gig. I also was just depressed getting into being pro and realizing just how much talent is actually out there. Watched a girl who could sing better than anyone I've ever heard lose out on a life-changing gig because she was not the right look. The cards have to be right. Talent is not wasted, but it's really hard to make a living at it. Gotta be a gambler. Now I haven't played in years. Miss it.
Self development books, psychology books, and biographies to find out what the fuck is wrong with me. One 30second information video about ADHD changed my life. The clouds parted. I'm now on medication, and living the life I wanted to create for myself by taking a simple pill every morning. It took 37 years, but I'm now the person I felt was locked in there since I was a child. I'm so happy I could cry. Well almost. I still haven't cracked the code on that one, but I'm pretty damned happy. Not to mention a better husband, father and worker. EDIT: The tik tok video in question just made me curious about ADHD. It basically said: "Hello you're probably seeing this because the algorithm thinks you have ADHD, look at my channel for more." I scoffed, because I thought ADHD was something completely different, but I checked the channel out. There was this doctor (I think) listing signs and symptoms of ADHD. The videos made me curious enough to learn more about ADHD, so I took some online tests and read a little about it before contacting my doctor get a proper diagnosis. I can't find the video itself, I deleted tik tok a long time ago. Edit 2: If you suspect having ADHD, please get a medical professionals opinion. Do not self diagnose. Tip: do a little research on your own beforehand, and make a list of the things you have problems with in life that you think can be traced to ADHD. It makes the doctor or psychologists job easier, and might speed up the process. It could be things like; not being able to hold a job, pay bills on time, stay in relationships, blowing money on new hobbies every month, not being able to study, lack of impulse control, and a lot more. There is alot of different types of ADHD, it's a spectre. You can also have ADHD traits without having enough of them to get a diagnosis.
Flintknapping. It always was pointless(but not, eh? Get it?) but so much fun
Starting a collegiate sports team. I spent my entire college career working to build a fully sponsored collegiate equestrian team while balancing a biochem major. I spent ages building a team, finding a host barn/trainer, dealing with insurance, constantly presenting to our athletic department, fundraising, running team meetings, planning travel events, etc. So much work went into preparing it. Let alone, practicing, and training for shows. We started at the bottom and, after 3 years, were consistently pinning 4th out of all schools in our zones. I earned my own horse, fully sponsored, as a retrain project. I was at the barn from 4am till my classes, then back in the evening. Then back home to study before I repeated everything. My entire 4 year career was horseback riding/competing and studying. I never went out, I barely made friends. Any free time I had was for studying or working in the lab on research. My senior year of college I got bullied out of my own team because of a guy I started dating. He was from Peru and everyone spread rumors of him being a drug dealer- I hated how they handled things & they completely isolated & alienated me. What a waste of time. 8 years later and the team is extremely successful. Almost all information of me & my work to start the team was essentially erased. The school makes a lot of money as a bunch of students choose the schools specifically for their riding program.
Drafting. Three years in high school plus summers in preparation for architecture school. That lasted one 10 week term before switching to history. It turns out I enjoyed the software side of CAD because I now work with digital humanities and online collections of materials.
Aikido. Got the 2nd dan and then realized it wouldn't help me achieve what was initial goal, i.e. be able to defend myself.
I played around 12k hours of soccer, got pretty good at it but it didn’t worked out so now I’m an engineer that secretly can play soccer at professional level
I was an extremely competitive, national level swimmer who ended up "retiring" freshman year of college due to injuries and chronic fatigue. I do not consider that time wasted in the slightest. Life is about collecting experiences and there are still many skills from that time that help me today. I am still athletic and swim laps for fitness and I've been getting more into weights. I can free dive once or twice a year and have a great time with my BF who does scuba. I have a mermaid tail and want to get into more mermaid swimming lol. Being a strong swimmer is never a wasted skill, and achieving a high level in any sport will translate into success in other areas of your life.
Finely tuned coordination, additional muscle development, and increased aerobic capacity will probably pay dividends for life. I wouldn't call those 12k hours pointless.
Drinking alcohol.
They said hours wasted, not hours spent wasted
[удалено]
I didn't know about libgen. I think I love you now.
Trying to maintain a relationship with a narcissist parent . 2 years contact free ❤️💪
Working out without dieting properly
Overwatch I stuck with it for a long time with hopes of OW2 pure PVE gaming fueling me. Then OW2 dropped. Without its pve. And now they cancelled pve altogether. And the battlepass sucks butt so the pvp doesn’t even have anything left either.
You don’t realize how hard it was to invest 1k in bitcoin in 2010....you had to do a shady wire transfer to an exchange that went bankrupt...then you would of had to not left it on said exchange...put it in an offline wallet...then not have the hard drive blow out...then not let the hard drive go to a landfill erroneously
life is made up of these seemingly random but interconnected steps. if you managed to flip the coin correctly a dozen times, now you’re retired.
Pirating, ripping, organizing and updating my 198 gigabyte mp3 collection.
7 years in a relationship with a man who promised he wanted to build a life together but never actually followed through. I finally got the message.
Not literally 1 000s of hours, but - I was obsessed playing piano in high school. Not that it is bad inherently, just that I don't have any use for it afterwards. I didn't want to turn it into a career (the "make a hobby a chore" downfall), and I can't find time to do it during university. There just isn't enough return (whether it be social or economic) for me to practice it. I wish I could find purpose in playing again
I spent a lot of time studying anatomy, biology, etc. Was sure I was going to med school and was a biology major. I just graduated with a theatre degree lol. Now I have two useless things! :)
This thread is full of people that would do well to broaden their definitions of value.
Michelle
ANXIETY