4mo ago

People who gave up on "the dream", do you regret it? How are you?

77 comments

Wanted to be a heart surgeon when I was a kid. Gave up on that in high school when the anxiety hit and I started shaking any time I was even slightly stressed. Figured that wasn't the career path for me.
I'm doing really well. Married, setting up to take over the family business with my partner. I still love heart-related medical stuff and read/watch things to scratch the itch.
Still anxious, still very shaky. I made the right choice.
- Are you a cardiologist now? Anything you can say to scare nicotine addicts from smoking or vaping lol?
  
  I'm manufacturing heart & lung support devices for a living. Look up the symptoms for COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). It's now the 4th most common cause of death worldwide (after cancer, strokes and coronary issues).
  Basically, your lung dies a little bit over time, and loses its potential to remove CO2 from your blood. The biggest problem is the creeping progress. If you're not running marathons regularly, you wouldn't even notice if your lung capacity drops by 20%. 30, you're a bit short of breath when climbing stairs. Most people would assume they are just unfit.
  But once you hit 40% and notice something's wrong, it's almost too late. Mind you, that can take 10-15 years, and usually only starts in your 30s, so you'll be 40-50 before noticeable symptoms begin.
  But then the decline is increasing exponentially. You have trouble breathing - try sucking air through a wet tablecloth. That's how strenuous breathing will be (no joke, try it!!!). Additionally, the amount of CO2 in your blood will change its pH value, making your blood slightly acidic. The acidity kills your kidneys and affects your liver, and also decreases the elasticity of your blood vessels, increasing the risk of organ damage even more, contributes to formation of brain aneurysms, and also increases the risk of strokes.
  Think that's all? Once your lung capacity is below 50%, you'll need mechanical ventilation - permanently. So they'll cut a hole into your airways and install one of those nifty adapters to hook you up to an oxygen bottle. Kinky, right? Comes with the downside of not being able to speak. And you'll have to drag 30lbs of equipment behind you wherever you go... On top of being in a weakened state that hardly permits you to carry 10lbs.
  Consequently, you'll spend 95% of your remaining time on earth in bed, getting sores everywhere, needing help to take a shit for the rest of your life, all the while you can't communicate properly, feel like being continuously choked, and hurting all over.
  Fun times ahead? Smoking/vaping is the leading cause of COPD. You probably just didn't hear about it because it's not an imminent killer. Cancer or stroke have better PR.
  Oh, and there's no cure. You can't restore dead tissue. With lots of luck and care you can stop the progress where you're at. But you'll never, ever, recover a single percent of lung capacity unless you get a transplant (and elderly smokers usually don't make the cut...). And even if you did, transplant recipients often have a shortened lifespan due to complications resulting from the immunosuppressive medicine they have to take for the rest of their lives.
  Good luck.
- So then get into robotic surgery. It takes all of the shakes out.
  If that is the only reason you gave up then I’d say you fucked up.

My dream was to live in a log cabin in the wilderness somewhere in Canada.
I've then spent one year living that lifestyle, as a hunting and hiking guide in Northern BC.
After that I gave up that dream, or rather I realized all the downsides of it in the real world.
Now I work as an IT sysadmin in Southern Germany, and am pretty happy with my life.
And I earn enough to retire in a log cabin in Canada, but with more comfort.
- I might be you in reverse.
  
  Your childhood dream was to work as an IT Sysadmin in Southern Germany?

I was going to build some kind of long lasting software that improves everyone's lives.
I've built some genuinely impactful stuff. Some of my work has saved lives.
But that long term worthwhile project hasn't materialized. Everything I've built is now either tossed out and forgotten, or has long overstayed it's welcome.
I take it as a zen lesson about the ephemeral nature of all things. All we are is dust in the wind - including the stuff we make.
Now I mostly make whatever someone is willing to pay for, and just however well they're willing to pay for. (Edit: Lately I have the privilege to select employers that I think do some genuine good. That helps how I feel about it. I did a lot of 'meh' work on my way to where I am.)
I do make a few handy little things on the side, but I'm no longer burdened with my past delusions of grandeur.
10/10. Would give up the dream again.
- On the film set, I look at each lighting setup as a mandala. We meticulously craft the look only to quickly brush it away in an instant.
  
  That's beautiful. A film set is a particularly good analogy - whatever we want to remember from it must be thoughtfully captured by skilled artists and technicians, before the set, itself, is gone.
- I feel this. So many projects I have built for companies, to their specs, that they considered a success, only to have them simply be thrown away years later rather than improved. So many projects I have built for myself only to have them eclipsed by VC driven companies with larger feature sets and deeper pockets. Unfortunately I have yet to reach your level of zen.
- I disagree. Humans are temporary. Physical things are temporary. But concepts are made until destroyed.
  Nations built by people thousands of years ago still stand.
  I"ve never met Abraham Lincoln. I don't know anyone who has met Abraham Lincoln. Yet for his personal role in destroying the concept of slavery, he will always be remembered.
  If your software can save lives, I guarantee the people whos lives you saved didn't forget you.
  You can still use your powers for good, and become a hero. Which is more important than being paid.
  
  If your software can save lives, I guarantee the people whos lives you saved didn't forget you.
  I appreciate that thought. I don't believe it. But I appreciate it.
  A lot (if not all) of the lives my work saved don't know anything about the part I played, or even that my software had anything to do with it.
  I'm okay with that. I know that there's families out there that are more whole today, thanks to my work. That's more valuable to me than any footnote in a history book.
  Someday those families will be just as dead as if I had done nothing. But I did do something. Millions of extra moments happened with family members who could have died.
  Beautiful things that are eventually forgetten are still beautiful things. To me, that's enough.
  I've been on the other side of this, too.
  I have no way to thank all the people whose medical engineering work extended my grandfather's life by decades. I don't know any of their names.
  But, I hope they know that people like me revere their efforts as sacred. (I've made some effort on that front, but I know I'll never thank everyone who deserves my thanks.)

I was never particularly good at applying myself to anything, I blame the undiagnosed ADHD. But for the last few years I found that Im very interested in fitness, nutrition and exercise science. So I'm in the best shape of my life while approaching 40. Im also building a 4 bedroom family home with a mortgage I can afford and I have a stable career earning good money in a union protected government job.
So what if I'm not a race car driver.
- Sounds like a golden opportunity to stealth in a race car bed frame to the master bedroom!
  
  And if potential partners don't like it? This guy/gal got a house, good secure job and fit AF - you ain't doing any better!!!
- I mean if you have monies you could get into spec miata racing. You're in it for like $10k with car and track fees and stuff, but you don't have to be a professional to compete and driving a gutted miata around a track is a lot of fun. Or go karts, though if you wanted to compete, the miata is cheaper.

My dream was to work as a game developer. This was nearly 20 years ago. I actually got an offer in that field at one point, and the salary was like $20k less than what I was already being paid. I was the main bread-winner in what was a (mostly) single-income household at that time, with my partner pursuing her PhD. Gave up the dream, and I'm glad I did based on what I later learned about that industry. If I went into the game industry I'd be making far less money and have far less free time to do the things I enjoy, like playing the games other people make.
- Any job that people dream about will always pay a lot less than a comparable job with less perceived glamour.
  The dream factor pulls people in, so you need less monetary incentive to meet your demand for workers.
- Well, good news is unions are coming to the industry now, might be worth keeping an ear if you ever find yourself interested in the next few years!

I'm not really sure. I wanted to develop games, I left the idea behind because I needed income and at the time it wasn't really an industry worth pursuing. Now it's easier than ever to make games, but the market is oversaturated. Also my current industry is dying and I'm just kind of bored? So it's going alright. Can't say I regret it, can't stay I'm happy either.

I really wanted a wife and kids. Once puberty hit, I had one goal, be the best father\husband I could be.
Put myself through college, got a good job, bought a house (specifically close to schools so they could just walk to school)... One problem... I'm clearly not attractive because everyone I dated in my 20s cheated on me. So I gave up. I've spent the last 10+ years having to constantly remind myself this. I hate it every day.
- Look man, that's a damn rough shake, but one thing worth considering is that people aren't really done "growing up" until their mid 20s at best. It was probably a lot less that you weren't the catch you thought you were and probably a lot more that you just got unlucky drew a lot of people who weren't as ready for a relationship as you were.
  Take it from me, job hunting was miserable for me, but it taught me an incredibly valuable lesson for myself. My worthiness has nothing to do with if people are rewarding me for the effort to be a worthy person. I had a perfect résumé, and gave a perfect interview, but I never got hired until I stopped barking up the tree I thought I was gonna spend my life climbing, because all the qualification in the world just isn't gonna mean shit against pure bad luck, and it sounds like you sir had a whale's load of bad luck.
  If it's been 10+ years since giving up, it might be time to start looking again. Stay the ever loving fuck away from online dating though, shit will retraumatize you in minutes, look for social events in your area that suit your personal hobbies and interests, but also, go looking for friends and not necessarily lovers, depending on your interests folks you find attractive might feel put upon if someone's getting the moves on immediately after meeting them at a fun hobby thing.
  Fun thing about friends to lovers is that if you realize it wouldn't work romantically, you still got this cool friend person to do fun shit with!
- I'm not sure you're thinking of this in the most helpful way. A lot of times we are attracted to the kind of people that make us feel comfortable, and what makes us feel comfortable is what we have experience with. So for example if we have a toxic relationship with our parents, or with a first relationship, often we become attracted to people who embody similar toxicity. So its likely not that you are unattractive, but instead need to rethink why you have been attracted to the people who cheated on you. Maybe they all have attributes in common? Anyway, being cheated on sucks, and I'm sorry you have to deal with that.
- Hugh Grant was married to supermodel goddess Elizabeth Hurley and cheated with Divine Brown.
  Nobody thinks of Elizabeth Taylor and says, "Man, her husbands must have been so ugly! She divorced them all!"
  Cheating has nothing to do with how you look. There are countless examples of people cheating with less-attractive options. As the poster above says, it's about the type of person you're currently drawn to/currently drawn to you (speaking from the same experience). If you're up for a book and can overlook the cheesy-sounding title, check out Attached: The New Science of Adult Dating/Attachment by Amir Levine for some really helpful insights into that stuff. It was so spot-on for me years ago that I read it in a single night, just stayed up and finished it, because it hit so close to home.
- Aww dude.

Two chicks at the same time, man...
- Sounds like someone's got a case of the Mondays
- You answered the first part of the question.
  Do you regret giving up on it or are you still hunting? We need answers, tell us, smotherpucker.

I wanted to be a big shot IT guy with my own company. Started doing a bunch of plastic surgeon offices and hanging out with celebrities. I hated driving to the city at 6am and staying till 11pm, didn’t really enjoy the work, and just ended up in the socialite party crowd.
I left when the question “Do you want to go to the bathroom?” was ambiguous beteeen cocaine or a sexual advance. Neither of which ever appealed to me.
I disconnected from the field which included cutting orthodontal work half way through that I had exchanged for my expertise.
Drank heavily and even alone for a few months in the comedown and no longer drink at all.
Bouncers in the city will remember your name and let you into just about any club when they see you with a big name they want to get back. I remember walking into one place and it filled with Victoria’s Secret models out of nowhere. Got to hang with some playboy photographers and handle some hip-hop star interviews.
Some of the people I couldn’t figure out how they made their money ended up being nothing but glorified drug dealers, but their IT and SEO was top notch.
Don’t regret it, but don’t wish for it back.

I always wanted to be a biologist. I love nature, I find it beautiful and fascinating. I'm passionate about environmental protection, have been since I was a child. Studied, got my Master's.
Finding work is so hard. What jobs you can get, are unstable, pay is ridiculously bad, and your values are constantly being ridiculed. The state of the environment is so depressing, and the future isn't looking any brighter.
I don't work in that field anymore (couldn't afford to anymore...). The whole thing breaks my heart. I wish I didn't care as much...
- This post is sadder than some of the warnings we get the world is about to end.

Better. I'd rather work with reality than endlessly chase fantasies which I'll never reach.

I wanted to be a rock musician. Then I wanted to be an EDM artist. I still occasionally make music on my computer and even occasionally collaborate with friends who make music. I don't have the same drive and energy that I did in my 20s to work on tracks late into the night, so it's become pretty rare. I'm extremely proud of some of the tracks that I did over the years, so that's enough for me. I'd like to keep pumping out music, but I just don't have a ton of energy for it anymore.
TLDR: I got old and I'm ok with it.
- Similar "dream" although, for me it was more just something I fell into for half a decade after highschool. I can't imagine trying to keep up these days. I still know old producers and DJs. It's not a stable way to age.
  
  I had a similar dream too, but solved the aging problem by not expecting to live past 30. Here I am now pushing 60 and wondering wtf.

I was a staff studio photographer doing jewelery work in the late 1980s. In NYC. If you are old enough to remember the Service Merchandise jewelery section, that was me. Lots of other upscale catalogs too. "Successful" in the business.
There were hundreds of people willing to do my job for free. Many were talented. So the pay was minimal. Tried other careers, landed in computer work in the early 90s. Got lucky with the rising tide. Rode it until now.
DO NOT REGRET. Photography is a lousy business. Now I own a house in the suburbs. Wife, kid, dog, car, 401k. Bills are on autopay.
- I remember service merchandise

I wanted to be a vet when I was younger, and then I learned how emotionally draining the job is, and I dipped. I want to be a professional photographer but the things I like to take pictures of don't exactly sell and I figured out that I should never make the things I enjoy doing my job because I will just grow to hate doing them.
- If you like something but it doesn't sell its a hobby.
  DON'T MONETIZE YOUR HOBBIES!
  
  There are people who do sell the kind of photos I enjoy taking, but they have way better set ups than me, and I just don't have like 12k to drop to get the setup.
- I totally agree with your statement. But, the thing is that I often don't have time to do the things I like unless it's my job. Certainly don't have time to become good at it. I'm now trying to do the jobs I like and switch once it starts to become a grind. It's usually about 5 or 6 years before it turns sour.

Honestly convincing my dad is the hard part, he's still pulling for me to be a tech wiz set for life with a developer job, but I haven't written an original project since before the plague hit, and I haven't had much real hope of beating the HR bot resume roulette wheel since before even that.
Now I'm wondering if I should try back for an IT cert in my management training or just lean into having been good enough at arithmetic and go for a cert in accounting to focus less on career ambitions and more on just having food on the table and putting my dream energy into something else outside of work hours.

I'm 30 but I haven't given up yet. I'll sleep when I'm dead.

To be brief, I am happier now than I ever have been in my entire life

I wanted to work for NASA one day. I realized I was a dumb motherfucker, could barely pass HS maths, so now I'm a cybersec drone.
But my job is extremely chill WFH, so i get to explore my other interests so much more. It was never meant to be, that's okay.
Now I just want to get good at something and use that to do stuff that I can be proud of, that I can show to other people and they can be impressed by.
I feel like all my life people just do things so much more easily than what comes to me and I don't have any talent, so that doesn't help, I don't want to be some schmuck that just watches TV or scrolls social media poisoning herself with alcohol all her life.

I got convinced to "be realistic" and accept a shitty life because achieving greatness is impossible. I regret it every day, being in an environment I don't belong to, faking it because I need to survive somehow. The worst thing is once you stop "surfing the wave" (of your own thing whatever it is) it's almost impossible to recover and get back on the track.

I wanted to be a story board artist. I wanted to work in Animation. I just never could get work (and to be fair, I'm not the best artist). It broke my heart. I regret choosing a creative field for school. My lack of talent and forethought is something I regret. I live with the reprocussions of that choice every day. I cried when I watch Arcane. Not because of the story, but I so wished I could have been apart of that quality of artistry. Now I'm doomed to the same job I wanted to avoid because that's a I can do (customer service based). I've had multiple breakdowns since college and probably will until I die 😂
I didn't think animation would be easy, or even fun, all the time. But I wonder nearly every day how it would of panned out if I made different choices, if I was smarter, more talented, more motivated, just a better human being. Since I'llikely be working until I die, I often think do "skipping" to the end.
- As a random internet stranger I just wanted to say to keep hope and that I sincerely hope you’ll find your way. The past is the past, fortunately, and all you have is the now. I always found peace in the saying that we make choices with the information we have at the time and we are always doing our best. You can’t be angry at a past self that didn’t know. Also! Life doesn’t have to be grand to be worth living and your life is very worth living. Hope this doesn’t come off as patronizing because it’s not meant to be, the feelings you are talking about are familiar to me too.
  But they are just feelings, and we can nurture them, be kind to ourselves, and, if we want to, slowly let them go.

I wish I had a dream

I've had multiple "the dream"s. First I wanted to go to college for robotics and make sick frickin robots. I ended up not going through with it because lol college is expensive. Then I wanted to become a priest, but concluded that my schizophrenia would probably stop that from happening. Most recently I was interested in becoming a monk, but a quick chat with the abbot shot that down, again thanks to my schizophrenia.
I could live with not going to college again no problem, I have a nice engineering job as it is. What's really frustrating is when my mental illness keeps closing doors in my face the minute I find them. It's hard to think, at times, that my life really has value. But I persist.

I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. Somehow ended up running a small AI company. Money is nice but I still think of persuing my dream once I have enough saved up.
- They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.
  
  Dang. Beaten to it.
- Hire me let me work remote fulfill my dream 😂 I work in IT

I’m happy it finally ended. I’ve been able to move on to a completely different life that I actually like much better. Not everything works out and that’s ok. We all think we know what our “dream” is until it’s a nightmare.

Can't give up the dream if you never had one.
- You can share my dream of 3 cat girl girlfriends (they love you).

I won't let 4chan take my dreams away from me.
But I'm thinking I may settle for this.

When i was 6 I wanted ti be an astronaut, when I was 7 I wanted to be a.firemen,nwhen I was 8 I wanted to be in the Army, when i was 9 I wanted to fly fighter jets...
Do I regret giving up on my dreams ? No, I grew up.

I never found "the dream" qnd honestly
I dont know if i regret that more

I have a few times in life, but I've always found a new one.
Each time I'd get deep enough into something, tech advancements always made that thing functionally obsolete.
Once again I'm watching my skill set being phased out, but am working on my big last hurrah project right now that I've dreamed of for years. Having a great time doing it, but have already started the process of replacing it over the next 18 months.
The one plus side now is that the company I'm with has already invested in my training for the next big thing. I've been through it enough times that I don't feel like I'm losing something or wasted my time.

I wanted to be a filmmaker but was forced to choose a different path when my grandfather (who had set up a small college fund for me) refused to pay for school unless I chose something more practical. I caved and majored in journalism (my mom was a photojournalist before I was born) but was so heartbroken I dropped out in my first year. I tried a second time to go to school but I couldn't stay engaged after learning the thing I had been working towards since middle school was no longer an option.
I ended up going to work in tech instead. In my late 20's I thought I would figure out making short films on my own wrote a script, bought some gear, but when I looked at how bad I was at social media and how much I wanted someone to see my work, I thought the odds were against it.
A few years ago some unrelated mental health issues made it impossible for me to work and I am writing a script for an audio drama which is hopefully cheaper to produce and a zine about Utopia while I recover.
Bailing on my dream wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Most of my problems and regrets are related to the undiagnosed and untreated mental illness that destroyed my already struggling career a few years ago. Not making the elder millennial version of Point Break sucks, but maybe if the audio drama works I can parley that success into a streaming series (Archive 81 style).

No regrets. The dream was unrealistic; the path to it filled with shitty pay, shitty people, and shitty tasks - all for a 0.001% chance of success. I realized I preferred having a normal life and enjoyed my youth instead. My current life is more enjoyable than chasing the dream ever was.

A dream is something you need to asume that you may never reach it. Or Maybe not in the form of you imagined. With the time I have been around, there were some things that after I had accomplished I realized they were actually dreams I wanted and I never knew. Some others became real dreams by valorating what happened.

I'm not getting a Nobel. It's mostly a political prize.
I'm not getting a second house in the Northern Hemisphere, somewhere around the Alps, so I'd get two autumns + winters per year. It sounds fancy but eventually it would become a chore.
I'm not marrying and having children. I simply don't see the point any more; I don't even care about romantic relationships any more.
I'm not going to make "the final" reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, the one that will solve all issues with the current ones. It's fun to do some "backyard science" here and there, but other people are better skilled at this than I am.

I'm still in the process of letting mine die (hope is a stubborn thing), but sometimes you need to accept your lot in life. Not everyone gets to do everything they want to.
now, I just don't know what else to dream for instead. As it is, I'm just existing and waiting to die.

My dream was the stereotypical actress one, but I never had the confidence to really go for it despite people telling me I'd do well.
Honestly, I regretted not doing it for a span of time, but everything I've learned both about the industry and me as a person since then made me realize that it probably would have made me miserable, even if I'd "made it."
The price of fame, to me, wouldn't have been worth it. The fakeness of Hollywood, the constant networking/having to deal with people who have a whole host of personality disorders that make them seek out that job, a life constantly being looked into, the persisting pedo problem, the Harvey Weinsteins, etc... I enjoy acting, it's super fun, but I'm glad I went a different route.
I'm a substation designer now.

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