What was your biggest waste of money?

Hmmm. I wouldn't exactly call it a waste of money (yet) but my current smartwatch. It's not bad or anything it's just.. not that useful. The fact that I have to charge it often, doesn't make it better
- I feel exactly the same. I bought mine mostly for hiking and the battery isn't even lasting a whole hike. No tracking or anything.
  
  I love my smartwatch, it usually holds charge for an entire day even with the screen on all the time. I think they stopped making them though, it is a Fossil smartwatch. I also like that it just looks like a normal watch at first glance.
  By contrast, I have bought a tablet twice thinking I would love to have one, and then NEVER know what the hell to do with it. My phone is easier to carry around. :/
  
  Apple watch?
- I bought a smart watch and found it collecting dust. My new job is strongly against being on your phone while at work. Nothing against earbuds and a watch however. Now it takes me twice as long to send a text via my watch.
- Apple Watch 7
  The health app is wonky. When it checks your vitals it vibrates. Think about this, you are wearing the watch at night and it vibrates which wakes you up. Stupid.
  Apple Music, here’s another one, let’s say you have your watch tied your phone and a Bluetooth speaker connected to the phone. Then use the phone to start Apple Music and stream some music to your Bluetooth speaker. The watch will tell you what song is playing that’s good.But let’s say that you want to use the watch to choose a different playlist. It won’t let you. It will claim you don’t have any device connected to the watch to play music. The watch should be telling the phone, but it never will. I don’t know if this is an Apple Watch or an iPhone issue but either way it pisses me off.
  Voice to text works great on the iPhone when trying to send a text message. Half the time won’t work on the watch. It willclaim you said one word when you said a different word. Why don’t I just text like most people do ? because I’m a super slow Texter with my thumbs and it’s much faster for me to hit the microphone.
  
  The health app is wonky. When it checks your vitals it vibrates.
  I think you need to check your settings, because it definitely doesn’t do that by default.
  
  Mine does not vibrate when I’m sleeping.
- I remember looking for a new watch awhile back and seeing a review that said "The battery life is outstanding! I get almost two whole days without a charge!" and thinking "naw dude".
  But, I also don't like "smart" watches... or "smart" anything. I want a damn watch that can occasionally do GPS tracking when I want it to and the battery should last, at minimum, one month.
  
  My Garmin last a month or two. Depends on the model. But it's less smartwatchy and more health and fitness. Gps is accurate in all my tests down to about 2 feet. Takes me to and from my car in parking lots with ease. Geocaching is a breeze. Best of all the watches I've tried.

I was young and didn't know how to say no....
Timeshare.
- Did you get the TV at least?
- Ugh... Same. Legally, I couldn't have agreed, but that didn't matter. Not my proudest moment.

My wife has been sick with a persistent respiratory infection for six weeks. I have a shoulder injury. We haven't been staying on top of the cleaning. We finally admitted that the house smells like one of those caves you age cheese in, and booked a cleaner to put it back in good shape so we can just maintain it going forwards.
Last night, at my wife's insistence, we tidied the house from top to bottom and wiped down the flat surfaces so the cleaner wouldn't arrive to a messy house. 😟
In her defence, she kinda saw the irony of it.
- As others have said, tidying and cleaning are quite different things. Most cleaners will come to do the latter. If your house is untidy, it makes their job harder.
  You can get a person in to tidy up for you, but it's usually a different person than the cleaner, and that requires much more input from yourself "Where does this go? Where do you want this? Do these clothes need to be folded or washed? Is this trash or not?".
  Anyway. Yes I've definitely been guilty of tidying the whole house before our cleaner comes.
- I hear you, but if you want the cleaner to deep clean, you gotta surface clean. Or just pay for twice the time.
- There's a difference between cleaning up and cleaning. You pay for the latter, unless you have a ft maid.

Taxes.
I wouldn't mind if they went to something other than the military and ICE

Star Citizen backer bundle that was supposed to get me an art book, USB key, and a few other things. Will never get it even though they made over 1 billion dollars

Music from Microsoft when they had the store and original DRM. They later shut it down and on newer Windows had no way to restore your DRM keys, so the music was useless/locked. Their support basically said "oh well". Eventually I got around the DRM by an ancient version of Roxio CD burner, somehow because it came out before MS DRM it just read the track and burned it to CD, there was no DRM checking I guess
- "Hmm, I don't know what the fuck that was. Probably not important, I guess. Anyways, here's your files."
  -Roxio

every . single. car.
- Cars are awesome.
  
  Cars are for drivers.

Destiny 1 and 2. I should have learned my lesson with the first game, but the hype train picked me up anyway.
- I started D2 with Shadowkeep's launch, sunk in 12k hours, spent who knows how much money on bullshit cosmetics, and finally quit for good this past November.
  I've made some lifelong friends through that community, pushed myself to do some serious challenges (solo Nez and pre-Resilience solo GM Lightblade probably my top two), and I wouldn't take all the time spent back, but the game and studio are toxic as fuck and putting it behind me has been one of the best decisions I've ever made.
  I do legitimately miss the social aspect we built around it - our small community discord has been incredibly quiet since most of us dropped the game. And pushing myself for lowman challenges and such was exhilarating. But the problems of that game and Bungie as a whole far outweigh any remaining value, and besides they're pushing the game in such a dogshit direction anyway. FOMO, power creep to hell and back, abysmal pvp sandbox andmatchmaking, I'm good.
- I picked up Destiny 2 during computer launch, because I never got to play the first one and saw all of the hype. I played through the main story, which I thought was pretty good… the audio and visuals were stellar. Then I went to go do world stuff with people to level up, and found everything shallow and same-y.
  There also was NO FUCKING TEXT CHAT. There was a box you could type text into, but it didn’t work to chat with people around you stupid baffling decision. They added text chat later, making it opt-in which meant nobody used it.
  The one raid was okay. Not a lot of combat in it.
  Strikes got boring quickly.
  I played through the main game and the two first expansions that came with my deluxe edition. There were no random rolls on equipment, meaning everything was the same. I joked that they would add them in with the first expansion that requires me to pay… and they did just that. I never paid. I just quit. Fuck em. No I guess they took the whole ass campaign out, which is stupid because that was a pretty fun part if the game. I’m never touching a Destiny game again.
  
  They not only removed the campaign the game originally shipped with, but also those first two expansions we bought. So many people defended Bungie when they straight up deleted the content, but everyone was still stupidly hopeful that it would make a return someday. I knew from the beginning of the "vaulting" that there was no "vault," and they just actually deleted huge chunks of the game from everyone's systems.
- My condolences. I got out after Destiny 1, but I did preorder the special edition with the motion sensor Dinklage bot so I have that in a closet now.

Kerbal Space Program 2 as an Early Access game on Steam. Take Two poached developers those that worked on KSP 1 and then laid off the entirety of Intercept Games, the studio that they made for KSP 2. Even though it's not being worked on anymore, you can still get it on Steam for an eye-watering €50, which was exactly what I paid (before the layoff happened, on day 2 of Early Access). This was after I had great experiences with other Early Access games like ULTRAKILL and Satifactory, so I thought that a company like Take Two wouldn't fuck the pooch that hard. It's playable, the graphics are neat, the music is very nice, and they did manage to add the science mode before it all went to shit, but I'm sad that the promised two other solar systems, planet colonization, resource extraction, automation and multiplayer will probably never be added. That is, unless someone else buys up the project and actually finishes it.

Drugs, including nicotine.
- Alcohol too
  
  Probably, as I always had a penchant for a good single malt, but I mostly used to smoke reefer., occasionally dabbled with other things when I was younger.

6 years of using bottom-of-the-barrel laptops because I wanted to buy new. Not to mention the time wasted "optimizing" them, working around their quirks, and spending a whole day fitting a riveted-in keyboard that was never meant to be serviced. If I had the foresight to buy a used business-grade laptop for $200 when I started, I might as well have daily driven it to this day.

Rent, but I can't afford to save up towards my down payment because I have to spend it on rent
- love this for us

$1000 x86-64 Linux tablet. Turns out, I didn't really need it, and it's too techy to sell to anyone in my neighbourhood, so it's just collecting dust.
- Collecting dust? What's the make and model? I'm interested in it.
- Just returned my Linux swapped Microsoft surface pro 8 top of the line edition got a banging deal but the whole folio aspect is not as good as laptop and keyboard popping up on text boxes in Linux are stupidly hjt and miss. Returned. The slate is also really hard to hold with a sleeve for your hand type case.

The college degrees I earned in an attempt to get away from a soul sucking career: Nursing. First mistake was getting a fucking bachelors degree in nursing. That is not neccessary, because an associates degree would be sufficient. In fact, nursing needs to go back to more on the job training in an apprenticeship style program, hopefully run by a union rather than just the hospitals like in the old days. This requirement to have a bachelors degree in nursing that many jobs have is bullshit, and it’s just an excuse to get H1-B Filipina nurses (who work their asses off for less than US citizens) imported en masse. My next mistake was earning a degree in nursing informatics, which hasn’t done shit for me and now I find myself in a job I’m stuck in because I’ve been away from the bedside for so long. My third biggest mistake was earning a MBA in a further attempt to get the fuck away from nursing. Right now, MBA holders can’t get the jobs they would typically qualify for because the market is saturated. And maybe I could have done a dual MBA/MHA (master in health administration) degree in order to become one of the suits in a health system that makes the problems for nurses worse.
Now I don’t know what to do, and I want to die. I am seriously looking at switching over to become an electrician, specifically for low voltage. One of my previous jobs which was informatics related, I worked with those guys for a while. The worst thing they have to do is pull cable through tight spaces and up steep heights. Rest of the time they are using fine motor skills to connect smaller wires to the devices, and then programming them. I think I could hack it. The problem is, in the USA, things are getting politically and economically unstable, and a nursing license in another western country is more of a golden ticket out of this shithole of a country than any apprenticeship. If I had to flee at the drop of a hat, I would have to start an apprenticeship from the bottom again. At least nursing gives me a lifeline, even though the longer I remain a nurse, the more likely I am to want to kill myself. Even my therapist has noticed that, and has told me to leave.

My ex

My life.

a tattoo, and I didn't even pay for it.
The reason it's a waste is because it'll cost £5-600 for a decent cover up. Essentially I got this to cover up... Terrible decision.
I have a variety of tattoos, and I only regret one of them. Still proud of the others decades later.
- May I ask what that tattoo is?
  
  It's the initials of me and my ex wife, with a small design around it. We got matching ones.
  Never get a spouses name tattooed. I was told not to, and I should have listened. This was 13 years ago and I will be finally getting around to it this year.

All games bought outside of GOG
- Steam?
  
  Steam even though supports linux gaming, it doesn't have DRM-free games

Any games that I've ever bought but continue to this day, not play.

Steam summer sale, and yet I fall for it every year. Doom collection still sitting in my library collecting dust.
- I have enough games in my steam library that I could probably play a new game every day for 2 years, and I still haven't redeemed all of my codes from humble bundles.
  But God forbid I pass up a 90% off sale on a game I heard mentioned once 5 years ago in passing...
  
  It's only THREE DOLLARS, how could I not!