When I was in college, I spent an entire semester happily bunking classes. Most of my time was spent either in a snooker parlor or at a bar, presumably because I had convinced myself that the required attendance percentage was more of a suggestion than an actual rule.
Then came the end of the year, and I discovered, rather inconveniently, that the university strongly disagreed, and I wasn't given my hall ticket and of course not allowed to write my exams. I did eventually finish university, but not before learning that attendance percentages were, in fact, not merely decorative.
The obvious thing in today's world to do would be to manufacture a beautiful retrospective lesson from this experience. I could package it into a neat story about discipline, accountability, and the heavy weight of consequences.
But the truth is much less impressive. I was young, and I really didn’t care about the consequences then. I wanted to have fun, spend time with friends, and I made a stupid decision.
And it was not my only one.
Like the one time I partied for three days straight because, at that exact moment, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea, why would you want to stop a party and get some sleep when you're having such a good time? Another time,
I went to the office, spent a couple of hours there, decided it wasn’t for me, walked out, and went for a drink instead. I could easily tell you today that leaving was an act of courage, but to be honest, it wasn’t. My trainer said something that offended me. My ego was bruised, and I reacted.
Now, I really don’t want to turn every mistake into wisdom. Some of my bad decisions were just bad, and sometimes just terrible. I wasn’t subconsciously engineering a better life. I wasn’t courageously forcing a pivot and trusting the universe. And no, it wasn’t meant to be. Sometimes I was immature. Sometimes I was stubborn. Sometimes I wanted to have fun and spend time with my friends. And sometimes my ego simply got the better of me.
The fact that my life eventually worked out doesn’t magically make those decisions good. But it does raise a strangely uncomfortable question that is contradictory: Why do some of the decisions I regret also belong to the periods of my life I wouldn’t erase or change even if I had the chance to go back?
This reminds me if a quote I read some time ago - “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!” - Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman,
A life containing absolutely no bad decisions will also be a life lived with an impossible amount of caution and no lived experiences.
At twenty, thirty, or forty, we are constantly making choices using incomplete information, immature versions of ourselves, oversized egos, impulses, ambition, and curiosity. Of course, some of them are going to be terrible.
The tension here isn't really between making good decisions and bad decisions. The tension is between wisdom which is usually the safe and recommended standard and aliveness risky yes and something that you are generally advised against.
Adulthood isn’t about somehow eliminating those choices retrospectively or forcing them to carry a profound lesson. Sometimes adulthood is simply being able to look back at an old version of yourself and say, "God, that was stupid. I’m glad I’m not that person anymore. But I don’t hate him for doing it."
I don’t want to repeat most of my worst decisions. But I’m also not interested in editing them out of my story.
They belong to the people I used to be. Some of those people were arrogant. Some were reckless. Some were spectacularly stupid.
But they were mine.