not a friend, but the biggest asshole drug dealer at my school and his trailer park family ended up being Mayor of Toronto and Premiere of Ontario.
I just assumed they would be incarcerated by 21.
A closeted gay acquaintance that I knew from shared extracurricular activities, is now a judge who ran as a Republican because that’s the only party people will vote for in the redneck town we grew up in.
shared extracurricular activities
😏
A friend I met as an adult. He had a pretty rough life growing up, his family was homeless and roamed around a lot, he was supposed to be ‘homeschooled’ but was really taking care of his parents during that time, so he never really had an education, obviously never went to college, etc.
He fell into learning programming as a teenager and started working when he was 16 as a web programmer. Now in his 30’s, he makes more money than anyone I’ve personally known and I’m so freaking happy for him. A lot of bullshit people like to brag that they’re ‘self made’ when they own companies, or are CEO’s, etc. And this guy is like the most humble, kind and well adjusted person I’ve ever known, and he did it all himself. Super greatful to be his friend and have him in my life.
A guy I grew up with playing music and working odd jobs for his dad is now a hardcore right wing influencer.
His family was very progressive (still are as far as I know) and we lived in a staunchly blue part of the country. Hell, we wrote songs that were hyper critical of the govt and authoritarian systems.
Now he’s screeching to a million plus followers and participating in counter protests as a pro-maga mouthpiece.
I am sure it has to be for money. He was always an egomaniac. Between that and the dopamine hit of a good grift, it has to be. I just can’t resolve in my own heart that he’s truly gone to the dark side.
The top performer is still in his hometown working a minimum wage job :-/ The guy was crazy intelligent… I have no idea what happened…
Being the smartest person is hard because you don’t really know how to struggle like people who had to work hard the whole time.
pretty much all of my high school friends went off the deep end, except for myself.
my best friend went to jail for heroin positition and beating his girlfriend.
most of my other friends dropped out of college and burned out on drugs to the point they looked/sounded like homeless mushmouths, or if they were women, they got married at like 20 and popped out kids and never had jobs.one of my girlfriends became a nun another one became a stripper
another became a nun then left the covenant became a trad wife
another one became a poor broke hippie and married the guy she dated after me who was poor broke musician, and they both became addicts.a lot of other people i was not friends with, even if they did graduate college and get jobs, lived at home, married very young, and basically inherited their parents homes and never left the area. they never lived on their own or had lives outside of the town. that includes some of my relatives, they all ended up working for their parents even if they graduated college.
I grew up in a shitty town that was in the lower quartile of economy/education. i was maybe like 10% of people who grew up there who ‘made it out’. and when people learn what town i grew up in they tend to give me the cold shoulder because it’s not a ‘good place’ and ‘good people’ don’t come from there… which is pretty much true. it sucks to that i will never live down the fact my parents were broke and that town was the best place they could afford to live.
on the flip side, anytime i met anyone from my past… they think I’m major pretentious asshole now because I went to an ivy league school, got a good job, lived on my own my entire life, got a graduate degree, lived abroad, and now live in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. and they start telling how ‘disappointed’ they are I’m not famous or super rich some bullshit. because they are miserable twats who hate their lives and made bad choices. I didn’t. i have never been back to that down since my parents sold the house when i was 21.
One of my friends in school was super popular. She was in cosmetology, was always immaculately dressed and had a stabe boyfriend for years in school and after we graduated. Her family life was rock solid but in 1988 she went off the rails and into a super depressive mode, stopped talking to everyone and killed herself. NO one, to this day, saw it coming. It came out of the blue within 4 months. She was carrying something emotionally bad that ate her, or some sort of wild metabolic disorder sent her into a spiral… no one knows.
Hell of a path NO one saw coming.
I dated a girl like that in college. She never went deep off the rails, but when I met her she was reckoning with the fact that she had basically been forced into the perfect pretty cheerleader life by her backwards Louisiana family, even having them go so far as to put her in a mental institution for a short time and hide it from everyone in their lives to keep being able to pretend she was “perfect.” It dragged on her mentally, and she years later would tell me the reason she disappeared and stopped talking to me after six months was I was the first man who had ever been interested in who she was and what her thoughts were and she literally didn’t know how to handle it. She tried to play the perfect pretty girl for a while longer, even marrying a guy who treated her the same way her dad did, as though she only existed to be a trophy wife, before getting divorced and starting to break free from those shackles.
Anyway, just saying, sometimes those super popular, happy seeming immaculate people have something sinister hiding under the surface: like a family forcing them to be that way.
German here. A friend from Grundschule (grades 1-4) is the son of Turkish immigrants.
His parents both didn’t speak German, so he struggled with the language.
They also sent him to a Turkish language Islam school in the afternoons.
As a classmate, I helped him with his homework, and I think I was the only German friend he had.
When my parents bought a new PC (a 386!) I hauled our old 286 to my friend and helped him install games on it.
Then I went to Gymnasium (the secondary school that prepares you for university) and he went to Hauptschule (the most basic secondary school that usually leads to a job involving manual labor, driving a forklift if you’re lucky, or unemployment).20 years later I met him again.
I had failed to finish a university degree twice in a row and was unemployed at the time. It was still a year before I accepted reality and took up jobs washing dishes or cleaning out houses after their inhabitants had passed away.
In the meantime, he had finished Hauptschule, switched to a school qualifying you for college, finished an MBA, founded an IT consulting company, hired 14 employees, married and had 4 children.
He told me that with the computer my family gave him, he could do the taxes for his parents and learnt a lot about IT and business early on.A guy with good grades was accepted into a prestigious architectural school.
He works for a local brewery now.
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He wasn’t a friend, but he was an acquaintance. There was this guy named Robbie, who was dating the principal’s daughter, and everything seemed bright and shiny for them.
They were like our small school’s power couple, Robbie and Shannon.
After high school, Shannon came up pregnant, and everyone was excited and startled because they hadn’t gotten married yet, and then it came out that the kid wasn’t Robbie’s.
Robbie took a nap on a train track.
The weird thing is, he survived being run over by a train. It was a huge event in our suburb.
But then he went deep into drugs and just fell apart. I don’t think he made it to 27.
I’m from a small town that has 3 factories in it. They employ a good portion of the area.
A friend of mine who was pretty socially awkward but really smart worked in one of the factories in the summers while he was going to college for accounting. He got his degree and…moved back home. He still works at the factory full time on the floor. We graduated high school in 2002.
The girl who got into every prestigious university for hard sciences is now working in the performing arts. I assume she was studying to placate her parents and then chose her own path as soon as she could escape.
My punk show / skater buddy went hard into religion, which led to apparent right-wing politics.
