A good friend in school always had really good grades. She worked hard, had mostly As and wanted to become a scientist since 5th grade, later she was mostly interested in biology and wanted to go into genetics. She graduated with really good grades, the second best student of our year, and would have probably made it into a field of her choosing. When I looked her up years later she had studied art and works at an art gallery. I'm happy for her if that's what she wanted, but she had talked about studying biology nonstop from 5th grade to graduation.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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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.
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.
One of my friends from our Boy Scout troop got into meth and went to prison for home invasion.
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. He now 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.
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 top performer is still in hisi 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.
My best friend was a fucking degenerate in high school. Drugs, alcohol, fights, got his girlfriend pregnant at 16, was in and out of jail for all kinds of stupid shit… I fully expected him to die young or end up doing hard time.
He’s now a department head at a very large university, even has his own published textbook. I’m incredibly happy for him.
I was a physics student for some time (got to quantum and realized it was not for me lol) and one of the smartest, most hardworking students I ever met was a 27 year old who had been in and out of rehab since he was 18. He is working on his masters now.
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.
She married the wrong guy.
But most feminists would skewer me for saying that, because it's her choice and "nice guy" actually means "predator" apparently. And then they complain about how men are so abusive and wonder why they can't find a man who treats them well.
And nobody is allowed to tell them that "Not all men are like that" or that "Your perception is indicative of the kind of men you've chosen to give your attention to."
And all the guys who spent their lives respecting women are instead quietly pursuing their own hobbies because they've realized there's no room for them in the dating pool, and never approaching women because apparently they would rather be mauled by a bear...
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 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.
Not to judge your friend, but an egomaniacal dopamine addicted grifter IS the dark side
You’ll get no argument from me on that. It’s definitely a case of the mask is fully off now.
We’ve moved on at this point. There’s no room in my life for hatred and facism.
A guy with good grades was accepted into a prestigious architectural school.
He works for a local brewery now.
A quiet nerdy guy I went to school with died at 19 in a freak magazine explosion aboard a ship he was serving on. Wouldn't have expected him to be in the navy, much less have such a random, rare, or young end.
I'm 52 and shocked by the number of high school classmates I've lost. A girl I dated a few different times in our lives died. She lived hard for parts of her life and I guess it wouldn't shock me if she fell back into drugs and accidentally OD'd, but I always wanted better for her. Maybe it wasn't drugs. Doesn't matter I guess. We weren't right for each other but I kept trying to save her whether as a friend or something more. Guess I didn't.
I'm 52 and shocked by the number of high school classmates I've lost.
Oh man.. I hear that one. I graduated in '82 and on the 40th reunion, I was shocked at the number of my classmates that had died who were fine on our 30th reunion. The 45-65 years seem to be when a lot of the "premature deaths" people fall.
Haven't really kept up with them. Not big on facebook and don't live nearby and life is to busy in general. Know at least one college guy became a nutter and another sorta a bussiness asshole.
Not necessarily a friend but someone I often spoke to back then. We met once again some years ago (just around when Covid hit).
He mentioned, he’s trying to get his life back on the rails; he got send to jail twice and then he went to the gym and got much more heather (lost a lot of weight). I was surprised that he got send to jail, let alone twice.
The one who became sergeant of a French special forces unit really surprised me. I thought he was gonna become a brilliant mathematician.
Edit because this is bringing back memories and I'm bored af: I have 2 best friends. Him, and another guy. They are diametrically opposed and never could really get along for more than a couple of hours. The other guy became a successful businessman (the 'has 3 new sports cars in the garage' kind), which I always knew was coming, but I know how he got his seed money, and how that's the real reason why he can't live in our birth country anymore. He was the street smart one. I met him at a martial arts tournament. The other best friend, the subject of this comment, was always pretty much Sheldon Cooper. Archetypical book smart. We were in the same elementary school, high school, and college. Smartest guy I have ever known, but super awkward, which never bothered me the slightest.
And so we were in college together, and after another night of him drinking way too much, to the point of resulting in a head wound that I treated in my room with my mother who's a nurse on the phone, he decided he absolutely needs strong structure, dropped out, enlisted 2 days later. A year later he was in the special forces. 2 years after that he was sergeant. 3 years later another grade bump, and now he teaches strategy at the top military academy we have. Turns out he wasn't just a brilliant nerd, he's the kind that's brilliant at anything he sets his mind on. I don't call "best friend" just anybody :)