Could have, should have, would have

London, UK

I often hear people say that if they had to live their life again that they would do everything the same way. This question seems like a setup and the response is usually formulated not to insult the people around them. I can’t imagine too many people saying in polite company “If I could live life again, I would have tried to find better friends, I would have never had have married my partner, I would have dropped out of school in grade 9 and I would have screwed up every female friendship I had just to fuck them”.

There is a balance between risk and reward with everything in life and emotions, distantly followed by logic, seems always to tip the balance.

If we could live life again, this would mean that life is eternal and death is nothing to fear as you’ll just start from scratch again anyway. Secondly, with the knowledge that you have now, who’s to say you wouldn’t want to try something new.

I’m pretty happy with where I got to in life. That being said, there are a *lot* of things I wish had never happened to me and many things I wish I had done differently.

Emotions are like a rainbow and it’s good to experience the whole spectrum. This is the only way people learn to keep their head together, act civilized, not put themselves in danger and not fuck others over at every twist and turn.

Last night, I thought to myself, if I could have changed anything, what would it be? I like where I am now but I wish I had taken a different path in getting here. There are so many things that I do now that I wish I had started when I was a teenager and not as an adult.

It’s much easier to be an expert in hindsight than foresight.

At the end of the day, we have no one to blame but ourselves. No one else can honestly make things better for us. If you think of all the shit gifts you’ve been given for xmas over the years, this is an example of what people think is the best for you without them having to put too much time, energy and money into it. Only you can invest in yourself and a large part of investment is risk, research and calculation.

What I wish I could change
I wish I had been born a Swede and not a Canadian. But if I had to be born a Canadian in Calgary again, I wish:

1. I had kept up with sports properly after I left swimming. Sports that would have been good to become an expert in: Skiing, Running, Hiking, Snowboarding, Soccer and Hockey. I had done tons of snow and water skiing and hockey when I was a kid and these would have been great things to keep up with. I feel like an idiot when a European hears I'm Canadian and they won't shut up about the NHL and I have to blag my way through it.

2. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time with C++, OpenGL, Win32 and with the world of 3D and instead, focused on Databases, Apache and PERL (as PHP wasn’t really big when I was a teenager). These skills are what got me to where I am today and I could have skipped a lot of shitty jobs and jumped into a good one when I finished high school instead (if not before that).

3. I wish I had smoked some chronic when I was a teenager, I really needed to improve my socializing skills and chill out a bit more.

4. I wish I had gone skiing without my parents more often and even just got the bus out to Banff on my own as a teenager. I’m sure I could have found others my age that would have had been up for it. It costs an arm and a leg to go skiing when you don’t live next to a resort and for me living in Calgary, it was a wasted opportunity.

5. I wish I had traveled to BC on my own. Better than that, I wish I could have left Calgary when things were really going south when I was 13. At the end of the day, the friends I had were shit and trouble was around every corner. At least I could have escaped that it and started fresh. I’m sure the change would have had made my transition into a computer geek easier.

The things I had to do to protect myself from Cambodian gangs in Calgary is something no young person should ever have to do. If the police in Calgary could have gotten off their asses maybe things would have had been different. I guess it’s easier to sit on your ass at Tim Hortons eating doughnuts, drinking coffee and wait for the gang members to kill off one another off first. This should have been a wake up call that things are fucked and something has to change.

I felt like I got through my teenage years by the tips of my hairs and seeing all the stories of people being stabbed or shot in Canada now really reminds me of what I came from and how honest to god lucky I am to have escaped and have a quiet life abroad. In all honesty, I’ve been to the middle east, south east asia and large chunks of the former soviet union, nothing compares with what I had to grow up with. This is another thing that causes confusion for me when people say they are dying to move their. The smaller and more isolated the area, the worse it usually is for safety.

6. I wish I had never gone to Catholic School. The amount of verbal and physical abuse that went on in my school was criminal. My teachers should be sitting in a prison cell. I was worried to tell everyone I was an atheist after left the school but now I'm glad I took a stand.

7. I wish I had sorted out my driver’s license at 16.

8. I wish I had started working at 14 instead of 16.

9. I wish I had saved more money so I could have moved to Australia for a year when I turned 18 instead of just going for a short period of time. I was so happy to be there and life in Calgary at the time was nothing but misery and drunkenness.

10. I wish I had some proper culture instilled on me. American TV is mindless and did nothing to further my life. I don’t think most Canadians realize that there are differences between countries and normally a sovereign nation will have it’s own culture. Canada and the US are distinct exceptions to this and it’s only when people go abroad that they realize that some people do try to be creative and make entertainment for their own kind, not just sit back and watch someone else's constantly. Canadians really do need to be more European in almost every aspect of their lives, it’s unhealthy to live like Americans.

11. I wish I had found work in London and not Exeter when I immigrated to the UK for the first time. It’s never a good idea to live in a town with a population of less than 250,000.

12. I wish I had learnt to socialize better so I could have learnt to treat women like human beings and not like some sort of alternative species. Seeing women as "them" and men as "us" is the worst mindset one can have in a relationship. Though I'm sure I would have found a way to screw up all my relationships anyway.

13. I wish I had lived in Berlin, Munich or Hamburg when I lived in Germany. Bremen was cool but Hannover taught me a lot about life that I would have preferred not to have learnt.

14. I wish I had gotten to use my holidays I earned in Germany and traveled through Eastern Europe. I had my holiday time stolen from me by my former employer and lost 250 euros I had used to by a ticket to Australia when I was forced to cancel the trip and take German lessons instead.

15. I wish I had understood *how* to learn languages before I moved to Europe. I wish I had learnt German, Spanish or Russian in school.

16. I wish I had not fucked around so much learning German and I wish I would have dropped my private tutor like a brick in Bremen and got into group lessons as fast as possible.

17. I wish I had taken up running when I was a teenager and not at the age of 23.

18. I wish my parents had taken me to Europe on holidays at least once when I was a teenager. The trips to America were good but I had desired European cultures more and seeing London or Berlin would have had really opened my eyes and focused me into the right direction. I'm sure if I had gone to Barcelona or Paris that it would have done nothing.

19. I wish I had gone to Estonia and Latvia in 2004 and I wish I had started learning Estonian in University in 2004. These have been some of the best things that have happened to me in a long time.

I might do a million things in my lifetime so to only want to change 19 isn’t too bad I guess.

Gambling can cause people to think “what if” and “double or nothing” and greed can cause people to risk all that they have now for one thing, even though that one thing isn’t worth what they have now. So if someone questions inaction, don’t forget that everything in life has a risk / reward ratio and only emotions can affect it in any significant way.

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