If you knew then what you know now

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I now remember, via another thread, that my mother was a musician and I was exposed to and played some (read: forced to play.) Now, I wish I had been able to appreciate that more. Of course, most of that was before I was 15.

Dear_one, I don't know what you mean by feminism, but I was part of it early on and I have never felt that it was about women at the expense of men. Of course, I am weird and may be an outlier.

It'd be absolutely amazing to be 15 again - and knowing what I know now! Get to experience it all all over again. Spend time with my turtles, dogs and grandfather all over again.
Avoid some pitfalls. Not do some things I'm ashamed of. Avoid doing something that was less than healthy and would have a good health effect on me now. Avoid some really moronic obsessions, a toxic milieu and a waste of money.

I don't know if knowing now how my high school attempts would turn out would make me not attend those schools at all, or try harder to get through them.

So the things I would change would be good for my loved ones, good for my health, and knowing that I didn't waste time and money on an obsession I came to regret getting into.

I would also have gotten into one of my current special interests sooner.

You’ve had an interesting life, BlazingStar.

Mine has been sort of uninteresting.....because I sought to avoid trouble and was easily complacent and lazy.

I’m glad you’re in a relatively good place now. That helps you give sensible advice, and also helps with people who want to rant at you.

Ahh, back to the thread. Aye, Blazingstar, it would be nice if everyone looked at each other with fresh eyes. I have found Native Americans rather good at that, but still not up to 50%. I have not sampled much of the world.

The brain can be seen as a filter, constantly receiving far more information that it needs. Currently, I can hear my furnace, and some traffic, but they don't usually get into my conscious awareness. If they do, I need expensive headphones. My muscles are constantly reporting on how the latest posture adjustment is going, and that seems to get dealt with fairly automatically, only occasionally demanding attention. When meeting someone, we get a flood of subconscious reactions, and these have to be processed using prior experience. If most men and most women share a trait, we will expect it from the next one we meet, just as much as we behave differently to dogs and cats and rats. Ever since Ma Nature invented gender, every mobile critter has wanted to know two things about each other they meet - species And gender - to know how to behave. When gender signals are confusing, it backs up the whole system, and may get "tossed out of court" for lack of time.

Prejudice is usually more of a time saver than a resource waster, so it arises inevitably. What we need is to manage it wisely, and that is not yet taught. Thus, men in general get all the blame for the excesses of patriarchy, when it should be seen as an economic class struggle. Poor men wind up on the very bottom.

I kept to the thread....whoever said I didn’t....is just plain wrong.

I was saying....that had I been able to go back, maybe I would have put myself out there more, take risks. Maybe try to get my writing published. Expand on my writing.

I think we agree that knowledge accumulates over a lifetime, and that we all made decisions based on less information when we were younger. I remember consciously deciding to try out the hypothesis that people were mutually helpful, in order to break out of isolation at 18. When I was 21, I joined a group working for World Peace, partly because it was growing quickly. When I was 27, we had lost our way and stopped growing, and I went looking for something more promising.
If I had been more cynical, I might never have tried anything. The general advice I'd give my younger self, if as a time-traveller I was constrained from revealing how things turned out, would be to keep an open mind, watch out for people who are fooling themselves with self-serving beliefs, and pay more attention to actions than words. I did quite a bit of that, but more diligence might have reduced my "stuck" periods. A companion bit would be to be more wary when all my information is coming from one source. A con man got me that way pretty badly once.

As one of my favorite tennis players, Denis Istomin said in an interview, "Don't look back, only forward." However, I do have ideas for a different career choice. I am seriously thinking I would like to help people with autism/Asperger's in some way.

If there was one thing I wish I could have done differently, it would have been to get help with algebra before I began to struggle because it stopped making sense to me.

I would be kinder to others. My biggest regrets are from how my lack of understanding hurt others.

Still not great but better.

I think two things I would have done differently:

Taken school a lot more seriously so that maybe I could have gone to college and gotten a job to support myself by now.

Made friends instead of isolating myself completely away from the world that way I could have maybe had support to turn to outside of my crazy controlling mother who has kept me a helpless child for 28 years.

Kept contact will school and work friends and acquaintances. The way my mind thought once I was done with a stage of my life I was done with it including the people involved. The concept of Networking, so you have contacts you can ask help from at a later time, was not publicly discussed, most people just seemed to innately understand this, not me.