20 30-Year-Olds Reveal Their Biggest Regrets About Their 20s

Answers found on Ask Reddit

1. “Spending too much time and energy on a relationship I knew was doomed to fail and then spending too much time and energy on mourning the failure of said relationship.”

2. “Not staying in shape; it’s hard but you can bounce back—but taking ten years or so off looking after your health is a bad idea.”

3. “I wish I socialized more ever since I was a teen. It’s hard to make friends once work commitments start piling up.”

4. “Not asking for help when I needed it.”

5. “Not starting to invest more in my 401k sooner. I also would not have started that reef tank. I did not get as much enjoyment from it as it cost.”

6. “I think the regret would be ‘settling’; not understanding big parts of my life could be better. It took a bit of a kick of my own arse to realize I could be a lot happier if I just control of my own life a bit, rather than just going through the motions.”

7. “All the time I wasted drinking and just fucking off.”

8. “The biggest regret I have from my twenties is that I didn’t develop any long lasting friendships in college. I had a lot of friends, and a ton of acquaintances, but there’s not a single person I know from my twenties that I still speak with and I really wish there were.”

9. “Listening to loud music, now my ears ring 24/7.”

10. “Trying to maintain a relationship with my shitty parents and not realizing how toxic they were to my life.”

11. “Being shitty to my friends.”

12. “Not learning how to handle finances.”

13. “Focusing too much on my career and not enough on friends and relationships. I have a great career and the financial stability to go places and do things, but no one to do them with because I was a workaholic and ignored my social life.”

14. “Losing friends. Also gaining a lot of weight I’m now having a hard time getting rid of. Eat healthy, kids.”

15. “Not standing up firmly against my emotionally abusive close friend. We hear about romantic abusive relationships all the time … but the very same dynamics can happen within friendships. It was only when I started reading about emotional abuse that I realized what had been going on with that particular friendship back then. If only I had known sooner….Would have saved me a world of hurt.”

16. “Not finding balance. I was too wrapped up in that party life pretty much until my late twenties, when I finally started to realize that I was lagging behind in things like career, managing finances, etc. There’s always a way to do multiple things while partying as long as you can find balance.”

17. “Being a ‘Nice Guy.’ I wrote cringey poetry, told women how I would be so much better of a boyfriend than their asshole bad boys, I wore a fucking trench coat and fedora. I don’t know how I ended up married with two kids, but I obviously straightened my shit out somewhere along the way.”

18. “Shoulda dated more instead of wasting many years with the same loser.”

19. “Not traveling to places while I could. Married with a kid now and travelling isn’t really an option nowadays.”

20. “Not going into therapy sooner.”