15 Decisions You’ll Regret 20 Years From Now

It's easy to look back and see what you did wrong because everything is crystal clear in retrospect. The hard part is to look into the future and figure out what you can do well today. These are 15 decisions you'll regret 20 years from now. Welcome to Alux.

First up, settling for what you have right now. There's such a thing as life satisfaction inflation, but it only becomes apparent after a certain time period. Essentially, what you have now will eventually not be good enough and you'll know it. But you won't admit it because it'll make you feel bad about yourself, and we don't want to do that, do we?

The reality is, though, things evolve whether you want them to or not. Your responsibilities demand more time and energy. Your bills demand more money from you. Your life basically demands increasing resources over time and you must keep up with it. This becomes crucially apparent when you look at your parents. For most of you, your parents' life progress stagnated years ago. They metaphorically called it a day when you left for college. After that, they haven't done a whole lot besides basically surviving. Well, that's going to be you eventually if you choose to settle for what you have right now.

This isn't about chasing money until the day you die. No, this is about understanding that the requirements will increase over time and you need to keep up with it.

Doing something you've got zero passion for. When you're young, you need money through any legal means necessary, right? It doesn't matter if you hate your job or the industry you're in because those bills need to be paid. But at some point, around 30 to 40 years old, doing something you have absolutely no passion for starts to feel a little bit unsettling. You feel it creeping in—the sensation that you're doing the wrong thing here. You have to make a decision: either keep doing it and try to make something useful out of it or do a complete 180.

Both are hard decisions, but there's one that you will regret eventually. You see, doing something on autopilot kills your soul and creativity. You can only put up with it for so long until you become bitter and resentful towards yourself. You cannot do something you don't enjoy forever.

Following the advice of people with good intentions but bad experiences. You've got people around you that care about you—they want to see you happy, successful, and fulfilled. So they give you advice on what they believe will make you that way. But here's the thing, okay? Not everyone is emotionally mature enough to understand what didn't work for them might in fact work very well for you or the other way around. They just don't want to see you suffer, so they try to make you avoid doing the things that made them suffer when they were young.

But nobody can tell you what your tolerance levels are but yourself. Maybe you are actually cut out for it. Maybe you can put up with more hardship than others, which gives you a competitive advantage. Maybe moving to a totally different country will be good for you despite having to start from zero.

There's value in other people's experiences, but some things you just have to experience yourself and see how you react to them.

Not investing when you have the capital for it. This is pretty much self-explanatory. The best time to invest is when you have the money for it. You're not going to time the market and the only way to predict if a company will be successful is if you run the damn company yourself.

And look, the reality is, most people will never get rich nor retire from their investments unless they get extremely lucky and hit the jackpot. You're not investing to get rich, you're doing it to have a little safety net under you. A little pocket of financial security that can carry you if something bad happens. It's also a really good instrument that teaches you how to be patient. You know someone is bad at investing if they check the stock market every 30 minutes. Point is, investing some of your capital in something that increases in value over time is never a bad idea.

Not getting educated. The vast majority of people stop learning any new skill by the time they're 25. The only time they acquire a new trait is if a particular job demands it, and it's not really a skill. It's more of a "this is how this particular software works," so their own personal software—their way of thinking—is stuck in time. The world is at a version 10.0 while you're still running at version 1.1.

This becomes crucially apparent when you're like 50 years old and have no idea what the heck is going on around you. You see these people every day, lost in time with old ideas and outdated mindsets. Their life progress bar stopped moving years ago. Some didn't know they had to keep pushing that bar themselves, and others just don't know how to do it.

But as far as we know, there's only one app specifically designed to accelerate your progress in life. If you don't want your progress bar to stop forever at loading, go to alux.com/slapp and download it. It's a free download and you get a 7-day free trial on us. We'll take your brain to the gym and guide you to the most valuable 15 minutes of your day, every day. That's alux.com/a.

Sitting in a bad place. This applies both physically and emotionally. If things were shitty for the past 20 years, guess what? They're not going to magically get better in the next 20. You just got used to your situation and that becomes your new reality. But eventually, in a brief moment of mental clarity years from now, you'll realize what a bad decision you made.

You see, things don't have to be a particular way. We either make them that way or we get used to them being that way. But there's no natural law that sets the rules of the game here. You do, in fact, have total control over change. You can change your environment. You can change your relationships. And, hell, you can change yourself.

Dealing with problems your own way. Look, there's a reason people get specialized in different fields. ChatGPT ain't your therapist, okay? There are millions of people carrying more baggage than FedEx. It's mentally exhausting. You’re not the first nor the last person on this Earth to experience what you're experiencing, and people have collectively developed ways to deal with problems. But very few actually take advantage of this. That's why you see 30-year-olds with gray hair and 50-year-olds dancing on the beach.

Dealing with problems your own way is like trying to fix your electrical wiring yourself instead of calling an electrician. At best, you'll do a bad job and at worst, you can literally be gone forever. We live in the 21st century, right? We have ways to deal with things.

Playing a side character in your own movie. People develop a personality in their 20s and they hide it for the rest of their lives because others might not like who they really are. We are rapidly approaching a time when authenticity will become a very rare thing. Everything is a copy of a copy and everyone acts the same as everyone else who's considered Instagram famous.

That's pretty much the state of things right now. But sooner or later, you need to rediscover who you are and what makes you, you. Your personality can lay dormant for so long until it dies off and you become a shadow of who you once were. So don't do that.

Giving up on something that excites you because it's stupid. At some point in life, you'll stumble upon something that only you find interesting—something trivial or out of place, or just something unique that catches your eye. And you'll be the only one in your circle interested in that, like being the only one who likes fishing and getting really involved in it. And people are not really going to know why you find this so interesting.

They won't straight up ask you to quit, but they'll occasionally make some light fun of you—friendly banter, as they say. But you see, these kinds of things add layers to your personality. They're what differentiate you from the masses. There are millions of people who've never found such a thing.

Giving up on something like this is like turning off a light—dimming the brightness of who you really are.

Sacrificing the wrong things. Everything's got a price, even if the price is not obvious at first glance. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Life is a series of trade-offs and they're pretty obvious at first. You always start with trading off your time, because that's all you've got. Then you move on to trading off your skills and your money.

But eventually, you'll get to a point where you have the option to trade off your personal time, your health, your relationships, your peace of mind, and even your core values. And you have to make a decision: at which point do you stop? What things do you consider untradable?

And you know, way too many people ask this question way too late.

Chasing after something you don't really want. One of the most profound wake-up calls you can face later in life is the realization that the dream you're chasing after is not actually yours. It could be inspiration instilled by society or by your family or influenced by your inner circle. The corner office, the flashy car, the perfect home—at the time they seemed like signs of success, the perfect things to aim for.

But deep down, they might not resonate with you and your true self. You realize this around 6 months after you get them. The excitement fades away and you're left with asking yourself, “Um, was that it?” So just make sure the dream you're chasing after is actually your dream, okay?

Quitting too soon. Think of the times when progress seems slow, the results are not immediate, and the temptation to give up is strong because the journey is harder than you expected. That's the worst time to quit because you just started to put the wheel in motion. And guess what? Those wheels are finally moving, albeit a little bit slowly.

Going through this phase is what makes you a master at your craft. It's the initial hardship you need to endure. Call it a trial if you want; it’s life's way to test if you really have what it takes.

On the flip side, quitting too late. You know, so many of us tend to not know, or just not admit, when something clearly isn't working. It comes from a misguided belief that if you pour more resources into something, it'll somehow validate the past expenditure. That's how people get addicted to gambling.

As a matter of fact, it takes a lot of finesse to understand when and how to course correct. You see, the true cost of quitting too late is not in the resources you wasted but in the opportunities that you had to close the door. That's the real pain, and that's what's going to haunt you 20 years from now.

Choosing to downgrade for convenience instead of paying for it. Here's something to really think about: a convenient life is a life that doesn't stress the hell out of you every 2 hours. It's easy and practical, but there are two ways to achieve this. One is to downgrade for it and the other one is to pay for it.

So here's a very basic example: figuring out what to eat every day can be stressful. Maybe you don't really have the time or the skills to grab the ingredients and cook for yourself. Well, you could either A) order in some fast food—that's where you downgrade for convenience—or B) talk to a nutritionist, make a meal plan with a clear guideline, and have someone deliver all of the ingredients to your door. This is where you pay for convenience.

One lowers the quality of your life while the other vastly increases it, and both solutions fix the same problem. This works for almost everything in life. It's a new way of seeing things.

And finally, doing it all alone. One decision we guarantee you will regret 20 years from now is doing everything solo. It's just not going to work. And if it does, okay, we need to do a case study on you or something.

Doing everything alone is not only ten times more difficult. It's also a pretty unpleasant experience overall. Think back on some of your fondest memories and see in how many of them you're all alone—surrounded by no one. That is pretty indicative of what the future will be like.

A good life is meant to be shared, or else it gets kind of pointless.

And of course, we saved a bonus for everyone sticking around until the very end: pursuing a watered-down version of your dream. Here's something very few people are aware of: it takes the same amount of effort to dream big as it does to dream small. That's because it's just not a linear thing. If it takes you a year to make a million dollars, that doesn't mean it's going to take you 1,000 years to make a billion.

The same logic applies to the amplitude of your dream. If you are one of the lucky ones that has a dream worth pursuing, you might as well make it outlandishly big and just go after it. And you know, in a way, it actually makes more mathematical sense anyway.

We hope you learned something valuable here. To Alux, we'll see you back here next time. Until then, take care.