40 People Who Tore Their Own Lives Apart With Bad Choices, Not Substances

I had more credit card debt than I could reasonably pay back. One of the credit card companies sued me.

I was able to file a consumer proposal, which caused the lawsuit to be withdrawn. For five years, I paid back an agreed amount every month. I successfully completed the consumer proposal and all debts were discharged.

The only credit card I have has a $50 credit limit, I use it to pay for parking on machines that don't accept debit, etc. I can't dig myself into another hole with such a small limit.

I don't have any overdrafts on my bank accounts because I don't want to be tempted to use them. I am determined to do better.

I worked at a private art college as a fabrication director in the Sculpture Department. My co-director, 55ish man, had it made. Married to a an architect, had a 10 year old son. They had two houses…an incredible brownstone in Chicago and a custom built home on the east coast of Lake Michigan. He “fell in love” with a 23 year old grad student who had a crush basically and played with his wiener a few times. He ended up divorcing his wife to be with her. The wife was not sympathetic. She left, took the son with her, and wanted nothing to do with him. He was NOT the breadwinner in the home. After all of that (of course) grad student finished up school and moved on with her life, without him naturally. Totally blew up an enviable life for a year of lust with a student. Pretty sad.

I've seen plenty women ruin their life over some guy they love. Or some people that have children too early and get stuck in poverty.

Apprentice baker at the restaurant I worked at managed to get a copy of the office key. Went in one day, took a bunch of paychecks out, laid them out on her prep table, and proceeded to mobile deposit about a dozen checks in her bank account. All on camera.

To this day I have no idea what she was thinking doing that, how she thought she wouldn't get caught. Pretty open and shut case. Got nailed with felony embezzlement and a litany of other charges. She was 19 and in college.

Ended up getting kicked out of college and went to prison for a bit. No idea what happened to her after that (it was a while ago, I assume she's out now) but darn was that stupid. Torched her entire life and career in a few minutes.

My mother is currently dying of cancer that was treatable for years. Why? Because she believed rightwing conspiracy bs that told her doctors were evil and she could cure it herself with veggie shakes and Jesus.

When I was in uni, I worked at a largish grocery store as a cashier and then a night packer.

The front-of-store day supervisor, who'd worked there for a decade, got caught stealing over $100k from the various cash registers. All the cashiers used to have to count their float to make sure it balanced at the end of their shift, and then she'd recount it to make sure they were correct. What she used to do was palm small bills so the tills were slightly out, but it didn't get noticed.

If the cashier particularly annoyed her, she'd take larger notes until the cashier got fired. They were all teenagers so it just got put down to them making mistakes when giving change.

The reason she got caught was she got into a long running fight with the front-of-store night supervisor and tried to pinch part of their float to get her accused of stealing and fired. The problem was the night supervisor suspected this was happening and kept meticulous records and clued in the store owner who later caught the day supervisor with cash in her locker.

To make things worse, it turned out that the store manager not only knew about all this, but was having an affair with the day supervisor.

They both got fired and divorced, the day supervisor got charged and I think she got some jail time.

Had a family member spend her and her husband's entire savings and retirement on cancer treatment...she didn't put it through insurance because she didn't want her husband to find out that she had cancer and worry about her. He ended up developing his own health issues and not being able to work anymore, so they're now financially completely dependent upon their adult children.

My Dad. Trusted someone who was brilliant and corrupt to the core. He but up the money to start a business and lost everything-including the house because he wouldn’t declare bankruptcy bc he thought it was dishonorable. He started from scratch at 53 and rebuilt his career but never attained the same level of material success. He was a positive force for good no matter his circumstances and I miss him everyday.

Me- having anorexia for 12 years from 16 to 26 years old. My early 20s were hospital visits for passing out and psychotic episodes. Parents and friends didn’t know what to do with me anymore because at 85 pounds, I didn’t want to be seen outside.
Ruined my social life, diminished any opportunities I had, completely broke my sense of self and it felt like waking up from a coma ever since I started recovery. Idk what it didn’t take away from me, it took everything away except my life but sometimes that feels more pathetic than claiming I survived. 4 years into recovery while my mind is clearer and better than it’s ever been, wasting my youth to an illness is something I’m still mourning for and experiencing the consequences of to this day.

My dad refused to get a colonoscopy and is now dying of colon cancer. Colon cancer is one of the most preventable cancers via colonoscopy.

Friend of mine stole and sold a Japanese Katana his father brought home from WW2 to buy an Atari 2600. his father found out and forced him to get it back. The person would not give it back because the kid refused to give the money back so his father filed a police report on his son. Left him with a record at 18 and messed with his attempts to join the military.

I had a lawyer blatantly slander me during a civil case that didn’t really involve me (my husbands ex sued him, she has mental health issues. Long story.) He had never met me or even seen me in person. The judge allowed it but the State Attorney Generals office caught wind of it and now pretty much everything he and that judge have been involved in is being brought into question.

Full ride scholarship to college. Tanked their GPA their first year due to just not trying at all in class. Lost the scholarship. Dropped out to start working manual labor and got his girlfriend of a couple months pregnant.

I worked for a guy who was very entrepenureal but very stubborn. At one point he realized he had about 2 million is assets if he factored in his house and all, and I said hey, you should retire, you're already 55 so enjoy it. Nope. Dude sunk all of his money into a new venture instead.

It was an arcade. The city he built it in didn't allow arcades. He dug in his heels and decided to fight "the man."

Lost the building, his investment, his house to creditors, and last I heard had to move in with his girlfriend and her mom. Hope he bounced back, buuut I doubt it.

I know someone who got in very deep with an MLM. She completely bought into the false positivity, the fake it til you make it and portrayed a completely false account of what was going on. She earned trips, claimed to be making thousands every month, living the dream, going to retire her husband someday soon. Eventually it all unraveled, she was deeply in debt that she had been keeping from her husband. She had been ordering tons and tons of product to keep her status and rank and had rented a storage unit to keep the product in. She had also gotten into her children’s savings accounts. Ended up divorced, destitute, and somehow her husband ended up with all her product in the divorce. I have no idea what he did with it.

My father hurt his family including me, he terrorized us because of his own unprocessed trauma. Now he’s in his 80s and is going to die estranged and alone.

A guy I know was in charge of a city department. He spent his days gambling his daughters college money away. It all came out when people started complaining that the city truck that he was driving was parked at the VFW all day long. He got fired from his easy job and had to tell his wife what he had done. She divorced him. I never heard if his daughter ever forgave him.

Had three buddies fresh out of high school decide to build home made bombs and blow up ports-potties. All of them were very smart and college bound. ATF found them after the third or fourth explosion. One buddy turned on the other two and got to lead a good life. The other two went to prison for a couple years. Absolute waste of what they could have done.

This one’s a doozy, as it’s not just one life ruined, but three with collateral damage.

I worked with a guy in retail who used to be a med tech taking care of patients in long-term comas. He wound up quitting that job because of an incident that messed him up so bad mentally that he couldn’t return to work. He was assigned to a 21 year old patient with massive head trauma who wasn’t expected to wake up anytime soon, if ever. What had happened was that the guy was chatting with a girl he met online who told him she was twenty. The first time they met in person he immediately realized that she was much younger, and immediately broken things off when she confessed to really being sixteen. Except Miss Sixteen took rejection… badly, and paid a friend of hers a hundred bucks to beat Mr. Twenty One senseless with a baseball bat. They got caught very quickly, and both were handed fairly hefty sentences. ( This was before the recent trend of ultra-leniency for minors.)

Three young lives, utterly destroyed in a matter of minutes, because one guy did the right thing.

My dad told me one of his coworkers when I was a kid. In the 70s, she won the largest payout from a slot machine in Vegas history at the time. She was in the papers, grinning from ear to ear, holding a giant symbolic check. However, my dad told me that, in order to win this record-breaking amount, she had gambled away her life savings, house, car, relationship with her husband and kids (divorce and kids wouldn’t speak to her), and more than the amount she eventually won. Maybe that’s why to this day, I don’t like to gamble.