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

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.

Local guy in my town had a great life. Multiple kids, lovely wife, he was an ex Olympian who had transitioned into a new career after he retired from sports. I knew his kids. In the aftermath of his Olympic career, he had started an investment firm, mutual funds I believe. He got a decent number of initial investors, including a very close childhood friend of his, and that friend’s aging parents. Something went wrong, and he lost a bunch of money, and instead of coming clean, started essentially running a Ponzi scheme. Years went by, possibly decades, and then I guess it all caught up to him. He wrote confession letters, sent them out to all his victims, and then hopped on his bike and disappeared into the woods. At first he was just missing, and everyone was confused and concerned, but then the confessions started to come to light, and people realized he had done a runner. It was a massive scandal in such a small town.


Then 2 years later, he showed up again and turned himself in, served his time, and is back out now living a relatively normal life. It was a major bit of news at the time because he had essentially stolen/lost millions, and that money included the entire retirement fund of his former childhood friend AND friend’s elderly retired parents. That guy was furious.

One I heard of second hand in the 80's.
An evening manager at a service business that dealt with the public. They frequently worked late to make sure the cash journal for the day balanced. Never took vacations.


Eventually took a week off, and a customer came in with a question about their invoice. 
The cash invoice they had and the one on file were off by $20.
The manager had been adjusting and reprinting invoices for cAh transactions and keeping the difference.


The money was all spent as soon as they had it. No assets, no savings and no job.
No charges were laid because the owners decided that this person in their 60s had done enough damage to their own life already.

Trusted the wrong person no matter how much evidence we presented as to why he couldn’t be trusted.

Lost her money, her home, her relationship with her children, her relationships with family and lost her hold on reality. He became her world as he stripped her of everything.

Edit: She got to keep her job because one of them had to work to fund the lifestyle of his choice.

Someone I know lost everything he had financially and went into debt trying to make money in crypto. He was obsessed, really obsessed. Like there were times when I was around him and he would barely acknowledge my existence because he was looking at the market.

A lot of people do this by getting pregnant with someone or getting the wrong person pregnant.

Me! I did the “smart kid”/ADHD burnout challenge run and basically sought to see how far I could get without being properly medicated and exercised. The answer is 22 years between a misdiagnosis of anxiety/depression and an actual breakdown. :).

College roommate. Mom was in the military so he pretty much had it made, free rides to anywhere in the world, GI bill covered his tuition. He worked at blockbuster for spare cash. Got fired for stealing dvds. Then stopped attending classes so got kicked out of school. Not sure what he's doing now.

Cousin got pregnant right before her and her ex broke up. She kept the baby despite him not wanting anything to do with her or the baby, and her being broke. She doesn't have parental support, either.

She is a smart person, and I believe she would have found her way into a stable career and marriage if she didn't get pregnant unexpectedly. Now, she's a single Mom on welfare with a special needs kid living in a tiny town in Northern Arizona.

One fallen in love with a wrong person. That’s the end.

Joined a cult.

I married the wrong person.

If you have to ask, the answer is no. The breakup will be less painful than the marriage.

Had a client who lost nearly half his 401K in housing crash of 08. Tired of seeing it go downwards he pulled all $250,000 of it out and put it in his checking account, really right when the market was at the bottom. Come tax time he paid about half of it in taxes(including a 10% penalty for early distribution). Today he lives on Social security alone. Had he just left it he'd probably have $1.5 million and would have a much more comfortable retirement.

I've been watching my ex wife do it for years. She is consumed by bitterness and resentment, primarily because we had two disabled children. She never goes to the doctor and has given up on taking care of herself. She looks like she will have a massive coronary any day. Former model and only 54 years old.