My punk show / skater buddy went hard into religion, which led to apparent right-wing politics.

Fuck it, I’m gonna skirt the rules a little and say me: I’m alive past 25 years old.

German here. A friend from Grundschule (grades 1-4) is the son of Turkish immigrants.
His parents both didn’t speak German, so he struggled with the language.
They also sent him to a Turkish language Islam school in the afternoons.
As a classmate, I helped him with his homework, and I think I was the only German friend he had.
When my parents bought a new PC (a 386!) I hauled our old 286 to my friend and helped him install games on it.
Then I went to Gymnasium (the secondary school that prepares you for university) and he went to Hauptschule (the most basic secondary school that usually leads to a job involving manual labor, driving a forklift if you’re lucky, or unemployment).

20 years later I met him again.
I had failed to finish a university degree twice in a row and was unemployed at the time. It was still a year before I accepted reality and took up jobs washing dishes or cleaning out houses after their inhabitants had passed away.
In the meantime, he had finished Hauptschule, switched to a school qualifying you for college, finished an MBA, founded an IT consulting company, hired 14 employees, married and had 4 children.
He told me that with the computer my family gave him, he could do the taxes for his parents and learnt a lot about IT and business early on.

not a friend, but the biggest asshole drug dealer at my school and his trailer park family ended up being Mayor of Toronto and Premiere of Ontario.

I just assumed they would be incarcerated by 21.

pretty much all of my high school friends went off the deep end, except for myself.

my best friend went to jail for heroin positition and beating his girlfriend.
most of my other friends dropped out of college and burned out on drugs to the point they looked/sounded like homeless mushmouths, or if they were women, they got married at like 20 and popped out kids and never had jobs.

one of my girlfriends became a nun another one became a stripper
another became a nun then left the covenant became a trad wife
another one became a poor broke hippie and married the guy she dated after me who was poor broke musician, and they both became addicts.

a lot of other people i was not friends with, even if they did graduate college and get jobs, lived at home, married very young, and basically inherited their parents homes and never left the area. they never lived on their own or had lives outside of the town. that includes some of my relatives, they all ended up working for their parents even if they graduated college.

I grew up in a shitty town that was in the lower quartile of economy/education. i was maybe like 10% of people who grew up there who ‘made it out’. and when people learn what town i grew up in they tend to give me the cold shoulder because it’s not a ‘good place’ and ‘good people’ don’t come from there… which is pretty much true. it sucks to that i will never live down the fact my parents were broke and that town was the best place they could afford to live.

on the flip side, anytime i met anyone from my past… they think I’m major pretentious asshole now because I went to an ivy league school, got a good job, lived on my own my entire life, got a graduate degree, lived abroad, and now live in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. and they start telling how ‘disappointed’ they are I’m not famous or super rich some bullshit. because they are miserable twats who hate their lives and made bad choices. I didn’t. i have never been back to that down since my parents sold the house when i was 21.

Both my best friends from highschool died.

One during a winter storm her freshman year of uni, car accident.

The other I lost contact with until I heard she died of an OD.

Nearly all of my friend group got hooked on drugs (except the one who made it to uni) and I guess some got clean but I never hung out with them again. My friend dying in the snow storm really fucked me up. we were inseparable in school. I think she’d let me laugh though, took her five tries to get her license, maybe should have taken 6 :(

I’m the biggest one in my friend group to go a different direction.

But there’s one guy who I was decent friends with. He’d been the most vocal atheist at our catholic school, went off to a prestigious college in California that happened to be Christian. The few times I saw him after that he’d been getting over his proto-incel mindset he’d had since high school, was increasingly progressive and feminist and starting to get women’s attention. Then he disappeared, last I heard he’d started a philosophy degree and converted to a form of conservative Christianity, but that’s just a rumor.

There’s also the friend who’s manic-depressive and had been increasingly into drugs through high school and as he was failing out of college due to mental illness. He was a progressive communist and atheist since we were like 12. Hell he was the person to break me out of the Catholic anti choice stance when we were teenagers. Well he had a bad trip in our early 20s, and he found a very different Jesus than the other friend. He’s done with psychedelics and never touched the hard stuff. He kept his political beliefs though, just found Jesus with them. Wound up finding a career that makes him happy in landscaping, and he’s engaged now to a woman who seems really good for him. It’s been too long since we’ve seen each other, he’s a good man even if he did wind up the sort of guy that’s really into sports.

My other two friends from high school more shocked me by how they stayed the same. I love them both, they’re good men, but also little growth in their 20s.

The sweet, shy, quiet band girl ODd on heroin sophomore year.

Not high school, but close. We hung out in the same group of friends freshman year at the local technical college. He was a very free spirited guy, with all sorts of wild tattoos and piercings, like a few others in the group. He even got some sort of genital piercing that I declined to see when he was showing it off after he got it. He was also fairly antiestablishment, an atheist who I think leaned politicaly towards anarchism.

Unlike the rest of the group though, he was way into drugs. There were a few who dabbled in marijuana and probably one dedicated stoner, but nothing like this. This guy was snorting lines of cocaine off the bathroom sink between classes, and always finding new pills try. Aside from that he was a very personable guy who had interesting perspectives to include in our conversations about anything and everything. Even when he wasn’t all there, at worst he was still decent company, so everyone just let it go. We’d all expressed our concerns at one point, and there wasn’t any point in continuing to bring it up. We were a very diverse group and most of us had some things we tolerated but didn’t agree with in each other.

For Christmas that year I bought a cheap little gift for each person in the group. Most were silly, but I got him a pill organizer. He excitedly began to brainstorm organizational ideas on how to use it, going on about uppers and downers and more terminology I can’t recall. I told him something along the lines of knowing he wasn’t going to stop experimenting, but I hoped it would help him stay safe. He hugged me and said it was one of the most thoughtful gifts he’d ever gotten.

At the end of the school year we largely all ended up going different ways and I lost track of him. Many years later, I heard from a friend I had kept in touch with that they had run into him. I’d feared he’d end up in jail or dead, but he was doing well, if in an unexpected way. Still had kept the crazy piercings, but was otherwise a button down, white collar guy. He had a wife and kids, lived in a suburban home, and worked as a manager at some office business. He was even a deacon at his church. He was healthy, happy, and proud to be many years clean of drugs. I’m glad he kept enough of the rebel spirit to keep the piercings, and I’m more glad he was off the drugs.

I had a really close group of friends in high school and by the time we had all graduated college all of us were going in directions we never predicted.

One buddie became a doctor.

One really loved being a professional chef.

I joined the Army after Undergrad and eventually went into IT.

The fourth member became a jeweler.

I didn’t expect one of my friends to wound up working in supervisor roles in retail stores. I always thought she had the tools to be creative and would wind up in some animation studio or something.

The biggest shock was a guy I met in first grade and was friends with all throughout school. We went our separate ways for college but saw each other on breaks. He went on to grad school, then med school and residency after that and I didn’t see him much. I was supposed to see him and a bunch of other friends at wedding but he didn’t make it. We callled him and gave him shit about it and he kinda played it off.

One day a year or so later my mom asked if he was done with residency and was a full doctor yet. I wasn’t sure so I looked on Facebook and his was about as barren as mine the last 10 years. Did a search, and nope not a doctor, got caught trying to pick up a 15 year old.

I never expected anyone I grew up with to ever be on the wrong side of the law for anything more than a misdemeanor.

A good friend in school always had really good grades. She worked hard, had mostly As and wanted to become a scientist since 5th grade, later she was mostly interested in biology and wanted to go into genetics. She graduated with really good grades, the second best student of our year, and would have probably made it into a field of her choosing. When I looked her up years later she had studied art and works at an art gallery. I’m happy for her if that’s what she wanted, but she had talked about studying biology nonstop from 5th grade to graduation.

He wasn’t a friend, but he was an acquaintance. There was this guy named Robbie, who was dating the principal’s daughter, and everything seemed bright and shiny for them.

They were like our small school’s power couple, Robbie and Shannon.

After high school, Shannon came up pregnant, and everyone was excited and startled because they hadn’t gotten married yet, and then it came out that the kid wasn’t Robbie’s.

Robbie took a nap on a train track.

The weird thing is, he survived being run over by a train. It was a huge event in our suburb.

But then he went deep into drugs and just fell apart. I don’t think he made it to 27.

The girl who got into every prestigious university for hard sciences is now working in the performing arts. I assume she was studying to placate her parents and then chose her own path as soon as she could escape.