My best friend was a fucking degenerate in high school. Drugs, alcohol, fights, got his girlfriend pregnant at 16, was in and out of jail for all kinds of stupid shit… I fully expected him to die young or end up doing hard time.

He’s now a department head at a very large university, even has his own published textbook. I’m incredibly happy for him.

A closeted gay acquaintance that I knew from shared extracurricular activities, is now a judge who ran as a Republican because that's the only party people will vote for in the redneck town we grew up in.

One of my friends in school was super popular. She was in cosmetology, was always immaculately dressed and had a stabe boyfriend for years in school and after we graduated. Her family life was rock solid but in 1988 she went off the rails and into a super depressive mode, stopped talking to everyone and killed herself. NO one, to this day, saw it coming. It came out of the blue within 4 months. She was carrying something emotionally bad that ate her, or some sort of wild metabolic disorder sent her into a spiral.. no one knows.

Hell of a path NO one saw coming.

A friend I met as an adult. He had a pretty rough life growing up, his family was homeless and roamed around a lot, he was supposed to be 'homeschooled' but was really taking care of his parents during that time, so he never really had an education, obviously never went to college, etc.

He fell into learning programming as a teenager and started working when he was 16 as a web programmer. Now in his 30's, he makes more money than anyone I've personally known and I'm so freaking happy for him. A lot of bullshit people like to brag that they're 'self made' when they own companies, or are CEO's, etc. And this guy is like the most humble, kind and well adjusted person I've ever known, and he did it all himself. Super greatful to be his friend and have him in my life.

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.

A guy I grew up with playing music and working odd jobs for his dad is now a hardcore right wing influencer.

His family was very progressive (still are as far as I know) and we lived in a staunchly blue part of the country. Hell, we wrote songs that were hyper critical of the govt and authoritarian systems.

Now he’s screeching to a million plus followers and participating in counter protests as a pro-maga mouthpiece.

I am sure it has to be for money. He was always an egomaniac. Between that and the dopamine hit of a good grift, it has to be. I just can’t resolve in my own heart that he’s truly gone to the dark side.

A guy with good grades was accepted into a prestigious architectural school.

He works for a local brewery now.

The one who became sergeant of a French special forces unit really surprised me. I thought he was gonna become a brilliant mathematician.

Edit because this is bringing back memories and I'm bored af: I have 2 best friends. Him, and another guy. They are diametrically opposed and never could really get along for more than a couple of hours. The other guy became a successful businessman (the 'has 3 new sports cars in the garage' kind), which I always knew was coming, but I know how he got his seed money, and how that's the real reason why he can't live in our birth country anymore. He was the street smart one. I met him at a martial arts tournament (kicked my ass btw). The other best friend, the subject of this comment, was always pretty much Sheldon Cooper. Archetypical book smart. We were in the same elementary school, high school, and college. Smartest guy I have ever known, but super awkward, which never bothered me the slightest.

And so we were in college together, and after another night of him drinking way too much, to the point of resulting in a head wound that I treated in my room with my mother who's a nurse on the phone, he decided he absolutely needs strong structure, dropped out, enlisted 2 days later. A year later he was in the special forces. 2 years after that he was sergeant. 3 years later another grade bump, and now he teaches strategy at the top military academy we have. Turns out he wasn't just a brilliant nerd, he's the kind that's brilliant at anything he sets his mind on. I don't call "best friend" just anybody :)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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'm from a small town that has 3 factories in it. They employ a good portion of the area.

A friend of mine who was pretty socially awkward but really smart worked in one of the factories in the summers while he was going to college for accounting. He got his degree and...moved back home. He still works at the factory full time on the floor. We graduated high school in 2002.

The top performer is still in his hometown working a minimum wage job :-/ The guy was crazy intelligent.. I have no idea what happened...

A quiet nerdy guy I went to school with died at 19 in a freak magazine explosion aboard a ship he was serving on. Wouldn't have expected him to be in the navy, much less have such a random, rare, or young end.

I'm 52 and shocked by the number of high school classmates I've lost. A girl I dated a few different times in our lives died. She lived hard for parts of her life and I guess it wouldn't shock me if she fell back into drugs and accidentally OD'd, but I always wanted better for her. Maybe it wasn't drugs. Doesn't matter I guess. We weren't right for each other but I kept trying to save her whether as a friend or something more. Guess I didn't.

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.

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

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 :(

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.

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

I am Italian, and in high school I had a friend who was REALLY into Indiana Jones movies and games. He kept saying he was going to be an archaeologist and we all scoffed at him.

Fast forward 20 years later, and he is not only an archaeologist but one of the best Latin epigraphists.

Some years ago, I was visiting an ancient Roman villa close to Naples and sent him the photo of a random marble epigraph, and he told me that that guy named there was the son-in-law of another epigraph he sent me promptly a picture of, but also that since I was so much into Stoicism, I would be interested in the bust that is 180 degrees behind me, picturing the neighbor of Seneca in Baia or something like that.

One of the most rebellious, authority hating teens from my class ended up a police officer and spewing the usual "cops are always right, obey, don't resist" bullshit.

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.

A sweet younger friend who was about 12 when I was in high school ended up doing meth, possibly selling meth, and in prison for shooting her bf to death (over meth.)