Between a misdemeanor and a felony

"Hell is meeting the person you could have been."

It's soul-crushing.

There used to be a time when kids were allowed to explore, to get lost, and find the limits. Taking risks was part of being a kid. When it paid off, you were the hero. When you failed, it would suck for a few days.

But something magical was happening.

After a few days, everyone moved on. Some experiences became good stories to tell and remember among friends. But for the most part, they were forgotten. That was the trick. The ability to move on.

We all knew that, and took it for granted.

Risk-taking was a no-brainer. There was way more upside than things to regret.

But it all changed with the digitalization of memories.

Once something is on the internet, it becomes permanent. "The internet never forgets" isn't a warning; it's a rule. The problem isn't that failures are more frequent than wins. The problem is that failures used to disappear. Now they don't. The downside became permanent. The upside stayed the same. The algebra changed.

And so we, as a society, stopped taking small risks.

We play it safe.

I can remember plenty of stories, things that I (and others) did, where it's not clear the degree of misdemeanor they were. For some of them, certainly borderline felony. "and " said Oscar Wilde.

Those stories were the result of doing the unexpected, exploring the unknown, and testing the rules of the world. Having that freedom made us taste how it was like in a small scale. Plenty to check the box of I did that while limiting how far or how extreme we could go.

I'll take drinking as an example.

Me and my friends tried alcohol when it was clearly illegal. A cheap small whiskey bottle someone stole from their house, was the perfect signal to meet in secret, there were no instructions, we were all exploring and learning along, we drank it testing different ways to do it and see what happens, it became our bonding ritual. We did it together on a small scale and then moved on. Someone puked, I don't even remember who, and that's the point.

Not one person in that group became an alcoholic later on.

Now think about those who couldn't do it like that. No small rehearsal. No safe moment to figure out where the line was. For them, it becomes something that builds up, compounds, and eventually, when they do it, they take it to the extreme — because they have no reference point. No memory of the morning after that taught them anything. No story to laugh about later. Just the pressure, building quietly, until it explodes in a bad way.

That was rare back when none of this was being recorded.

That's not the case anymore.

The stakes are too high. You will be forever on the internet for a moment you did something stupid, and that will define your identity forever. So you don't take the risk. The experiment never happens in small doses. And then one day it does happen all at once, with no practice, no friends to laugh it off with, no forgetting.

There has to be a right to forget.

A right to take the risk, to do something stupid, and not be defined by it. A right to move on. The bigger problem isn't that others judge us for what we did in the past. It's that we judge ourselves in advance, before we've even acted, and we never start. Anxiety 101.

We become the person we could have been by not doing anything stupid early on.

And that's the real hell.