Weirdly enough, I also took a Cisco Networking class in high school (never met someone else on the internet that took one). That was the start of my regrets. That, along with a dual-enrollment college class I took were terrible ideas - the workload put me in a very deep depression, anxiety, and suicidal tendencies that I'm yet to recover from 6 years later. I definitely recommend just sticking to normal classes in high school, get by with the easiest classes you can if you don't want to burn out before you even get to college.

My biggest regret, overall, is college. I want to go against what you said and instead say "definitely do take at least a year off", but unless you do so by deferring your college then you probably will have no scholarships (even by deferring I'm not sure if that might also cause you to lose your scholarships). Probably in 10+ years, when/if I have been graduated for some time, I'll say it might be worth it (ignoring the debt, of course), but at this very moment it's hands down the biggest regret in my life. Waking up after every night with nightmares of not turning in homework, failing tests, or not going to class... and those are just the days that I actually have some time to sleep. College is such a huge test of your constitution, I cannot believe how many all nighters I've needed to do to pass classes (as of last year I averaged 4 fucking days per week). Having PTSD-like anxiety and wanting to take your life all because of school seems absurd (and surprisingly [at least to me], from conversations with other students, this isn't a mentality held just by the depressed or anxious [though more frequent for them], very "normal" students are bombarded by these thoughts a lot as well).

As /u/Orblord asked, where can I go to see my comment history? While logged in, http://snapzu.com/zants is filled with comments and submissions from everyone I follow (along with tons of other junk). I have to scroll through that page a lot to find my own comments, so it's totally not practical. Opening an incognito window and going to http://snapzu.com/zants filters it so it's only my own content, but it's still a mess of my comments, submissions, and achievements/level-ups, with no way to show only comments (also, requiring us to not be logged in to see just our own content seems a bit absurd). Is there another page (or way to filter your profile page) that I'm missing where only your comments show up?

location: West Michigan

interests/hobbies: startups, quantification, cyberculture, website design, education.

5 music artists: Linkin Park, First Aid Kit, Skrillex, Deadmau5, Sia.

5 films: Inception, The Truman Show, Fight Club, Her, 21 Jump Street.

5 shows: Futurama, Rick and Morty, Workaholics, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, basically any late night talk show (Conan and Jimmy Kimmel being my favorites, though)

5 games: RuneScape (hate it, but makes the list because I can't quit it), Need for Speed: Underground, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Pokemon: Crystal Version, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (GBC)

5 books/authors: everything by Roald Dahl, Harry Potter. That's it, I don't enjoy reading. :p

favorite tribes: /t/startups (my own), /t/asksnapzu, /t/internet, /t/technology, /t/explaintome.

a dream/goal of mine: Live in San Francisco. (Though before that: survive college.)

I've played an MMO for the past 11 years, so I've never found myself trying to find something to do as there's always more to do on there (for better or worse, mostly—almost entirely—worse). I really want to quit, hopefully by 2016 I'll be at a point that I only play a few times a year, though I currently have nothing to replace it (hoping a job will be that something).

I have a huuuge to-do list that I've just been dumping stuff into for the past 5-6 years. So there's always that as well (but that stuff is scary and actually requires work, so I almost never do that). Really hoping to get everything done this summer, though, so I can finally be done and get a ton of weight off my shoulders (I've said this for the past 3 years, though, so I hold out no hope for this to actually happen).

I used to read a lot of tech/startup blogs, nowadays I just read their "top story" email digests and follow some websites on Twitter. Reason being: at least where I live and go to school, nobody else is interested in the startup scene, so everything felt pretty pointless as I could never bring anything up in conversation with people. However, I didn't completely stop reading about it as I plan to eventually get in the startup scene myself and don't want to be a complete newb (also the personal interest is still totally there and needs to be fed with something).

And of course, link aggregators like Digg, reddit, Snapzu, and dozens of others. After several years of working at it I've finally lowered my usage of these services to somewhat normal levels (though I still have some progress to be made to actually consider it "normal" usage). I've done this basically for the same reason as the tech/startup blogs - I'm trying to limit my time spent on things that don't help me socially.

Other than that, really got into watching YouTube about two years ago. I used to just watch the occasional video, now I take my subscriptions seriously and watch just about everything they upload. This dramatically lowered the time I played the MMO - it started as something I'd do while AFKing, but it's become a time-consuming activity in itself. Last year I actually took a break from the MMO for a few months (I was burnt out) and just watched YouTube videos all day in its place... I never want to watch that much YouTube again. I seriously earned my YouTube PhD that year. I think a reason I find myself using YouTube so much nowadays relates to the points I made above - YouTube has become a totally normal activity that everyone I know does (for several hours per day), so I do it with less guilt.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I message friends a lot. Right now through Facebook Messenger, though this summer I hope to finally get with the times and get a phone so that I can use other apps (2014/2015 is finally approaching the point that "I can just do everything on my computer" doesn't fly anymore, you really need a phone unless you want to be weird and do everything in an emulator like BlueStacks).

I'd like to get into movies and watch some TV series someday, but so far I've never been interested in these things. Something I plan to never get into is gaming (unless VR is really sweet and changes my opinion); MMOs ruined gaming for me.

This turned into a longer post (with tons of annoying parentheticals, sorry!). Okay, here we go...

I tried traditional journals (pen and paper, a Word document) several times, for a few weeks each. However, I felt that:

1) I was putting way too much work and time into it. I found myself trying to "save energy" after my homework to write the journal entry, and lots of times sacrificing homework time for it.

2) It was just messy and disorganized, I didn't know how to improve the system.

3) I always found myself paranoid and afraid that someone else would find it.

4) I worried about losing it, even though it was supposed to be "write it and forget it".

5) As it relates to #4, though I could back up Word documents, school absolutely destroyed Word documents for me. I didn't want to use a program that I associated with the stress of essay writing, and reminding myself "it's ok, this isn't for school, you're just keeping a journal for yourself" as I'm on the verge of a panic attack staring at that white screen every time got super old.

6) I really felt that I was deriving no sense of improvement from the activity. Being more aware of my thoughts didn't help me to work on them, if anything it made the situation worse as I uncovered more things to stress about fixing.

For about a year (last year) I used a "habit calendar" where I wrote down a list of habits and ticked each item off as I completed it (things like waking up, brushing my teeth, not biting my nails, running, etc. - literally everything I should do every day). So that itself was sort of like a journal as I could look at the calendar and see what I did each day (which actually proved useful, as before doing the calendar I could never come up with a clear answer when people asked what I did yesterday/last week). I also had a section where I reflected on my day, and another where I gave it a score between -2 and 2 of how happy I felt that day. Overall I found this pretty time consuming as well. Ticking off items seems easy enough, but when you forget to do it until the end of the day you find yourself spending a lot of time thinking "wait... did I actually do this?" (and just in general, needing to set aside time every day to do it wasn't very fun). The alternative, running to the calendar to tick something off right after you complete it, would be super annoying. Also, it was just very depressing. Seeing so many days with the only thing checked being "Eat supper", and never going beyond a 0 on the happy scale. I knew I wasn't very happy and didn't do many things every day, but that list made me aware of things that really got to me (and I feel didn't make the situation better). So for now I've stopped doing it; instead, I moved everything to a program called "Stickies" which will pop up a sticky note and tell me what habit I should be doing at specific time. For some things this is useful, but for most things it hasn't done well (probably like 90% of the pop ups I instantly close and forget, telling myself "well I'll just remember to do that later..." but never do).

Right now I participate in two kinds of journaling:

1) About a year ago, something called /r/MyDaily3 was created on reddit. At the end of the day you post three things that you did that day. I've been absolutely hooked to this and look forward to writing down my three things every day. It's very motivational as well, as some days you find that you can only come up with one or two things for ...