According to the 2023 United States National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 48.5 million (or about 17% of) Americans aged 12 and older battled a substance use disorder in the past year. 10% had an alcohol use disorder, 10% had a drug use disorder, and 3% struggled with both.
Addiction impacts all aspects of life, including physical health, mental health, personal relationships, and career. It wrecks lives not only of those who succumb to it, but also the people around them.
But it’s possible to ruin everything even without taking a sip or a hit. Reddit user Think_County_5850 asked the online community to share stories of people making life-changing mistakes while sober. Here are the most memorable ones we found among the thousands of replies.
#1
I had more credit card debt than I could reasonably pay back. One of the credit card companies sued me.
I was able to file a consumer proposal, which caused the lawsuit to be withdrawn. For five years, I paid back an agreed amount every month. I successfully completed the consumer proposal and all debts were discharged.
The only credit card I have has a $50 credit limit, I use it to pay for parking on machines that don’t accept debit, etc. I can’t dig myself into another hole with such a small limit.
I don’t have any overdrafts on my bank accounts because I don’t want to be tempted to use them. I am determined to do better.
Image source: mermaidpaint, eugeneshemyakin9 / freepik
#2
When I was in uni, I worked at a largish grocery store as a cashier and then a night packer.
The front-of-store day supervisor, who’d worked there for a decade, got caught stealing over $100k from the various cash registers. All the cashiers used to have to count their float to make sure it balanced at the end of their shift, and then she’d recount it to make sure they were correct. What she used to do was palm small bills so the tills were slightly out, but it didn’t get noticed.
If the cashier particularly annoyed her, she’d take larger notes until the cashier got fired. They were all teenagers so it just got put down to them making mistakes when giving change.
The reason she got caught was she got into a long running fight with the front-of-store night supervisor and tried to pinch part of their float to get her accused of stealing and fired. The problem was the night supervisor suspected this was happening and kept meticulous records and clued in the store owner who later caught the day supervisor with cash in her locker.
To make things worse, it turned out that the store manager not only knew about all this, but was having an affair with the day supervisor.
They both got fired and divorced, the day supervisor got charged and I think she got some jail time.
Image source: Numerous-Barnacle, vgstockstudio / freepik
#3
Had a family member spend her and her husband’s entire savings and retirement on cancer treatment…she didn’t put it through insurance because she didn’t want her husband to find out that she had cancer and worry about her. He ended up developing his own health issues and not being able to work anymore, so they’re now financially completely dependent upon their adult children.
Image source: Peg_Leg_The_Pirate, Drazen Zigic / freepik
#4
Apprentice baker at the restaurant I worked at managed to get a copy of the office key. Went in one day, took a bunch of paychecks out, laid them out on her prep table, and proceeded to mobile deposit about a dozen checks in her bank account. All on camera.
To this day I have no idea what she was thinking doing that, how she thought she wouldn’t get caught. Pretty open and shut case. Got nailed with felony embezzlement and a litany of other charges. She was 19 and in college.
Ended up getting kicked out of college and went to prison for a bit. No idea what happened to her after that (it was a while ago, I assume she’s out now) but darn was that stupid. Torched her entire life and career in a few minutes.
Image source: IridiumPony, Kiwistocks / freepik
#5
I worked for a guy who was very entrepenureal but very stubborn. At one point he realized he had about 2 million is assets if he factored in his house and all, and I said hey, you should retire, you’re already 55 so enjoy it. Nope. Dude sunk all of his money into a new venture instead.
It was an arcade. The city he built it in didn’t allow arcades. He dug in his heels and decided to fight “the man.”
Lost the building, his investment, his house to creditors, and last I heard had to move in with his girlfriend and her mom. Hope he bounced back, buuut I doubt it.
Image source: I_Smell_Like_Trees, freepik
#6
My dad refused to get a colonoscopy and is now dying of colon cancer. Colon cancer is one of the most preventable cancers via colonoscopy.
Image source: toosickto, EyeEm / freepik
#7
I’ve seen plenty women ruin their life over some guy they love. Or some people that have children too early and get stuck in poverty.
Image source: HawkHarder, freepik
#8
I worked at a private art college as a fabrication director in the Sculpture Department. My co-director, 55ish man, had it made. Married to a an architect, had a 10 year old son. They had two houses…an incredible brownstone in Chicago and a custom built home on the east coast of Lake Michigan. He “fell in love” with a 23 year old grad student who had a crush basically and played with his wiener a few times. He ended up divorcing his wife to be with her. The wife was not sympathetic. She left, took the son with her, and wanted nothing to do with him. He was NOT the breadwinner in the home. After all of that (of course) grad student finished up school and moved on with her life, without him naturally. Totally blew up an enviable life for a year of lust with a student. Pretty sad.
Image source: dr-awkward1978, The Yuri Arcurs Collection / freepik
#9
Me- having anorexia for 12 years from 16 to 26 years old. My early 20s were hospital visits for passing out and psychotic episodes. Parents and friends didn’t know what to do with me anymore because at 85 pounds, I didn’t want to be seen outside.
Ruined my social life, diminished any opportunities I had, completely broke my sense of self and it felt like waking up from a coma ever since I started recovery. Idk what it didn’t take away from me, it took everything away except my life but sometimes that feels more pathetic than claiming I survived. 4 years into recovery while my mind is clearer and better than it’s ever been, wasting my youth to an illness is something I’m still mourning for and experiencing the consequences of to this day.
Image source: Happy-Investigator-, DC Studio / freepik
#10
I had a lawyer blatantly slander me during a civil case that didn’t really involve me (my husbands ex sued him, she has mental health issues. Long story.) He had never met me or even seen me in person. The judge allowed it but the State Attorney Generals office caught wind of it and now pretty much everything he and that judge have been involved in is being brought into question.
Image source: Hefty_Pangolin3273, Anna Tolipova / freepik
#11
Full ride scholarship to college. Tanked their GPA their first year due to just not trying at all in class. Lost the scholarship. Dropped out to start working manual labor and got his girlfriend of a couple months pregnant.
Image source: Wandering_Lights, seventyfour / freepik
#12
My father hurt his family including me, he terrorized us because of his own unprocessed trauma. Now he’s in his 80s and is going to die estranged and alone.
Image source: Honest-Elk-7300, freepik
#13
My Dad. Trusted someone who was brilliant and corrupt to the core. He but up the money to start a business and lost everything-including the house because he wouldn’t declare bankruptcy bc he thought it was dishonorable. He started from scratch at 53 and rebuilt his career but never attained the same level of material success. He was a positive force for good no matter his circumstances and I miss him everyday.
Image source: Breezy207, Bizon / freepik
#14
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.
Image source: stickylarue, Grinvalds / freepik
#15
My brother. He was adopted from foster care as a baby and the beloved only boy in our family. We lived in a small town where he was treated like a little king. I’m not exaggerating, all the little old ladies on our street would keep his favorite snacks on hand for when he rode up on his bike to say hello. He was so empathetic and sweet as a kid but the moment he hit puberty, he changed.
Between the ages of 12-22 he, in chronological order:
-shoved our baby sister into a fire ant mound
-started using the N word (we are a white Hispanic household)
-stole lunch money and field trip fees from little sister, resulting in her not eating lunch regularly and missing field trips (she had to sit alone in the library while the rest of her class went to a theme park once).
-got accepted into a prestigious boarding school for gifted kids only to get kicked out for smoking and stealing several of the parents credit cards, racking up bill ordering food, and then blaming the one black student in his dorm.
-dropped out of school to become a professional video game player (that didn’t last long).
-got a girl pregnant and once he realized the family would only provide childcare if he treated us with basic human decency, he stopped trying to have any relationship with husband kid.
-called my Asian American husband slurs and said he wasn’t a real man bc he doesn’t work with his hands (my husband is a vet but whatever).
He’s ruined his own life. He’s now a lonely, radicalized young man who isn’t invited to the family Thanksgiving a half hour away from his apartment.
Image source: spookymommaro, freepik
#16
Had three buddies fresh out of high school decide to build home made bombs and blow up ports-potties. All of them were very smart and college bound. ATF found them after the third or fourth explosion. One buddy turned on the other two and got to lead a good life. The other two went to prison for a couple years. Absolute waste of what they could have done.
Image source: jimjobob768, EyeEm / freepik
#17
My friend got pregnant at 13. She kept the baby, but lost most of her friends, couldn’t do after school activities or hang out on weekends. Teenager, top of her school, now a mom who is lucky to get a minimum wage job.
Image source: frannylightpainter, sharshonnikolass / freepik
#18
A guy I know was in charge of a city department. He spent his days gambling his daughters college money away. It all came out when people started complaining that the city truck that he was driving was parked at the VFW all day long. He got fired from his easy job and had to tell his wife what he had done. She divorced him. I never heard if his daughter ever forgave him.
Image source: sdm2430, standret / freepik
#19
A lot of people do this by getting pregnant with someone or getting the wrong person pregnant.
Image source: pancakecel
#20
Friend of mine stole and sold a Japanese Katana his father brought home from WW2 to buy an Atari 2600. his father found out and forced him to get it back. The person would not give it back because the kid refused to give the money back so his father filed a police report on his son. Left him with a record at 18 and messed with his attempts to join the military.
Image source: Similar-Opinion8750, freepik
#21
A dude in my neighborhood was a big name in my town. He was on our HOA board, was a coach of his kids soccer team and was active in the PTA.
When COVID happened and everything was on lockdown the guy got exposed.
Turned out he had another whole family in another state.
I have no idea how the guy found the time to juggle all of that.
Image source: tizod, Drazen Zigic / freepik
#22
I know someone who got in very deep with an MLM. She completely bought into the false positivity, the fake it til you make it and portrayed a completely false account of what was going on. She earned trips, claimed to be making thousands every month, living the dream, going to retire her husband someday soon. Eventually it all unraveled, she was deeply in debt that she had been keeping from her husband. She had been ordering tons and tons of product to keep her status and rank and had rented a storage unit to keep the product in. She had also gotten into her children’s savings accounts. Ended up divorced, destitute, and somehow her husband ended up with all her product in the divorce. I have no idea what he did with it.
Image source: maefae, Svitlana Hulko / freepik
#23
My mother is currently dying of cancer that was treatable for years. Why? Because she believed rightwing conspiracy bs that told her doctors were evil and she could cure it herself with veggie shakes and Jesus.
Image source: disorderincosmos, katemangostar / freepik
#24
This took place in NoVA about 30 years ago. My roommate drove me to the auto parts store early one morning. On the way back, we were waiting at a stop light as the first ones in the left lane of a four lane road. Dude comes tearing up to our left followed shortly by a cop with lights on and siren blaring. They both turn left at the light into a neighborhood. A few seconds later, the guy comes back into the intersection and does a short spin out.
Cop pulls up, pulls out his gun and orders the guy out of the car. Guy gets out and puts his hands on the roof of the car. As the cop starts to put the cuffs on the guy, the guy turns around and starts hitting the cop. The cop pulls out his stick and hits the guy a couple of times. The guy gets the stick away from the cop and starts hitting the cop. Finally the cop pulls out his gun and shoots the guy twice. The guy died on the way to the hospital.
I read the newspaper the next day. Turns out the guy had a warrant for unpaid child support. He had been sitting in his car in a parking lot when someone reported a suspicious person. When the cop pulled up to investigate, the guy took off.
Dead in a matter of minutes over unpaid child support.
Image source: BillyRubenJoeBob, standret / freepik
#25
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.
Image source: BrightTarget9236, frimufilms / freepik
#26
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.
Image source: madamevanessa98, freepik
#27
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.
Image source: onebitcpu, The Yuri Arcurs Collection / freepik
#28
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.
Image source: satansfloorbuffer, drobotdean / freepik
#29
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.
Image source: dump_in_a_mug, EyeEm / freepik
#30
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.
Image source: Routine_Mine_3019, EyeEm / freepik
#31
One fallen in love with a wrong person. That’s the end.
Image source: ConsciousCanary5219, freepik
#32
Joined a cult.
Image source: ParcelPosted
#33
Myself. Self sabotage and imposter syndrome.
Image source: Ok_Beginning4040
#34
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. :).
Image source: Kelegan48
#35
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.
Image source: NoOccasion4759
#36
Marrying a terrible woman who is out to rob him in a divorce. So ugly I can’t tell you. My friend is in such desperate trouble.
Image source: 1911Earthling
#37
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.
Image source: RaindropsInMyMind
#38
I married the wrong person.
If you have to ask, the answer is no. The breakup will be less painful than the marriage.
Image source: xpacean
#39
Yup, guy with his dream job, but refused to get a COVID vaccine. Lost his job, doing something well beneath his skills, mad and drinking.
Image source: TraditionalChicken18
#40
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.
Image source: jmcdon00
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