What Are the Top 10 Greatest and Top 10 Worst Experiences of Your Lives

I'm interested in what people have to say about this. Some of the worst experiences in my life were not childhood traumas or anything like that, just embarrasing experiences I had from when I was an adult.

The best experiences for me were also unexpected

I have a lot to say about all of this, but I don't want to start

the fuck am i gonna

i. remember
ii. rank!
iii. write down for postings sake

the ten worst things that have ever happened to me

extraordinary request my man

not even of 77 tho the public thing is only one aspect and ofc 77 isnt a vault

haha yes Dan did you put this into top10 format to trick some of the ILM list addicts into having an actual grown up conversation?

one of my ten worst experiences is feeling the burn of that post

"Greatest Experiences of Your Lives" causes the same momentary blankness and slight sense of mild panic that I get from meditation or relaxation sessions which start with "Simply think back to a time when you were happy....".

Idk if I’m prepared to submit a novel-length disclosure on this topic! But pretty much every single one of my top ten best experiences involves it being 10am after a date-with-sleepover and we are cuddling on the couch drinking coffee and listening to music. Every single one of the worst experiences involves somebody being intrusive with my body/time/limits of attention and being angry/vengeful when I tell them I wish for space/no contact.

I've weighed this up carefully and I'm not gonna play because discretion but acid was involved

My trouble with drug experiences (and they crossed my mind with this thread) is that it's surely true that the greatest experience of your life could easily be simply watching some cartoon on TV whilst chemically-enhanced. Wonderful and hilarious at the time but could seem a bit sad in retrospect.

Its more that ...the ten best and the ten worst? I

I mean thats about my limit with acid and maybe 1 worst...

Pretty sure all of my worst experiences involve either deep personal grief which I will not discuss here, or emergency dental surgery.

Best experiences tend to involve being on my own somewhere new. Feeling free and full of possibilities. Those kinds of experiences and feelings have grown increasingly rare for me over the past few years.

how would i even itemize this. like a lot of my life experiences i would consider the best are composite events that last weeks months or even years, or are recurring features of my life. such as writing songs, making a record, etc. could do my top two worst experiences of my adult life though

1. first year invited on a friend beach vacation with a bunch of ppl who knew each other really well and i felt pretty alone and i did molly with them that was probably cut with coke and i was totally suicidal for the entire weekend. i am very fortunate in that i am rarely suicidal but boy did this suck

2. living with an alcoholic for a year

As noted elsewhere above, my worst experiences center around profound grief or pain. By the same token, my best experiences center around love, fulfillment, and a sense of wonder or discovery. Which is exactly what I'd expect. But as darraghmac indicated I'm not interested or eager to catalog them to the tune of ten apiece. To really put across the full context that made them so good or bad would require paragraphs of scene-setting. And for the bad ones, it would require revisiting some very terrible moments - something I do in the depth of the night all too often already.

It's easy for me to recount my best experiences, and it would be easy for me to recite them.

My really worst experiences center on profound grief and pain too and I couldn't possibly disclose them here, and I wouldn't want to recount them as you all wouldn't.

I was meaning for this thread to center on more concrete experiences.

for example, worst experiences for me:

1) trying to buy a car. I've bought three cars in the last 30 years, and for every car I've bought the experience has almost brought me to a heart attack it was so painful, each in different ways. I can expand on this if anyone is interested. I will never buy a car again

2) getting fired 'in advance' from my first job, but then having to work there for an additional year knowing they didn't want me and having to scramble for another job, it was a depressing experience

3) having neighbors on both sides of me flaking out when it comes to repairing retaining walls on our steep hillside, and then the companies I contract with not responding. As my best friend says - when you ask for something, even if you're willing to pay for it, "no" is only the second worst answer. The worst answer is "no answer"

4) many experiences of being rejected in relationships, and in one case having to go through the humiliation of grieving in front of my friends and burdening them until I could let go

5) having friendships I've enjoyed in the past just disappear forever because of a tiff or argument or a misunderstanding or because I didn't value them enough to save them, and then wishing I had years later

#1 worst: the washington capitals winning the 2018 stanley cup

Not that I'm a shining example of equanimity in bad situations, but it seems almost all of my "greatest" or "worst" experiences were internal, and obviously affected by life events, but more so reflective of my internal weather. In at least one example of each, I remember walking around outside, just thinking, and maybe no-one would know if I was feeling great or terrible if they had only been watching.
I mean to say being depressed is/was a much worse experience than losing my parents, a car crash, a burned leg, etc.

losing my parents, a car crash, a burned leg

Not all on the same day

even if it did all happen on the same day depression would still have it beat imo.

having friendships I've enjoyed in the past just disappear forever because of a tiff or argument or a misunderstanding or because I didn't value them enough to save them, and then wishing I had years later

Ditto, except every time it was of course the other person's fault.

i don't think it's possible for me to compile an answer, but i've often thought about how certain events seem to "best" others in my head, even though some might seem worse from an outsider's perspective. i also tend to think of these sorts of questions in terms of the useful temporal constructs of years or months, etc.

for example: i had stage IIIb cancer in 2019, as many of you know. i also lost two dear friends and my most important mentor that same year.

but nothing of that year compares to the horror of 2016: even before the election, i'd lost four friends to drugs or suicide, i had been threatened and stalked by an insane tweaker in the woods of norcal, i had been gaslit by a load of people whom i thought were my friends, and then the election happened. in the midst of all that, my car broke down, and i had to buy a new (used) one that i couldn't really afford. and then the Ghost Ship fire happened, where i lost one dear friend and numerous others with whom i had been friends or casual acquaintances.
2016 was absolutely the worst year of my life, worse than the cancer year, and i just hope that nothing else ever comes close.

lol this is impossible ofc

standout best: a bowl of olives in Italy, purchased as an appetizer but it overshadowed the whole excellent meal

standout worst: (redacted)

- ex-girlfriend and I got back in touch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, decided to give it another shot. Our first in person meetup/date was at Waffle House on Christmas Eve (technically day I suppose) at 1:30 AM. Totally surreal scene to be at Waffle House on Christmas Eve/morning as it turns out.

- ex-housemate flew into Vegas to hang while I was there for work, while we were heading out for dinner on the first night I hit a slot machine for ~1500. Upgraded our dinner plans to one of Daniel Boulud's places, we stopped at a craps table after and using the leftover grand wound up $6000 up. Spent the rest of the night drinking very expensive rye in one of the casino bars until we had Denny's at three in the morning

- weirdly not a worst, also in Vegas, there for a nightclub and bar convention with five co-workers/friends plus the bar owner I was kind of sort of seeing. First night we went to this shitty butt rock bar on the Strip, one of the women in the group handed back a shot for me... I thought I was supposed to drink it, turns out she was trying to get rid of it because a stranger handed it to her. That's the last thing I remember until my boss/quasi-girlfriend slaps me upside the head outside of a strip club because I didn't know who she was for the last 40 minutes. I think I'm dead, everything has a hallucinatory feel, all very bad... except my boss/q-g stuck with me all night even though I was apparently completely insane for hours and refused to go back to the rented condo when everyone else did. It was very sweet of her and the memory of that kept a bad relationship alive for a good two and a half years longer than it should have.

- same person after full upgrade to girlfriend status, we're out at another bar and she gets up to sing Lady Gaga for karaoke. A very drunk 60+ year old man at the bar slurs "I'd lahk to poke her face" - which is a real party foul but also in a slurring voices accent one of the funniest sentences I've ever heard.

- when I was living with the housemate from the non-roofy Vegas experience some friends visited from out of town. I introduced them to the concept of a Rumplebomb, which lead to Husband Friend down on one knee (badly) singing "Kiss From A Rose" to his beloved and them drunkenly conceiving their second child in our living room that night. Housemate and I tried to get naming rights for the kid but we were soundly rejected.

- went to see Orphan on a date, at the big reveal a teenage girl stood up in the middle of the theater and yelled ESTHER GOT TITTIES at the top of her lungs. Best movie theater experience ever.

- senior year of high school I went to a party with my grocery store co-workers/buddies, it got busted by 10:30 or so but we made off with two 750s of vodka. Decided to go see a movie, walked in 15 minutes late and had to sit on the floor in a packed theater passing around the vodka and MST3King Gladiator. "Do your duty for Rome" remains a joke with the ones I've stayed in contact with since.

worst: all the other days

- ~8 hours into my first acid trip (where I took five drops on Sweet Tarts because I was an idiot), I was on my side on a mattress on the floor and the room started filling with something, as it rose up past each eye everything melted and turned into an Impressionist painting so at one point in my left eye I'm seeing "reality" and in my right eye the Impressionist world. Once it had all filled up and then snapped back I stood up to go have a smoke, a web of red threads like spider silk ran from floor to ceiling and side to side, I could feel it and see it on my skin. After I left that room I grabbed my jacket off the back of a chair and blue butterflies flew out as I swung it around.

Every other psychedelic experience was fine but nothing ever hit as hard as that ~15-20 minute window.

- no real memories attached just vague impressions of the night I met someone very important at a party, at some point Madison Avenue's "Don't Call Me Baby" was on the stereo and it's been a rare day since that I didn't get that I didn't get the bassline or the vocal hook stuck in my head for a minute or two. 23 fucking years.

And why not ?

- Spring/autumn days lost in my thoughts on the forest road just up from my parents when I started a lifelong habit of going for walks at the end of the day.
- For that matter, a month alone on the road circling the whole of Iceland, felt like complete freedom.
- First time in Paris to meet a girl I had been chatting with. I was 19. I had never been to a big city, never been with a girl. I knew her well from long conversations but of course it was awkward. During the day we were with other people. In the evening, she brought me to her "maid's room" on the sixth floor, which had the space for a bed, a sink, and a mini gas stove. It was lovely. I had no idea what to do and was honestly taken by surprise when she kissed me. The next morning we listened to Björk, watched Hero, didn't step out.
- Sex with my first gf. She was a wonderful person. But honestly, the sex. It took me a couple of one-night stands to realize how spoiled I had been.
- Fast forward a few years, I was getting embroiled in a romantic situation with a neighbor in southern California, when we were both in relationships. I especially remember that afternoon we were driving down towards Mexico (where she was from), our mutual friend had fallen asleep on the backseat, we were listening to The Smith's "There is a Light" and there was this magnetic tension of us both knowing what was going on between us.
- Visiting my wife-to-be in Johannesburg. I had pursued her til despairing that I had been wrong about her, when she said "let's try this out". I booked tickets, called my family to say I wouldn't be there for Christmas. We hugged at Park Station. Three days later she remarked that I was the first guy she didn't feel like throwing out of her house after 24 hours. It felt easy. Getting engaged and committing too - the intimacy of it - the dutiful ceremony of marriage felt slightly silly in comparison, it was much better when everyone left and we were left alone on the dancefloor listening to Akanamali (and she indeed was broke, both of us were).
- Looking into my daughter's face elicits a joy there is really no equivalent for. The joy of shared innocence.
- Life's simple joys. Music. Books. Running. Nights with friends. Hosting. Baths. Tanning on the balcony.
- The routines of living alone, especially reading Cortazar and El Eternauta in Spanish, followed immediately by the friendships of a shared flat in Bern. Again a sensation of freedom, uncertainty.
- Childhood in the countryside, playing with my cousins, picking berries, board games and video games, being outside, the smell of grass, meter-high snow, reading, family gatherings, mother's cooking. I'll stop before this reads like effing Proust.

- Who cares about worst.

Beautiful

I haven't lived enough for a top/bottom 10 I just post other ppl's experiences on the internet from my basement.

I think I'm suffering from PTSD from some of the stuff I have lived through for the last 6-7 years. Now I'm not living with crisis situations every day any more and things are a lot more stable. Rather than being ill and stressed now it's just a low level depression I live with. Lol .. yes I'm available for children's parties - they call me captain chuckles!

The past though, sad nostalgia is always golden. It's not really specific events I look back on. It's more like how I felt at the time i.e. still full of hope and happiness, still feeling quite realistically that life can get better. That's ALL gone now - might as well get the pauper's funeral booked already!

calz, even from the small portion that you let drop in your posts I'd say there's little room to doubt you have some degree of PTSD. I think you know this already, but I find that spending time paying attention to the non-human part of this world is always helpful and healing.

the non-human part of this world has kept me on the level through long stressful periods of life, it's not everything but no doubt it is a force for goodness and healing, yes.

i'm feeling that post calz

The past though, sad nostalgia is always golden. It's not really specific events I look back on. It's more like how I felt at the time i.e. still full of hope and happiness, still feeling quite realistically that life can get better. That's ALL gone now

especially this part

chronic low-level depression can sneak up on you if you get too used to it, only after i stopped getting out of bed for like 2 weeks did i think 'oh shit, this is full blown nasty depression'... anxiety = same deal... and therapists dont take insurance because it means doing a shitload of extra paperwork for less money

find that spending time paying attention to the non-human part of this world is always helpful and healing.

otm this is what makes life worth living but it just isn't a daily reality when you live somewhere with 100k humans/sq mi

10 is way too large a number of experiences to reveal. One of each might have made for a thread more people are willing to contribute to but 10?
I’ll contribute one of each:

Worst: being abused by my orthodontist

Best: visiting the original Wicker Man feet

:)

one of my best:

I was plagued with painful mouth sores my whole life and they were very compromising, especially when I was as stressed out in high school and college, most of all when I was doing my medical school clinical rotations. They could be so large and painful that it was hard to eat or even speak and I would have to swab lidocaine on them to numb the pain.

They are called canker sores, they are mysterious, maybe have different causes, and involve mucosal membranes, and are not the same thing as cold sores. It was only many years later I found out that I had them because I was allergic to sodium lauryl sulfate, an ingredient in almost all toothpastes and mouthwashes, and when I banished those ingredients the sores went away IMMEDIATELY and COMPLETELY. That was a shock to me and was maybe the most transformational thing in my life

Another transformational thing:

I had been near-sighted since I was in fifth grade and had to wear glasses my whole adolescence and young adult life, which I felt automatically labeled me as a nerd.

When I was an older adult in 1997 I had lasik surgery, right at the beginning of the time of it being accepted. My opthalmologist was a pioneer in the procedure and assured me that I was a good candidate, having a classic butterfly astigmatism. I didn't know much about it, but he did the lasik surgery and it was like a miracle. Although I had dry eyes for a few years after that, it made my far vision super clear, and that clear far vision has lasted now for 25+ years

Presbyopia has become a problem as I have gotten older though, and I now require reading glasses for books, recipes, reading contents of packages and bottles etc, one of the pains of getting old

2016 was also a bad year for me. my ltr of 7 years basically ghosted me, just disappeared from my life overnight. the heartbreak from that - i've never experienced anything like that and hope to never again.

it's hard to think of this in terms of an individual experience, but being in an abusive family and the many years long process of leaving it behind and burying it has been both bad and good. trauma is horrible and i wouldn't wish it on anyone. healing from it is hard but very rewarding.

my partner and i met a younger man a few years ago. the whole experience of falling in love, being in a three-way relationship, the sexual chemistry between him and me in particular, has all been a great flowering.

love you map

I've been thinking that the objectively worst things to happen to me during my life I kinda handled better than I thought I would, while the moments I was most intensely miserable were over things that in retrospect don't seem so serious (girl trouble, messing up at work).

^^^same

a taxonomy of 'worst' would be useful here but i don't think it's possible to be objective about that. whoever posted upthread that 'worst' was reflected by an internal state is otm i think. i also tend to agree with posters who list their own 'worst' events as related to heartbreak or romance gone wrong or esp death of loved ones. losing someone you're close to - i really can't think of anything worse than that.

ime guilt and shame are pretty powerful agents of misery. they aren't quite in the same class as grief or intense pain, but they can leave some deep scars.

grief is some ninth level of hell stuff ime, as hard on the body as any disease

also it lasts forever, just when you think it's gone for good it comes back a knocking

Worst for me was becoming chronically ill around 2005, still never really got to the bottom of it despite the odd partial diagnosis here and there. But the initial sense, at 22, of being sick and assuming like any other time you'll feel better in a few days, but it going on and on, was incredibly difficult to deal with, kinda changed my whole life, though have made my peace with it more in recent years.

If I think of the best stuff it's more fleeting, idk, specific nights out or days or whatever, then there's stuff like achievements or whatever which feel different again.

Feel incredibly lucky that it's much easier for me to list best than worst experiences, and that I've had many more of the former than latter. My bests are mostly representative of broader categories (travel, food, music, etc) that have many other things I could mention. Also, not to be corny, but any given night where my wife and I get to just hang out on the couch, eat homemade food, make ourselves cocktails, and watch a movie or show or listen to music automatically qualifies as one of the best experiences of my life — and we get to do that at least a few times a week.

And not to continue to be corny, but I love being a dad and have many great experiences related to that (along with plenty of challenging and frustrating ones, of course), which would be hard to single out from the past 20 years. Beyond the immediate domestic realm, many would revolve around friends, travel, music, food, drink. So I guess this list is really a sampler of all of the above, in chronological order:

— Exploring the New Forest as a 9-year-old during the year we moved to the UK and lived in a little village in Hampshire. I imagined Robin Hood hiding behind every tree (wrong forest, I know, but c'mon). A magic place.

— The little league game at age 12-ish where I got three hits including a triple, plus a walk and 2 RBIs, and caught two long flies in the outfield. I still have the game ball the coach gave me.

— The impromptu final gig that my high school rock band played, at the country club where we were all working in the kitchen the summer after my senior year. There was a raucous wedding party with a live band, and by plying the band with food and drinks we were able to persuade them to let us play a few songs while they were on break. The other two guys came out in their kitchen aprons and I was wearing my busboy clothes, we played "Johnny B. Goode" and "Keep Your Hands to Yourself" and probably "Wild Thing," the drunk wedding-goers loved it and all got up and danced. It was the perfect way to end that whole chapter — we'd been playing together for nearly 4 years by that point, and while a bunch of other people had been in and out of the band we were the core trio.

— Smoking a joint onstage at the Hacienda in 1990. (To be clear, I wasn't performing, when there wasn't a band people could just go hang out and dance on the stage.) Even in the moment it felt like, "I'm gonna remember this." Yes, it should've been an E, I realize that, but you make do with the substances at hand.

— Walking home from my editing gig at the NYT the night before my first-ever freelance NYT article was going to be published. I wrote about 10 for the arts section while I was there. I knew for sure it would be in the paper the next day, because I'd already seen it go all the way through the editing system. Literally nothing at that point could stop me from having an honest-to-god New York Times byline, and even though it was an inconsequential story on the inside of the section, I was just walking on air.

— Receiving an enigmatic, intriguing secret admirer email from someone who turned out to be the person I have been with for the past 14 years and married to for the past 11. Still have the email, of course. (Could also mention our first date a few weeks later, which concluded with our first kiss in actual falling snow, for real.)

— So many amazing concerts, but just to mention two: Prince and the Revolution on the Purple Rain tour (the Syracuse show that's now been issued on LP and video, which of course I have copies of), just totally galvanizing and indescribable for 15-year-old me; and the first time I saw Patti Smith, circa 2000, which remains the most ecstatic live music experience of my life.

— Likewise a zillion great meals, but let's say the trout we had for lunch at a little han in a Bosnian village called Pocitelj — so fresh, right out of the mountain stream, and the hospitality was warm and welcoming. The whole place was timeless, the village dates to the 1300s and it felt like we could have been travelers from any era, stopping in for sustenance.

— And so many good drinks, but how about sampling the product of a mezcalero in the countryside near Oaxaca. He had about 15 different varietals, all stored in big plastic jugs along the wall of a cinderblock building next to his outdoor fermenting and distilling operation. They were labeled in black magic marker on masking tape, and just poured us sips of one after another. All delicious, we bought a few that he then decanted into bottles for us. Don Felix was his name. It still tasted great once we got it home, but lost just a little something from not being there sipping from cups in his garage.

Worst experiences, I mean, I've been divorced twice and even though they were on paper amicable and we're all still on good terms, that's just a miserable thing to go through no matter who you are. And of course I have at this point lost some close friends and dear people to assorted ailments and accidents. I think many of my worst experiences along those lines are still to come.

Oh, I didn't mention a specific one related to my kids. Hard to pick! But I guess the biggest one was bringing my oldest home from the hospital — because he was born three months premature and spent 90 days in the NICU, with wires and needles monitoring his oxygen, blood, etc. We spent so many weeks unable to even hold him, and he would get better for a few days and then struggle again, it was really wrenching. BUT then suddenly he started getting stronger and healthier, and then they were just like, OK, you can take him home! The taxi ride back to our apartment felt so strange, we couldn't quite believe we had him with us. Took him home and laid him down to nap on a special pillow we'd placed on the couch for him and just kind of marveled at him.

I have never been and never will be a father, but I think I really get the joy of that experience tipsy! My best friends had an unusual path to parenthood, but they asked me to be godfather to their child. From the moment I first held my goddaughter as an infant I understood why people wanted to be parents. I’m grateful that my friends let me into their lives and let me help take care of her and witness the magical developments and memorable individual moments in her early life. Those moments will live on in my memory

Among the best: trying e for the first time
Among the worst: the awful two days immediately after

Tipsy on third marriage shocker!

Averaged one a decade for a bit there. On the plus side, they were all good wedding parties! Too many good things in them to really regret — my kids being foremost in that, but a lot of other things too. (But happy to be in a delightful partnership now.)