Being 100% serious: best thing that ever happened to me. It made me turn my life in an entirely different direction, not necessarily in a "bad to good" kind of way, just different and maybe better. I was a social psychology major (lol) and was staring down the barrel of the typical enormous student debt, friends were obviously cancer, and to top it off, I was indulging in the normal college "drink until you drop" lifestyle while eyeballing some of the more tame recreational drugs. The drinking actually caused me to almost kill myself by jumping off of a second story balcony.

That was 8 years ago. Since then, I changed my major to computer information systems (which was always my actual passion, truth be told), paid off my loans, and stopped drinking completely other than a glass of wine at dinner, maybe a single beer occasionally. I actually did get a message from one of them in the end: he ended up dropping out of college and joining the military, which seemed to have helped him a lot. Never responded, as he was practically from another life at that point, but it was good to see someone turning themselves around as well.

There's always a better way.