I don’t know if this is something people say in other countries, but in my country, there’s this common cliché or “wisdom” where adults will assure you that the people who picked on you in environments like school will universally develop lives of hardship later on, one way or another getting into mayhem.
I asked my mother one day what happened to all those people growing up. I can sense she may have been sugar coating it, but she said something along the lines of “well, I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and became a teacher, and waited some more, and finally watched as my bullies had to go into retirement five years late, yay” (okay, not really like that, but it might as well have been).
Yeah, common theme in my experience that what we hope for is never “that” set in stone. No matter where in the community (or even long-distance communicating) you knew them from, based on life, how much approximate correspondence do you associate with that mindset in the first paragraph?
A town near where I grew up had an epidemic of that. The teachers treated the bullies like their favorite children, the next thing you knew they had burglarized every single unlocked vehicle in the entire town for drug money on multiple occasions and were arrested right before they would’ve graduated from high school. My friend was one of their brothers and I remember it got so bad they graduated him despite him not passing just to remedy the memory of trying to overshadow him.
