An old friend of mine and his wife were having trouble getting pregnant. She kept having miscarriages, and the last one they had to remove a fallopian tube. She was understandably distraught by this and fled to Colombia. Totally mia for a few weeks. In that time this old buddy knocked up his neighbor. When his wife came home he said "see I'm not the problem". Oof

Edit: to be clear they removed a fallopian tube from her.

I ruined my.own life the fastest. I went to a doctors appointment for chronic pain, was prescribed opiates in about 5 minutes. That's all it took to utterly ruin the great life I had and alter it.forever

Thankfully, I'm coming back strong now.

plenty of good answers I see already, one I think of is Otto Warmbier. While I doubt we'll ever know for sure what exactly happened, he made some small choice, whether innocent or foolish, that ruined and subsequently ended his life. I remember at the time of the incident he had the persona of a privileged twat who thought touring north korea would be a fun gag, and quickly FAFO'ed. Now its North Korea so how much of it was manufactured? IIRC the incident was that he tampered with a poster or something. that we'll never know, but one could argue just being an American traveling to North Korea in the first place as a 'tourist' is asking for it.

The cop who shot the kid tamir rice 11 years ago now is one of the few police who hasn’t been able to escape their past as a shooter. He got fired as an officer after the shooting, and he’s continually tried to apply to new police stations and as a security guard to various places, his past keeps catching up with him, and people keep contacting his new work places, to keep him off the force, and to this day he has not been able to return as a cop

Not the fastest, but you have to credit Elon Musk for the sheer scale of his downfall.

He went from Silicon Valley’s darling genius that was going to save the world, to detestable technofa**st and one of the greatest villains of this generation.

He is now the poster child of the ultra wealthy using their money to make our lives worse.

That O’Brien ceo guy. Coldplay kisscam simultaneously brought him into fame and ruined his life.

My older brother had a pretty epic collapse. He was waiting tables at one of the best restaurants in our city and was promoted to bartender and was being fast tracked to management. I know waiting tables and bartending doesn't sound like a big deal, but he was making around $100k a year and only working about 30-35 hours a week. He bought a house, a new car, and had a dog. Then he got into d***s.

One week everything is great. The next week his roommate moves out abruptly. I'm guessing he had been spiraling without the family knowing, but she saw it all coming. She leaves abruptly, the car gets repossessed, and the bank seizes the house. He moved in with my dad, but after 2-3 days my dad puts him in the VA hospital. After a few days there he bounces out and declares himself a new man. Moved back in with my dad. After a couple of days there, he's back at the VA, then out to basically a homeless shelter. This is all within like a 2-3 week span. That was 15 years ago. He's been bouncing in and out of shelters in Baltimore and Boston since.

The Oceangate CEO did it pretty fast.