No matter how you get there, we all end up the same way, just remember that.

I spent 14 years with an abusive (ex-)wife and I didn't achieve anything. Felt like my life was wasted. But you know what? It wasn't. It's all life-experience. It has shaped who and what I am today, and the person I am today I'm damn proud of. If you can call yourself a good, decent person, that's success to me.

Don't measure yourself against others (like everyone else says). Find your values, and if you excel in those values, who cares you didn't change the world? Or hold a patent? What is "Excelling at life" aside from making yourself and the people around you happy?

Do what matters to you. For me, it's traveling. Doesn't have to be expensive, or far. I just like to see as much of the world as I can.

I'm fixing it by going to therapy and am learning avenues to move forward happy. I would recommend you do the same even if you don't think you have something mentally wrong, your happiness is important and thoughts like these can spiral out of control without you realizing it.

Not really. Part of my life's adventures have just been showing up.

"Wasted" as in how? Who are you answering to? What standards are you judging by, and are they your standards, or the cultural standards pushed onto you by a capitalistic "must be productive" mindset? Or parents pushing their own hopes and dreams unrealized by the same mindset? Are these friends really successful?

Maybe I was cursed or blessed by having parents who really didn't give a shit about me, were constantly "disappointed" by who I was, and not really caring about me as an individual person but how I made them look. My dad was a sociopath who never wanted children, and my mother was an alcoholic who wanted children to show that her marriage was successful and good unlike what all her relatives kept saying. Until she committed suicide and my dad threw me out while I was still a teen. Thankfully, I learned early on that my parents would NEVER be proud of me because it wasn't about me at all. It was about them. The disappointment was their motivator with no real strategy behind it, and they set me up to impossible standards with bad examples, and frankly, lies they were trying to make into truth. So I stopped seeking their judgement, because I could predict it would always be disappointment.

Last time I spoke to my dad (1998), he asked what i was doing career wise, and I told him, and he dismissed it as "you have no idea what you are talking about," as if I was making it up. The thing was, I was still making money. The money was real, his opinion of my success was worthless. He had to one-up me, and always will. I felt so free after that, and never spoke to him again. He never missed me because he does not love me or hate me. He just doesn't think about me at all.

The expectation of others is a powerful drug, I won't claim to be immune to it. But at a certain point, you have to ask who you are answering to when you determine your own success and failure.

Bruh you are 17. Life is just starting for you. My advice would to be find something you’re passionate about. If you’re not sure what you wanna go to college for, that’s okay, focus on what you love, and eventually you’ll make a career out of it. If you can live with your parents until you get your feet off the ground, you’ll be in a great position. I wish you luck. But please know you never wasted your life until you’re actually dead.

A shift in perspective could help. You focused on different things than them. We're you successful in your studies? Your leisure?

Putting perspective into place, you're in a different position than them. Direct comparisons like that are unfair and a fallacy.

As an approach, radical acceptance may help in coming to terms.

Or seeking to gain what you desire - but at your own pace and focused on yourself and your situation.

Focus on your own milestones, steps, and successes. Practice could internalize. Maybe a thankfulness diary. Listing 3 or 5 things each day. Or forgiveness for letting go, or successes.

I'm very successful in some things and utterly unsuccessful in others. I don't often feel envy, more often frustration, and probably often anxiety. I try to accept and suffer through what I can't/am unable to change. I distract myself and do/focus on what I'm good at.

There is no objective purpose to life. Having a hobby is a popular way to enjoy the limited time available.

At 17 I was a total waste of space. Didn't even attempt to get my life together until I was about 23, and even then it was a long process. I barely even graduated high school.

Now I'm 32 and I'm that guy people are jealous of that "has his life together". I've got a family, a good career, an education - all the societal boxes are checked.

I don't think anybody really has their life "together", though. We're all just trying to get through life as best we can. I'm not necessarily any more "happy" now than I was at 17, I've just had more time to improve my situation a little at a time. Just live your life, my dude.

Kind of felt that way for a long time. Still kinda there but I feel like I'm finding satisfaction in other things than a yuge career, like my family and home improvement. The time I spend being useful to someone else than me (and my boss) don't quite feel like a waste of time. To me, it's not about "pacing up", it's more about finding what makes you feel the best version of yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with doing what you’re doing. You’re a human being (not a human doing) who gets to choose how to spend your time. It is your life. You’re not a machine who’s purpose is to be productive, it’s an unhealthy mindset. No one is happy being a machine.

A few thoughts:

• As others have said comparison is the thief of joy. It’s also not a very useful motivator. Feeling a bit better off than someone else isn’t going to push you to work all night when it’s required. That motivation is going to have to come from an intrinsic place - some well of meaning that has significance for you.

• I’ve had the chance to study a little philosophy in pursuit of my profession and having a foundational system of thought - or several to compare - from which to approach decision making has helped me to determine my path and give meaning to my time alive.

• If you’re trying to do anything difficult, doing it alone is courting failure. Find other people doing similar things and figure out how you can help them out. Equally, if you want to learn something you’ll have a much easier time if you find a teacher.

You are the only one who decides what gives your life meaning, and you decide what counts as "waste". If your meaning is keeping up with people who have achieved big goals without working hard to achieve big goals of your own, you'll probably end up envious and miserable. A lot of people like doing that so you've got plenty of company to wallow in your misery with if that's what you want to do.

I'd suggest finding another form of meaning.

Psst you are 17. You can't even legally waste your life on alcohol or drugs yet in Canada. Maybe you are/were messing around and causing trouble. You can still get out of it at this stage.

You are still growing up. You are at the starting line. What you do from here is up to what you want.

I know almost everyone has a parent or relativ tell a kid to be the next Galileo, Mozart, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or invent the next thingymajig. But it's more about what you desire to do, what you desire to be.

It took me over a year to find work in my field in the industry I wanted to be in (railways). Did I waste a year of my life? From some perspectives, yes, but I think not really because it was a terribly challenging time keeping my mental health, job applications are so bullshit but I got what I wanted eventually.

Did you want to change the world? Here's how I did. I had a casual chat with a homeless person by the parish, gave them 10 dollars, and the dollar store gloves on my hands to help them on the cold winter's day. It didn't do much to combat poverty in society overall, but for this person on this day it seemed like I meant the world to them. Even if that was 2 or 3 years ago, that's something I can feel just as proud about (if not more) as all my programming, hobby projects, school and work accomplishments.

why you compare an achievement of someone who have live vastly different than you ? like for example you live in europe so you mostly eat bread, and people in asia mostly eat rice, you cant expect yourself as european to suddenly envy asian just because they eat more rice than you

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

• William Faulkner

The race is long, and in the end its only with yourself

Don’t overthink it. If you have a good place to sleep and are happy, healthy, and not hungry then you are good to go! Success is almost always felt in the moment and doesn’t last. Sure there are some great discoveries that change the course of modern civilization but the rest were just a moment in time. Also some people are just full of themselves and not telling the truth.

You can’t reach self-actualization without grinding through the rest of the hierarchy. And when you get there you realize the only thing that matters is if your life was a waste for you and what other people think or do didn’t matter

It’s never too late to make a change. Be the you that you want to be but don’t judge your worth against other people’s achievements.

Set a goal for yourself. Learn Japanese, release an app, cure cancer, whatever you want and aim for it on your terms. But be realistic and if needs be set a small goal first and work your way up.

Edit. Typo

You live in a world with 7 billion other people and the weight of all of history to compare to.

Huge numbers of them are going to just be flat out better than you in every single way. Incomprehensibly large amounts are going to be comparable in certain ways and just luckier at times when it counted.

None of those people brightened your friend's day with a joke, cooked and shared a beautiful meal with your family, planted a flower patch on your street, whatever you did that contributes in some local way.

You can be meaningful and find contentment without being world changing, and every single world changing person was supported by a world of people doing their own little things to contribute positively to their life.

Yep. Nothing's ever worked out, I've never had the opportunity, ability, and inspiration to get anything done. Some inspiration but I just can't. Mental problems, financial problems, social problems, always something in the way and I just kinda give up and play video games for a few months because that's all I can do. All' the cheap philosophy around here is like, "Oh, but you have a warm bed and a safe home and Internet access" but the bed's too warm to sleep some nights, the "home" is really not safe or healthy for me, and the Internet is a pile of memes and memers and several kinds of news that make me glad humanity's driving itself extinct and ready to jump ahead on that. I'm just not compatible with this hell-world.

It's a journey, they say. Yeah, the kind of journey where some of us get tied to a truck and dragged around town. "Enjoy the ride!" they say. Yeah, sure.

Anyway, what the bollocks am I even doing here? Idunno. Answer is yes, you're not the only one who feels like it's all been a waste but I think it's not just a "you're some kinda loser" sort of thing. While it's true that not everyone can or should do "incredible things" it's also the case that this world's pretty aggressively built to prevent much of anything from happening :-\ Go to work, rest for work tomorrow, repeat, repeat, repeat. Consume some memes. No thoughts, no room to breathe. It's amazing that anyone does accomplish anything. And then it gets taken and sold. still rantyrambling for some reason. Better just post and hope no one notices, I guess

The beauty is there's no right way to live, because we're all going to die one day and you won't be around to care about your achievements or lack thereof. If you want to set those goals and strive for them, go for it if that's what makes you happy. I had a similar crisis at one point that caused me to go back to school and do a bunch of new stuff I had never done. But eventually, I realized it was pointless to stress too much because there's no true value, there's only value to you. For me, that meant spending more time with family while they're here, and studying things that interested me. If you sit around doing nothing but watch movies for years, but every single day you did what made you happy, how could that be a waste? It can only ever feel like a waste when you compare yourself to others and aren't confident in yourself. Even if your values changed over time, and now you want to do stuff you never did, go do it! You didn't waste time before, during that stage of your life you lived how you wanted to.

Look, I spent my entire adulthood addicted to drugs. I have done nothing. BUT I wouldn't trade my experience for the world, because ultimately I like who I am because of it.

You need to appreciate experience for what it is. There is no goal, but death, and that is the ultimate completion.

Life is pointless. The only point is what your able to mine from it. I have settled on appreciation, and enjoy the ride (:

People always flaunt and embellish their accomplishments, especially online. You're comparing yourself to liars and attention-seekers. You gotta find the path that brings you satisfaction, not material reward or approval from your peers.

Live your life for yourself. Everyone's path is completely different, and you are only seeing the highlights of others loves, not their struggles. So stop comparing yourself to others and do what will bring you long-term joy.

Having goals for yourself is important, but they should be based on self improvement for the sake of it. Not for some weird one-sided vendetta. For example, I eat healthy and do yoga so that I can perform better at my sport. Does it matter if I actually improve at said sport? No, I'm never going to be the best in the world, or be able to compete in the Olympics. But improving gives me satisfaction in life and it is fun. So I set goals around it that give me something to strive for. I'm healthier and happier for it and that's all that matters.

Find the things that are important to you and focus on them. Life is much better when your focus is on what actually matters to you, and not the things that matter to others.

They likely have their own insecurities and demons as well. Likely have the same feeling as you about others with a different context. Be a hobbyist. Experiment and find your "calling" or passion. I've never personally really tried to pace with people as they are on their own journey as well. Friendly competition has always helped but it was agreed upon items (running X amount of miles a week, getting A,B,C, qualifications together).

I used to feel the same way sometimes, but then I thought about it for a while, and reflected on my own life as well. I see all these people around me that are busy pursuing fancy degrees and high-paying jobs. But at what coast? I thought to myself that following societal norms/expectations does not seem fulfilling or interesting to me at all. Why would I want to do things I don't enjoy, just because it's what everybody else is doing? No. I decided not to worry about it, and just do whatever I feel like doing, regardless of what other people think about it. If you enjoy laying in bed all day, reading Lemmy content, and nothing else, then fine. Do it. You are not wasting your life because you don't do what everybody else is doing. You are wasting your life if you don't do what you want to do, that's it.

Well... no and yes.

No - I don't feel like I've wasted my life. I feel like I'm supposed to feel that way, and I know that many (most?) people looking from the outside in would believe that I have, but I just don't feel that way. I'm content, and as far as i can tell, that's the only thing that matters.

Ah, but there's the rub - I'm content. It sounds as if you're not.

Unfortunately, the only thing I can definitely recommend is to try to assess your own feelings and figure out if you really are discontented or if you're just going along with the idea that you should be.

But if you really are discontented... I guess I could say to try to look at what it is that you really value (which is likely not coincidentally what you've mostly done with your time) and try to actually feel the value in it.

But I have no idea how that's done, since its apparently just something that I do naturally.

Sorry if that doesn't heip...

The important thing is that you feel satisfied with what you do or achieve. In my family there is a lot of pressure to be “successful” but after a while I decided that I have to be happy with whatever things I can achieve, and believe me, after that change in my mindset, good things began to happen with apparently no efforts. So as other ones are saying, believe en yourself, don’t be so harsh on your past or decisions, and remember that there is no race or goals you need to get, you create your own life.

From what I’m getting, you see the end point of major goals other people had, and you wonder how you could ever do anything like that.

What you need to do is turn that into a main quest line. In a video game (most of the time) you don’t start with “kill the big boss and save the realm” but every little thing progresses you to that point. The first thing you get as a goal is something stupid simple and abstract like Equip your sword and block some arrows. Eventually all the little side tangents culminate in “Kill the Boss, Save the realm”.

So try to use that principle in your life. Ask yourself a question, what do I need to do right now to do “XYZ”, come up with two things that would help you accomplish it. Now ask yourself, of those two things, is there anything I can do within the next 5 minutes to make that happen. If your answer is no (let’s be honest it most likely is), split each of those tasks into two things that will help you accomplish that minigoal.

Eventually you will have broken the tasks in two enough times you can find your “Equip your sword, Dodge some arrows” and start crawling your way up that quest tree.

If i am making stuff and it effects the tiny bit of the community i felt fulfilled.

One of the biggest rules I adhere to that has changed my life is "Nothing is supposed to be anything"

I went to high school with a couple of people who went on to do truly incredible, world class things. Both of then in fields I treated as a hobby / entertainment. Meanwhile, I've been midlevel mediocre at everything.

And I figured out years too late that I completely blew it when it came to three separate relationships, any one of which would have been life changing for the good. I was just very, very stupid and thought relationships came around like a bus service.

Now that I'm much older it grieves deeply me all the things I took for granted. All the missed opportunities. All because of some mix of laziness, lack of a long term perspective, lack of focus, lack of self discipline, and cowardice. Looking back, I realize many of my peers were more mature and focused.

I have to accept that I am a fundamentally unremarkable person and have burned up most of my good years of potential. I try not to dwell on these dark thoughts all of the time. But there's no way to truly come to peace with it.

I don't care much about "leaving a legacy". Just wish I'd made better decisions, especially when it comes to finding and keeping a loving partner.