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Comment by tastyface | Hacker News Reader

I'm 29 years old, and the biggest blocker in my recent life has been the regret of wasted time. I left my job in late 2013 to travel and work on my own projects, but the project-making has been very slow and sporadic at best. In aggregate, I feel like I've literally wasted about 4 years of my life — just dumped into the trash — and I don't know how to deal with that fact. (At least people with failed startups have "the journey" to learn from. Not the case when you literally can't get any work done.) Part of me feels that I should go get a real job at this point, but a) I'm pretty sure I'm now behind engineers in my age group by half a decade, and b) it will feel like giving up on my ambitions. These thoughts keeps me up at night.

I wish there was some magic phrase that would convince me it's not too late to catch up. If we have aspirations, how do we stop comparing ourselves to other people?

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Different people appreciate different things and to different degrees. What I really enjoy you might very well hate. So it does not make much sense to compare your life (and achievements) to that of others - there is no objective metric to go by!

Next time you stay awake, go get a piece of paper and pen, and think back on your travels and current life. What things have you learned that you enjoy doing (especially things that surprise you)? What things have your learned that you don't enjoy (especially things that are often considered desirable/good)?

From there you might be able to come up with some guidelines for how to chose your path forward. And you will probably realize that your traveling years has taught you a lot about the most important thing - yourself!

Never ever regret making a decision that you thought would make you happier. The fact that it didn’t work out like you thought is nothing to regret. that’s life. It turns out, with the benefit of hindsight, that maybe staying a traditional career path would have been a better choice — but you only know that because of the journey you’ve taken. There was no other way for you personally to have learned that. Now you’re 4 years older and you know much more about who you are and the type of life to want to live. Lucky for you, you get to make the choice between your ambitions and a traditional career again, this time with more knowledge that will hopefully lead to a better decision.

That said, don’t discount your ambitions — sometimes a poor, unsuccessful life spent in pursuit of something beautiful is more happy than a traditionally successful life in pursuit of nothing at all.

How did your travel go?

Careers can go like the game snakes and ladders sometimes. If you can phrase the time you spent more positively I think it can work out.

To be honest, I really suck at traveling. It was a great experience to live in so many different cities around Europe, but there weren't many actual activities involved. Mostly looking around, going on long walks, and eating local food. Nothing like those Instagram travelbloggers who travel densely and intensely. Frankly, I barely even talked to anyone.

The years weren't a total loss, since I did release a reasonably complex tablet app (with $10k sales) plus a bunch of smaller, less profitable ones. But it took me 3-4 times as long to develop them as it would have any competent engineer, at least based on the stuff that gets posted to HN.

I still want to keep working on myself and break through to the other side of productivity, but sometimes it feels like I'm just circling the drain. My personality is such that I can lift my head one day and find that entire months have disappeared out from under me.

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