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Comment by bloqs | Hacker News Reader

To everyone in this thread, a piece of advice I didn't initially believe but over many years I have understood more:

"everyone loses 10 years to something, somewhere along the line"

Reminds me of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, "and then one day you find ten years have got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun!".

That quote is actually from the song "Time" by Pink Floyd.

I used to listen to that several times a year to motivate myself to do more and not let the months and years pass me by.

As someone who doesn’t quite understand/believe it, could you elucidate more on that?

More apt would be: hindsight is a b.

Everyone has a tendency to evaluate the past with today's knowledge and experience. That's a fallacy. You didn't so much "lose" 10 years, it just took 10 years to come to an understanding about a meaningful part of your life. And maybe you really needed all that time to arrive there.

In my book, regret means you've learned something about your past but you're still trying to change the past. Which you can't. What matters is how you're going to leverage your wisdom going forward in a meaningful way.

I take it to mean that everyone has a situation that they could have handled better, and it took them quite a few years to really fix the situation. Perhaps it was something that affected them mentally, and they finally overcame it, or perhaps it ended up being a physical or financial hardship.

Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone makes a few big mistakes.

The key is not to beat yourself up over it. Learn from the mistake and do better in the future.

It means that if you add up the regrets (for example, staying in a bad job or not doing X for Y years) then it will come up to about 10 years for everyone. Maybe your 10 years are still ahead of you, or perhaps some of them are behind you but you didn't realize that yet as you haven't seen the consequences yet.

Read through the thread. Look how many stories there are of people losing years and years to something that they now regret. The realization is that this is the norm, not the exception. We're all just fragile and fallible and trying to make our way through life as best we can, and we all end up messing up big somewhere along the way.

It's easy to look back on 10 wasted years and think you failed, you blew your one chance at life. But if you come to realize that looking back on 10 wasted years is actually a common human struggle, it can help you reframe your regret as just another one of the trials of being a limited, mortal human and not take it so personally as your own failing.

This thread is self-selecting: people who have no big regrets clearly wouldn't be posting here.

Yes, that's something I thought too when reading the parent comment. While I agree with the general sentiment of everyone losing ten years to something, I think it's hard to prove that, in a non-solipsistic way.

I'd agree but also add that it's not going to select people it hasnt happened to /havent realised yet too.

Wow. That makes me feel so much better!! Seriously. 2011 to 2021 were those years for me. I've beat myself up over not making forward progress in life, if not regressing, for an entire decade. The idea that there's a saying about it is somehow comforting (assuming of course that the decade is now over). It's like when you stop and realize that "existential crisis" is a cliche phrase because so many others have experienced it as well, for centuries.

A peek at your website tells me that if I could have achieved half of what you have by your age I would be happy, dont sweat it.

Wow, it’s crazy to hear that as a person who has recently become aware of first such occasion at 31 years old.

Thanks for sharing!

This is immensely helpful. Thank you for passing it along.

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