“I’m still grateful to be able to pursue what I want each day”. Gratitude is so good 🙏

I do Duolingo, too :) What language are you learning?

I have a number of assorted thoughts, or angles, on this question, which hopefully make sense together.

First, let's take the thought seriously. It's probably true on some level that you're not doing everything you could be doing, or not living up to your potential in some way. In other words, it's unlikely this is your best possible life, and you just have to start feeling better about it.

Ok, then why are you failing to live up to your potential? There's a lot of reasons, but first, note that there's no benefit to blaming yourself or feeling ashamed about it. This only turns into an unproductive story like "I suck, I'll never succeed, I always fail, I can't do it." That's called depression.

It's totally possible to accept the way things are without losing the ability to move forward. Meditation and stoicism are both great for this. So even if you wasted the last ten years, ok, so you wasted the last ten years, that's just a fact, there's no point in just feeling bad about it, just accept it and think, given that fact, what's the best thing to do from here?

When you're stuck in self-blame, you tend to want to fix everything really quickly, which means having totally unrealistic expectations about what you should be able to accomplish, and when you don't accomplish all that, you feel like a failure again, self-blame, etc.

If you don't blame yourself, if you instead just focus on what is the best thing to do right now, then you can make sure that every day, you do at least something beneficial for you, even if it's only for one minute right before you go to sleep. The mind is really bad at projecting the effect of many small efforts over a long period of time. And, importantly, as you start to notice changes, that's one of the main internal sources of gratification and confidence you can find.

In fact, learning to enjoy the daily process of doing your best is the only way to find gratification. If you only care about end goals, then even if you achieve your goals, you might end up becoming dissatisfied all over again.

Second, let's question the thought. One thing I notice about this kind of thought is that it is like 1:1 with a bad mood for me. In other words, I don't feel like this all the time, but when I do feel like "I'm wasting my life," it is always accompanied by this very bad mood, whereas when I'm not in a bad mood, I don't usually believe this.

It's so connected that I have started to realize that there's more a reciprocal relationship between these things than I thought. Meaning, I always assumed "I am wasting my life, therefore I feel bad." That's not entirely wrong, but it's also true to say "I feel bad, therefore I interpret my situation very negatively, and conclude that I'm wasting my life."

I've learned over time that thinking clearly is really fucking hard. The emotion usually comes first, meaning the emotion is negative, and therefore the thought that it produces is also negative.

Again, given my first point, the negative emotion does in some way probably reflect something true, but note that a lot of things impact that feeling as well. Here's some examples:

• If your diet sucks, you'll probably feel bad, which will make you more likely to conclude that you're a failure.
• If you don't exercise enough same thing.
• Same thing for other needs like socializing, sunshine, enough sleep, boring things that don't seem to solve the "wasting life" problem but are actually extremely important.
• Cognitive behavioral therapy: If you waste a day, do you feel bad for wasting that day and try to do better tomorrow, or do you then think about every failure you've ever had, so that it's too painful to even think about your day? Meditation and therapy can be very useful for making your thoughts more productive, and avoiding feedback loops of negativity that can paralyze you.

There are surely more but I'm not thinking of it right now.

In conclusion: you're probably thinking this way both because there's something true about it, and because you're already feeling bad and feeling bad causes negative thoughts like this. To help address the issue, you can take concrete actions to make things better, and you can also address the negative feeling itself, which will make your thinking more balanced and make it easier to take action.

Sure, but how do you avoid making dangerous mistakes or errors and how do you avoid wasting too much valuable time? Or are those concerns themselves part of the problem and blitheness might actually be better?

It's tricky. It's really, really, tricky.

Probably the biggest thing to accept is that you can't successfully do it for everything. You just can't. You can learn to avoid the traps of logical fallacies, but cognitive biases are an entirely different story.

I've eventually become convinced that you can't avoid cognitive biases. They're a fundamental feature of how the brain processes information. You can get better at recognizing when a cognitive bias influenced you past or present perspective, but there's no total fix.

What you can do, though, is learn from past mistakes by reflecting on them. If you set aside some time to think about what went wrong, or learn how to seriously entertain the idea that some of your firmly held beliefs/values might not be quite correct, you can slowly discover places where you made mistakes in the past. That can help slowly change your perspective on, and approach to, life. Your perspective is a giant barge of a ship, though. It doesn't like to turn on a dime. Mindfulness, and maybe meditation, can help you to slowly turn that barge onto a new trajectory, but you often won't see results right away. And you won't know what trajectory its putting you on.

It's a bit of a leap of faith. You really just have to experiment, for at least a few weeks/months, and see if you like whatever results you get. One thing I'll ask you to take on faith for now (experiment and see if I was right or wrong), is that sometimes better awareness of the problem is actually enough to fix it. Not always! Not by a long shot. But more often than you'd expect.

There's a lot of trial and error in this. It's a soft science, not a hard one. You'll rarely get concrete or consistent answers.

Be careful not to give yourself too much new anxiety, in the process XD

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Volunteering. Helping others is the best way to feel like your life has meaning. Habitat for humanity, your local food pantry, somewhere where you’ll be working in conjunction with others. You don’t need any special skills or talents, you just need to show up and follow directions

Sometimes I feel like I’m just going through the motions. But right now I’m sitting on the back porch and my wife just finished rambling on about how blessed and spoiled she feels. She’s retired now and doing things she’s always wished she could do but couldn’t, and she’s been talking about how it’s only because of the home and income I’m providing. So that means a lot. I don’t feel like I’m wasting my life because I’m taking care of my family and they appreciate what I do for them.

We struggle to see our own lives accurately; maybe trying to journal and writing down one thing you liked about the day, one way you helped someone/yourself/the planet, and finally reflecting on a plan for the next day might give you a sense of purpose. A lot of people find that having goals helps them direct their energy, set small goals, and feel like they’re accomplishing something.

I also find that when I’m struggling to find my own joy, I’m usually still able to contribute to or partake in the joy of others. Doing something kind or thoughtful and seeing a reaction makes me happy; letting someone know you’re thinking about them and they’re important to you.

I don’t want to comment on your treatment at all, but I will add that at particularly difficult points in my life therapy and a support system have not been enough and I’ve needed medication. Everyone is different and you don’t need to share any more info about yourself, I just talk about it because we need to end the stigma around medication.

While something between 70 to 90 years seem long for people, it's really not that much in the grand scheme of things.

You feel like you barely blink and a week is gone. Great, you're finished with work today, the month is already over. This process seems to speed up the older you become. As a child it felt like every hour was a day, now with 26 I feel like weeks are just flying. I don't consider myself old by any means but in just four years I'll be 30 already. I can still remember my 18th birthday like it was yesterday.

Life is too short, live the way you want to live. If you ever think to yourself "is this what I should be doing", don't think about wether you should do it. Think about wether or not it gives you joy. I'm a caretaker for the elderly not because of a sense of duty or because it's expected of me but because I want to help people who can't help themselves anymore.

Besides my passion for my field of work I'm also a gamer bar none, oftentimes "wasting" my days off with nothing but gaming. But I'll also grab a few books and read for a week or two if I feel like it. I learn different languages. I have recently taken up woodworking a little. I enjoy cooking a lot more. I started going out with friends again. I'm not doing these things because I should be doing them. I'm doing these things because they bring me joy. Something I can be proud of at the end of the day. Something other people will remember me by when I'll inevitably be gone one day. Because that's all that will remain, the memories of other people who knew you. It's a scary thought and wether or not an afterlife really exist I'm not really sure. But in the meantime between now and my inevitable death, I'll just enjoy the life I've been give doing things I want to do.

The most important thing is finding a balance for all of this. Obviously you shouldn't neglect work for hobbies unless you can make more money with them. Neither should you let work influence your off time. Friends and family are important. For the longest time, when my depression and anxiety hit rock bottom a few years ago, I neglected everything. My friends, my family and basically all other hobbies but gaming. I had thoughts of doing really, really bad things to myself. Even worse than in my youth when I was bullied throughout all years of school. Quite frankly, I didn't want to be alive anymore. But I just couldn't go through with it. The thought of my mother weeping for me was the hardest slap back to reality I've ever gotten.

She is my anchor, she is what keeps me going. I've always had to endure being called a momma's boy. I don't give a single rat's ass about that. Yes, I'm a momma's boy and I'm proud of it. My mother sacrificed basically her whole life for me. The unplanned child. The youngest of four, my other siblings being 10 to 15 years older. Heart condition from birth and boom, basically all of her late 30s and early to mid 40s were gone because of me. She sacrificed everything for me. Even today on the days I feel like an absolute failure she always tells me how proud she is. I'm not the best son, she isn't the best mother. We all have flaws. But to me she's the greatest person who will ever live and every single time she tells me she's proud of me, I know I didn't waste the life she nurtured despite being robbed of most of hers.

Your life isn't wasted because there's people who love you. People who care. Even if it's just one person that can be enough to know you're not wasting anything. True, unconditional love is the greatest gift anyone could ever give.

First off I want to give you my personal answers to these questions you asked. Just live a life you have fun living and that makes yourself proud. That's what I'm doing and I of course my depression sometimes kicks in. My anxiety gets the better of me even these days. I still have days where I'm in tears thinking I'm just a failure no one needs. But at the end of the day there are so many good things to live for. Yes, sometimes you have to actively go out and seek for these things, sometimes they just come to you. Every day can be an adventure. You just have to go, sometimes take a risk and have the best adventure of your only life. Our life is an adventure. Any adventure, no matter if successful or not, is worth it. Never a waste.

Second: I'm really, really sorry I wrote so much, it's far more than I intended to write. Have a cookie made of code for your trouble.

If it makes you happy, do it, but be aware of the consequences. For me, I feel like wasting life because I don’t have a car, so i can’t go anywhere, or afford anything. Living like that can be miserable, but it depends on your mentality, because sometimes you enjoy the experience of laziness.

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What helps me realize that's absurd is fiction. Fiction is great because it's all stories about people and their meaningfulness, so if these guys who also wrestle with waste of space kind of issues end up having meaning, then so can you and me.

I get fiction isn't real life, but that's not the point. Fiction is a reflection of how people really are. That's why literature is art. Books remind us that we only see a small part of our own story at any given time and that we are our harshest critics.

Read a book.

What I found helped is to stop wasting my life. Then the feeling went away

So you know how sometimes you look at old photos and someone looks JUST like Keanu Reeves. Or someone talks in the same way. Or someone has similar hobbies?

These are all little pieces of what makes you - you.

Not in any kind of magical thinking of reincarnation or anything.

The whole “nothing really matters because there’s no authority on what “matters” beyond what we decide. It’s freeing.

Momento Mori You WILL die. You’d don’t know when, and you never will until it happens. Could be tomorrow, next year, in 10 years, etc.

But the story will end with death. Then there will be no future for you. Everything you wasted your life on, won’t matter any more.

My point is, it doesn’t matter. No matter what you do, you will die. So live how you want, and live truthfully and honest with yourself. Try your best to be genuine, and you will die in peace

I'm Irish. The guy is a national embarrassment.

I feel the exact same way at times I try my best or if I don’t I try to make peace with myself and try to to motivate good habits. You’re not alone, there aren’t answers for what’s the best way you should live your life but there are healthy choices a lot of us can make and even when we think we’ve given more than we can take, it’s up to you to decide how you want to approach life. I’ve lost a lot of care due to depression and anxiety as well as addiction but I’m still grateful to be able to pursue what I want each day.

Having a goal that you have control and agency over.

Then you are on the right path

ok, better don't move then

I’d recommend something along the lines of Duolingo as a start. I suffer with depression and anxiety as well. Even in my worst times, it’s easy to jump on my phone and do a lesson. And the feeling of accomplishment is actually kind of addictive. It builds momentum, and makes me want to get started on other things I want to accomplish.

Thank you for the comment and encouraging words. ❤️ I really appreciate it!

I have struggled with this feeling for the last 5 years. As I say, “I did nothing and, more importantly, it meant nothing”. I have been unable to shake it. Hopefully you will have success in shaking how you feel.

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.

I have struggled with this feeling for the last 5 years. As I say, “I did nothing and, more importantly, it meant nothing”. I have been unable to shake it. Hopefully you will have success in shaking how you feel.

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.