To think that since I haven’t achieved anything yet my life is basically a write off?

[TimeWoundsAllHeals]

I’m going to be 33 in May and I have never achieved anything. I’ve learned things don’t get me wrong but I’ve done f all with it. When I was a kid I thought I was so smart and everyone showered me with praise for it and said I was full of potential. Now I’m 32 and I feel like I’m no better off than I was when I was a kid except now I’m old and even if I did achieve something now I’d be playing catch up against all the normal people and I’d still come out the loser in the end as a result.

I mean don’t get me wrong. I’m not giving up on life. I don’t want to die so all I can do is live. But I feel sad I’ll never amount to anything.

Wow @Kolo that was an amazing comment. Going to use that with my son!

OP a bit left field, but are you getting enough sleep? Or are you up all hours trying to “find the flag” and then up early with kids?

Your thinking seems a bit wonky (I mean that kindly) and that happens to me when I’m sleep deprived - I lose proportion and logic and tiny things seem insurmountable.

I’m going to be 33 in May and I have never achieved anything. Sometimes I feel like you do. But I'm twice your age - I have lived your lifetime twice over, and I doubt whether I have another 33 years to come. Stop looking back and start afresh from now.

Like other posters, I think you're focusing too much on the result, and not enough on the process.

I'm a lab scientist. The people who work here are very clever, have often found school easy and sailed through university. But doing a PhD or working in research means CONSTANT failure. It's impossible to do it at all without failure. Experiments go wrong, papers get rejected, grants get turned down. But that's the way it's supposed to work. If you don't work through the process and use each "failure" as a stepping stone to the next thing, then you can't achieve anything at all. Some people really, really struggle with this idea.

This is just a roundabout way of saying: learning new things and doing new things requires "failure". Don't be scared of it, and above all don't use "failure" as evidence that you are bad at something or not good enough in general. It's not evidence for that in any way.

If everyone thought like that, zero works of literature would have been written, zero films would have been made, and we'd all still be living like mediaeval peasants.