It’s something I’ve been wrestling with being closer each day to 30 and still living at home. I have a lot of regrets about not taking my early schooling seriously or even going for the career I wanted to in the beginning instead of making the “right” choice like my parents wanted. It just feels like time is running out (not in an end of life sort of way) and that my opportunities aren’t there anymore.
Anyone else have this feeling?
Every waking moment.
Wait til you hit 40.
30 years old? Dude, you’re a baby.
I don’t know, before I felt like there was too much time and now I feel like there is never enough.
As the others said, this is an every single day thing. I’m 32 and feel the same.
As someone once said, if you’re telling yourself you’re too old to do something and should have done it 10-20 years ago, just ask yourself, “How old will you be if you ***don’t ***do it?” Answer: same age.
I turned 30 on an Amsterdam/Brussels train after 6 months of joyriding around Europe and North Africa, and never holding a steady job in my life. When I dropped out of college, I knew I’d have to live by my wits alone. Now, 50 years later, I take comfort that there is nothing I’ve done, nor not done that I regret.
That “too late” feeling? That’s interesting because I’m 74 and to this day have never experienced the feeling. I admire the previous poster in having no regrets as I certainly do but they remain locked away in an unchangeable past where they belong and each one definitely provided some wisdom to deal with the present and future.
Don’t allow “too late” to become a philosophy to your future or it may transform into a eventual regret.
Yeah, me neither.
It’s never too late, this side of the grave, to do something. Write a book, see the world, ask a girl out, whatever. By falling into the ‘it’s too late’ thing you’re giving in to the counsel of despair.
It’s only too late if YOU make it too late.
I’m 53, starting a new business, painting and dating for fun and not marriage. Nothing’s ever too late.
I’m 32 and I feel that every single day. I waited way too long for a lot of things, and feel like I wasted virtually my entire 20’s. Not a good feeling.
The only time it’s too late is when you have become physically incapable, or you statistically speaking will probably die before completion leaving a big mess for someone. Otherwise there just ain’t no time like the present, whether you are thirty or seventy.
Yeah, there are a few things that you are too late for. There’s no sense in sugar-coating the truth. Like, it’s too late for you to become a five-star military general. And if you’ve never had a formal dance lesson in your life, I’m gonna guess it’s too late for you to join the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. These are two lofty arenas where the door of opportunity closes after a certain age.
But it’s not too late to change courses as long as you have realistic expectations (based on your resource level and individual strengths/weaknesses) and as long as you have a concrete goal to shoot for. “Finding a job I enjoy” isn’t a concrete goal. “Finding a job doing X” is.
It’s a common/ubiquitous-enough feeling that a group called… Pink Floyd? wrote a song about it, a minor track (Time) on what I can only assume was one of their lesser known albums (to the extent heir albums are even known to us at all), The Dark Side of the Moon:
Anyone ever heard it? Or at least heard of it? 
Yep, opportunity cost at work. Every decision implies forgoing other possibilities, so some opportunities really aren’t there anymore.
But that’s fine; that’s just life. In my opinion, the idea is to be purposeful and try to understand the reasons why you are making the choices you are making. So you can feel comfortable in paying the costs of those decisions. So you appreciate the price you are paying, and can commit to working hard towards maximizing the outcomes of your decisions. So that you are able to learn from any failures that may result.
Closer to 30 as in you are 29 or closer to 30 as in you are 22?
If I can make a suggesting, maybe one of the first things you should do is move out of your parents house? On some level, I think most people these days goes through a sort of “quarter life crisis” in their 20s regarding what they should have done or should be doing in the future. But in my experience, going off and living on your own goes a long way in both a) giving you a sense of actually being a functioning adult and b) gives you a realistic perspective on what your life is and what you need to do to change it.
I went back to school and got an MBA at 29. It changed my entire career trajectory and still gets me teased by my classmates as the posterboy for a mid career MBA changing you life. Now I’ve spent another decade running down the path the MBA set me on and I’m getting tired of it so I’m going to go back to school again change my path again (not as drastically this time). You certainly aren’t out of time, unless your goals are things like Monstro mentioned.
I would also agree with her that you need to set some goals and then try to accomplish them. Be happy isn’t a goal, get laid is a goal. Once you have a goal figure out the steps you need to achieve it and break them down into today, short term, medium term and long term. So if you want to study how the mind works your today goal would be to sign up to take the GRE, then your short term goals would be to study 1 hour per day for the next month until your test day, Medium term goals would be to apply for programs that you have a good chance to get into as well as network the faculty to help you get in and the long term goal would be a PhD in psychology.
Personally I always like to have a core plan and then ways out if you don’t like how its going so as an alternative I’d make sure that I could do something with a Masters in Psychology if the phD didn’t work out or whatever and then make sure you’re intermediate steps are limiting so if you’re going to sell all of your stuff and move to India to minister to the poor keep some of the money available to pay for a plane ticket home and maybe 3 months rent so you don’t end up broke with no way out.
Schooling is only part of the equation. It’s not the same experience for everybody, and definitely not a magic golden ticket to prosperity and independence.
But educated or not, you should be out of your parents’ house. What’s keeping that from happening? Identify what’s holding you back and fix it. Stop worrying about it being “too late” – which frankly sounds like an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for your own life – and start working toward improving your situation now, whatever form that may take.
Deciding it’s ‘too late’, is simple and obvious self sabotage. It’s just an excuse to not self motivate, an easy out for never stepping up and into full adulthood. To do so, pre 40’s or 50’s is beyond sad really.
The ability to self motivate is so fundamental to any/every success in life, but not often addressed in my experience.
Then again, if someone hasn’t at least a passing ability to self motivate, as they near thirty, perhaps it is too late? Without the ability to motivate themselves what CAN they ever really change, master, reach, learn or achieve? It’s kinda a key ingredient to getting anywhere when you think about it.
I’m 28 going on 29, but I guess I just feel bad about wasting all the help that was given to me. Like so much was given and I have nothing to show for it all. Although I guess all the help in the world wouldn’t really help me since I didn’t really have a solid goal to pursue. It was usually what someone else said was correct or the right thing to do.
Now I have regrets about not pursuing those goals earlier when I had more resources and didn’t blow them all.
Please clarify. You never had a solid goal to pursue, only what other people said you should have as a goal. Now you regret not pursuing the goals other people said you should have?
I don’t think living in your parents’ basement is the way to determine your goals. Are you doing so for strictly financial reasons, or do you have fears about living on your own?
A lot of people start with jobs and make them into careers. Do you have a job?
I know this feeling, and I want to tell you the story of how I overcame it.
I didn’t do particularly well at school - flunked maths and English, OK in the sciences, not much else.
I managed to get into college on a computer technology diploma, on the promise that I would attend night classes and retake maths, which I did (and got a decent grade), but I flunked college and dropped out after the first year of a 2 year course.
I then went on a government sponsored youth training scheme related to computing, which would probably have led to an apprenticeship in some technical role, but I screwed that up by stupidly following others into petty theft, but I was the one who got caught and blamed, and I got thrown off the course.
After being unemployed for 6 months, my father managed to get me a temporary job packing boxes in a warehouse. Not the career I had dreamed of. So much missed potential.
Long story short, I did that for quite a few years. I had given up thinking about opportunities and change, and development.
Then I met the woman I would marry. That changed me and I started looking for opportunities, and taking them. Over the course of many years, I worked up through various roles in Inventory control, then IT (which is incidentally where I had very first intended to go), then management and leadership.
Alongside that, I realised I had lists of ideas I wanted to pursue in my spare time, but that I was not really doing anything about them. I decided to start just doing things - trivial things - on the list, and I found that doing this made me really happy.
I started writing up these silly hobby activities on a website, and later, on a channel on YouTube and it’s now (after 15 years) grown to the point where it might become my full time occupation.
And I still love it - and it is the thing that gets me out of bed every day.
Moral of the story: It’s really common to regret missed opportunity, but you MUST NOT allow that regret to occupy your attention. It’s pointless (unless by thinking about it you will derive some useful insight on not repeating the mistake)
The opportunity that should occupy your mind is the NEXT one - the next opportunity you have to find; and if you can’t find it, create it for yourself. This is something you can choose to do. You choose - you don’t wait for it to choose you.
It’s not easy, and neither is it a quick fix for anything, but it is good.
Look forward, not back.