Why feel like I've wasted life when I know I've done things?

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I can't understand why I still get these thoughts in my head telling me as though I've "wasted" my life despite the fact that I know of a number of things I have done in life so far like going to college for two years, trying uni for three months, having a job and holding it for 7 or 8 years, driving a car, went abroad to 8 countries and cities as an adult.

I seem to find myself forgetting about these things whenever I get these negative thoughts conjuring up in my head as though they never happened just because I feel like there are pieces missing like relationships, long term friendships etc. I seem to feel as though having a long term relationship and a big social bunch of friends and being a really extroverted person will somehow make me "content" with life and not lead to regrets.

I've had two therapists tell me that I need to start giving myself credit for the good things I've done in my life.

But between being bullied as a kid, being ostracized in college and some very bad job experiences in the past, I tend to focus on those instead of the fact that I'm married with three college-graduate kids and now have a good job that I enjoy.

Because it's easy to see the things we've done as mundane, no-big-deal because we've done them.

It's the things other people have done that we haven't that seem out of the ordinary.

I remember a couple of very short live marriages. People I knew at work. Like a month or less!

I feel like that a lot. I've got a pretty impressive list of accomplishments, far more than most NTs do. But, I often times feel like an absolute failure that has just wasted his life.

Personally, I think that it's because nobody ever quite lives up to their potential. There's always just a bit more than we could theoretically do, and that includes extreme high achievers like the sorts that are captains of industry or heads of state.

There's also compression and the distance that tends to develop over time between you now versus you back then. I'm not the same person I was in my 20s and as I've had more experiences, each of those experiences has tended to offer somewhat less novelty than the early ones did.

IMHO, this all combines to a sense that I've wasted my life, when that's not entirely true and in my case, I may well still have another half-century in me if I keep taking care of myself and my forefathers are any indication.

I wish I had been that smart. I've stuck with my wife for nearly 5 years thinking that she can't possibly be this much of a monster. She was fine before we got married, but then absolutely flipped out and started to behave extremely poorly. I think we'll likely get divorced in the new year because it doesn't matter what I do or say, nothing gets through to her that her behavior is that unacceptable.

Nobody should ever pretend to be significantly different from whom they are when dating because if you do wind up getting married, you're stuck pretending for the rest of your life. And the rest of your life is a lot longer than it sounds if you're having to spend it being fake with the person you're married to.