Does anyone else feel like their youth passed them by?

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I am 27 years old as of writing this and I feel that my youth passed me by. Now I know 27 isn't old but I feel like I missed out on a lot of things growing up. My childhood was spent on the living room couch in front of the TV for the most part other than being in school. Because my over protective mother wouldn't let us play outside. Mom feared that myself or my sister would be abducted by pedophile rapist murderers if she took her eyes off of us for a second. Then as a teenager, I missed out on interacting with kids my own age because I was taken out of public school after grade 6. I had my own friend group of nerdy aspies that attended a social group and bowling club together, so that wasn't an issue. It was the lack of interaction with the opposite sex that really hurt me growing up. I knew only one girl growing up in my teen years and that was my homeschool tutor's daughter. It didn't help that she was beautiful, I was obsessed with my tutors daughter until I graduated in grade 12. She never knew I liked her. On the bright side grade 11 and 12 were pretty good years, I joined auto shop in grade 11 and 12 though a cross immersion program. I made some good friends at the local high school and enjoyed getting up to mischief like smoking pot down by the river with the boys. Unfortunately after highschool and college my social life stagnated. After spending a year in trades school studying automechanics, I moved on to working at a car dealership washing cars in hopes of getting a job as a mechanic in the shop. These years at the car dealership would be the some of worst years of my life. I struggled with self medicating with drugs and alcohol. I felt in my early twenties that I should have been partying and dating lots of girls but that never happened. Since about the age of 23 I have been working on becoming a better person and I have succeeded in many ways but I still have the occasional feeling that I wasted my youth. I know that I lot of it was out of my control, growing up with a mentally unstable single mother and being isolated from my peers in homeschool where two things that I couldn't control. Oh well hopefully my thirties will be different.

There are a lot of older folks on this forum and my guess is that many of them will tell you that your best years are when you are old. Sure, there are physical limitations but there's so much more peace and self-contentment, and the things you enjoy stay the same, or may change but you enjoy them just as much. You just feel more at ease when you are older. So you have something to look forward to.

(I have been struggling with a bad life event for the past two years and still I feel that way. Bad life events can happen at any time or age, and they are unfortunately a part of living.)

Not really...
Somewhere in my mind, I feel a bit too young for my own body. And I'm just around your age.

I've been waiting to outgrow things I want to just outgrow, but I'm not so patient to wait for another few years.

Most of my life is wasted on waiting and not knowing what to do. I still don't.

Not for the lack of trying in initiative; a good part of my life is limited by duty and the economy -- if it weren't, I would've moved away long time ago.

And coping in the dark with unknown conditions that consumes my resources. 'Coping with autism' isn't enough in my case.

It's this frustrating self preoccupation that I've been fighting alone for most of my life -- I'm just sick of it consuming my time, my waking life, and a good portion of my decisions and actions around it; further and further...


My body will just keep aging around this head or mind or whatever that stubbornly refuses to just damn move on and live.
I don't feel like I'm missing out -- more like it will come one way or another but; it is always uncertain if it will ever happen.

I just feel frustrated by the lack of linearity. The lack of order. The lack of meeting expectations because that's all it was known.


Walking my own path is a very, very long and exhausting gamble.
Winning, losing, fulfilled, unfulfilled -- either or all may or may not also be a hidden landmine in itself.
And I don't like to gamble a lot.

I don't feel missing opportunities; more like missing a bet that I may or may not win, and winning may or may noy be worth it.

I couldn't seem learn from mistakes and therefore know what to avoid, and I don't know which is right and will guarantee that way that IS worth it until it's there -- it's like that; all of it is just luck from my perspective.


In essence, I don't regret missing out in a sense that I don't regret participating in a game that I don't know (and will never ever master) how to play.

And spending too much time in a game that you don't know what's going on and what the rules are is very frustrating.

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My youth, 20s and 30s have all passed me by.

I don't think it's uncommon to feel that you wasted your youth.

When you look back, with hindsight, it's very easy to identify lots of opportunities that you missed as a kid. I think we tend to assume that if we could do it again, we'd do it differently but we forget that we were simply blind to those opportunities, we never saw them so how could we possibly have taken advantage of them?

As a 44 year old, I can tell you that I feel just as regretful about the period from 27 to 44 as I do about the period from 14-27. Maybe some of us are just wired that way.

When I look back all I can see are things I didn't do, the time I wasted, the bad decisions I made. I don't think it's very helpful, except to try and see that all you really have is right now, and the best lesson you can take from the past is to try and pay better attention to the opportunities that might be coming down the pipe.

I had a stroke in my 30s and and to start over, learning to walk and talk again.
I had the option of going on disability and never working again but opted to recover and go back to work.
I made a full recovery and saved enough for an early retirement just before I reached 60.

Now I get to start over and do retirement hobbies like cooking, gardening, and playing golf.

My physical youth has passed me buy, but I have the mindset of a 21 year old Mod. i could possibly go back to being that Mod if Trudeau doesn't win the next election because I'll have a lot to celebrate.

Yeah I felt that way in my mid 30s. I really blossomed around 29 but those years 15-29 when I had maximum opportunity and potential for fun I squandered because I was so unsure of myself in those developmental years. I stupidly (and naively) looked to my parents for guidance and all they wanted to do was control me)

I found myself in my early 30s attracting people in the 18-25 year age group who liked my confidence, but a lot of what I experienced I could have done many years before.

I too spent a lot of time infront of the tv a youngster
One day when I turned 25 I had a quarter life crisis, and thought that life had passed me by.
I decided to create a bucket list so I don't leave this world unforfilled, it's never to late to do what you want to do.

No, I feel like my youth is waiting for me to release my death grip on it.

I never stopped feeling like a youth, or acting like one.

^ I interviewed Steve-O once when he was doing promotional stuff for the first Jackass movie. It was the middle of the afternoon and he was really drunk which made it a difficult interview.

It's pretty hard to feel as though my youth has passed my by if I have a young mind and spirit.