Writing this article has been devastating. It should have been, that’s how I know it’s real, but I definitely wasn’t ready for the emotional rollercoaster it brought me.
Let me tell you what I won’t do in this article. I won’t try to give you a secret recipe for recovering the lost time, I won’t tell you there’s not going to be any consequence for the years of nothingness we lived. I won’t do any of that because it’s not true, and if anybody ever tries to tell you this you should know in advance that they’re trying to sell you something.
Those of you who lived an experience similar to mine (most of those who read my articles, I suppose) will make a connection. If you do, chances are it’s going to be devastating for you as well.
Embrace that feeling, because it’s going to keep you company for a very long time.
Table of Contents
My personal moment of recognition
I lived through this realization during the first months of 2025. From the outside, my life looked reasonably functional: job, gym, karate, occasional hikes. Nothing unusual, apparently.
Well, this is technically correct. My life was, for all intents and purposes, “full”. I had what I wanted, and I earnt it all by myself. What else could a person desire?
I talked about that in another moment, but I’ll mention it again. At the start of 2025 I met a person whose life had been genuinely lived. It was full of friendships, experiences, stories; the kind of person you could listen to for hours. That’s when something broke inside of me: what could I add to the conversation? What part of my life played the role that their stories played in theirs?
The true, simple and soul-ravaging answer: nothing. The more I thought about it, the more I thought about nothing at all. I couldn’t help but notice how I spent my life going to school at first, then at university, then at my job, and never developed my own personality, a passion, something worth talking about. To be fair to myself, in the last couple of years I did do just that, but it was just too little, too late.
The awareness hit me like a train, and prime Mike Tyson couldn’t have hurt me as much as it did. I was left with little bits of recent life kind of lived and an empty history that I could not fill anymore.
The first thing to do
I was (kind of) left with two choices: despair and dwell into a past that I could not change, or take matters into my own hands and start doing something about it. I chose the first one.
Needless to say, it was the wrong choice. The thing is, I didn’t really have one (that’s why I said “kind of”). Do something about it? Do what, exactly? Make a list, set goals, build habits, take action? What will it accomplish? How will it help with the crushing feeling that time has finally caught up with my life-wasting ways?
It’s not the wrong thing to do, but I dare to say that it should not have been my first priority, and neither it should be for you. If you’ve just realized that years of your life have gone and you’ve got nothing to show for it, then you might be tempted to start doing everything together to make up for the lost time.
I won’t sugarcoat that for you, lost time is lost for a reason. Both the choices I (kind of) had after my realization are the same you had after your realization (or you will have, if it still has to come), and neither of them should be your priority.
Grieving is a natural part of the process, there’s no denying that. I won’t tell you that it’s useless, I won’t tell you that you shouldn’t feel pain. Yes, you should feel it, you just found out something terrible.
Also, making a run for it will actually be sort of useless. I also tried to run fast enough to catch what I’d missed, and discovered that I couldn’t. Even if I could, I’d be doing it from obligation rather than genuine desire. What good would it do me, then?
So, what should have been my priority after my mind-shattering epiphany? And what should be yours? I think the first thing we should do is to stop. Stop trying to recover what can’t be recovered.
There are experiences that belong to specific ages and stages of life. A childhood with close friends. An adolescence full of experimentation. Early adulthood lived outward rather than inward. These windows exist, and then they close. No amount of effort can reopen them, and trying to chase them down as an adult is more exhausting than useful.
Accepting this is painful, of course. I still haven’t done it completely, that’s part of the reason I’m still in therapy. But it’s also necessary, because whatever you want to build in your life from now on cannot be built on a foundation of grief for what’s gone.
You already lost your past. If you don’t let it go, it will cost you your present, too, and you’re way too important to waste your present.
The land of no going back
Now that you know that you wasted your best years and you’ve grieved enough, what are you going to do? Are you going to acknowledge the issue or will you ignore it?
Here comes the subtle cruelty of life: you can’t ignore it.
You can try to live without being influenced by your newfound awareness, but you’ll be reminded of it every time you’ll talk to someone and they’ll tell you how much fun they had at parties in their twenties, traveling, dating people and making memories with lifelong friends. Despite all your efforts, it will come back stronger and stronger every time.
It’s as if you had crossed a bridge that collapses behind you as soon as you step foot on land. You can’t go back and forget, and you know it. This sounds nothing less than terrifying, but it’s actually a blessing in disguise: now you have a sort of compass for you life. The only direction you have is forward. You can try and stay there, where the remains of the bridge are looking at you from the bottom of a ravine, but it will only give you more pain. It looks like a curse, but it’s clarifying.
After the grieving
A time will come when the grieving stops being so absolute and petrifying that it immobilizes your life. Your mind will adjust to this new condition, not because the feeling went away, but because you can only live that way for so long. So, when the time comes, you must decide what you want to do with what remains of your life.
Funnily enough, my life didn’t change much before and after the awareness. I was already on the right track, my pain was caused by the realization that I had been on the wrong one for most of my life. It’s not necessarily the same for you, though, so I want say something that helps with your next phase.
Life usually goes through stages for a reason, and that’s because in each stage of life you are surrounded by other people in the same stage of life that need and want to live the same experiences as you. You help each other with your issues, you find friends, you fall in love, you travel, you do all the things that you are supposed to look back at with nostalgia in the future.
Now, in our case this is the time for something that is both unsettling and liberating: all the stages, the patterns, the “seasons” of life have been thrown out of the window, and you have no guidelines anymore. Scary? Maybe. Freeing? Definitely.
Don’t try to follow a predetermined path, there is no path for people like us. We left it a long time ago, now it’s time to build our own. And it will lead us exactly where we want to.
Do you want to start a martial art? Do it, your time is yours and yours alone, do with it as you please. Do you want to write a book? Go for it, who’s stopping you? Do you want to travel the world? Well, time to start planning and saving up (trust me, this is a hard one, but then again, no one can tell you what to do).
Everything has gotten much more chaotic. Embrace the chaos, make it your new home. You are finally free to live your life the way you mean to, and you’ve got nothing to jeopardize, since you wasted so many years.
Me? I’ve decided I want to become a beast at karate, or at least as much of a beast as I can possibly be, and I’m working towards it. I’ve decided I want a six pack, so I’m training hard and eating correctly. I’ve decided I want put my mind on a different set of tracks, so I’m going to therapy. I’ve decided I want to travel more, so I’m searching for cheap weekend flights as often as I can.
The dangers of overcompensation
This is an issue you might encounter. What I described in the final part of the last chapter sounds like I’m trying to do everything at once, but it’s actually very different. I am undertaking so many life-improving challenges because it took me a long time to start them all. First I went to the gym, then karate, then food, and so on and so forth. There have been several timespans of several months between the start of a challenge and the next one. It’s more akin to a marathon than to a sprint.
I have spent most of my life with a joypad in my hands, or junk food, or a phone used to doomscroll, or simply laying on my bed wondering why I wasn’t good enough for other people to be my friends. If I had decided all of a sudden that I wanted to stop everything at the same time and start a completely different set of habits I would have failed immediately.
You are not choosing between starting quick or starting slow. You are choosing between starting slow and failing.
A summary of what matters
If I had to reduce everything to a few basic principles, it would be these.
Accept the pain first. The grief about lost time is real and it needs to be felt, not suppressed or bypassed. It will pass more quickly if you let it move through you than if you try to outrun it.
Distinguish what’s gone from what remains. Some things can’t be retrieved. Accept this clearly, completely, and then direct your energy entirely toward what’s still possible.
Don’t sprint. You’re building new patterns into a system that was built for different ones. That takes time. Pace yourself accordingly.
Follow what actually interests you. Not what you think you should want, and especially not what society wants from you, that ship has long sailed. You want what pulls you forward. The motivation will hold longer, and the results will be yours.
In the end, it does matter
You can’t recover lost time, but you can stop losing more of it.
That’s what turning your life around means: not returning to some better version of the past, but a different relationship with the present. Believe it or not, some people actually do it the other way around: they live their youth and waste the rest of their lives. You’re well on track for doing the opposite.
It’s enough. It’s more than enough.
Start there.