One of the wisest and most succinct things I’ve read on this site.
- Sylvia Plath
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-ta...
Learn from it, and then apply what you can for the benefit of older you. Regret is pernicious.
But you can still mourn all the things you didn’t do because of the choices you made.
Same way that I’m sad I cannot drink both the banana and apple shake at the same time.
https://m.soundcloud.com/uncomplication/the-ladder-to-the-to...
Live in the now and make the now the way you want it to be.
Sometimes (most of the times for the "normal" person), this is impossible, contradictory, conflicting...His approach to the subject is realistic, effective...Does it sound good? definitely no...That's life..
You can look at it in a positive way though...work with the resources you have to get the best from them...maybe not the life you want, but the best one you can get from your current reality.
I still dream about FIRE and working as a 1-3 person studio working on silly creative little games for the joy of it.
I also work on a game I like and have played it a fair bit without being paid to do so.
It is hard to break into games, and harder still to find work on game projects you want to work on, but it is possible. Lots of people do.
In another response you're saying you are 32. you are little more than one(!) decade into your adult and professional life. Christoph Waltz barely was making a living acting until he was 50 years old. With the exception of maybe being a soccer world class athlete you can pretty much still do anything you want.
An older guy I used to work with in China who was sent to some labor farm for half a decade and who only went on to study in his thirties told me when this discussion came up one time "don't worry, if you're younger than 45 you can just start over, everyone here has done it five times"
I have said, that, if I could go back to being 20, I would want the body, but not the mind that went with it.
I've usually been forced to take the paths I've taken. Pretty much every big advance in my life has been heralded by fecal matter impacting an air circulation device. Being forced into early retirement, by SV’s notorious ageism, is an example. It really pissed me off, but now that I’ve been out of the rat race for a few years, I am kicking myself for not doing it sooner.
If my life would have gone the way I wanted, it would have sucked like a supermassive, galaxy-core, black hole.
(For OP, you can still go do 20 pushups, learn a simple guitar song to the point of self-enjoyment, write a small video game that makes you and your family laugh.)
I did a lot of job-hopping the past few years looking for the right place to work, and I finally found it. I look for companies that respect work-life balance, don't want me to work too hard, and have excellent engineering culture that values high quality work and has managed to retain their senior employees. I deliver great work, they make money off of the code I ship, everybody is happy. I can crunch every once in a while but we all understand that it sucks and isn't a long-term strategy.
My father was a funeral director & coroner. He would NEVER claim he "loves what he does", but he used his career to build a life for him and his family. I look at my career the same way.
What do I ACTUALLY want to do? Develop video games, make music, write fiction. But nobody is shelling out for that, and even if they are, I'm not good enough at it to compete. I know if I pursued any of my passions, I would have to work much harder for much less pay, and be treated much more poorly by my employer. I know my limits and I know that I cannot thrive in a situation like that, I've done it before, no thanks.
Part of growing older is mourning the person you could have been. If I had a time machine, I would have stayed in better shape, practiced guitar more, invested my time more wisely. But I can't, and honestly my life has turned out pretty great by trusting my instincts.