Not spending more time being young. I never really got the chance. Due to life circumstances I had to begin working basically as young as you can work in America. I've never had a free summer, never rushed a frat, never went to dances, etc. At the time it didn't bother me but now I'm older I've seen the effects. I similarly did nothing but school and work to pay bills in college. This has had such a profound effect on my self esteem the scale I have to measure it in is logarithmic. As a result in many ways I'm maladjusted to "normal" life. The song "Time" by Pink Floyd really resonates with me.

While I've moved on from losing the best years of my life (you're only young and innocent once) I overcompensated for a long time, and still sometimes to this day, by trying to do everything people invite me to do. Paradoxically this made my situation worse because more...stable people have a lot of people-oriented things they like to do and I approach all these things expecting to not keeping to do them. For example, going to the bar or clubs or whatever. These however lead to more regrets, like drinking too much when I was young and not taking better care of my health (thankfully nothing serious happened).

Now, the advantage of getting older is I can look back on this wide body of experience and use it to make calls on things. I know what I like to do. I know that I am not a very social person. Instead of trying to be a caricature of what I imagine a normal person is like I just work with what I have. It's been a long multi-decade process to get here but I am better.