Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
I guess the first thing to note is that in a hundred and fifty years, you'll be dead and unless you're one in a million or maybe ten million, nobody alive will know you existed. So it's not a competition, there's no prize ceremony at the end for the guy who did the most stuff, there's no one way you should be living your life.<p>The second thing is, the past is dead and gone. You can't do anything about it. You can learn to let go of it or you can let it consume your present and deny you whatever future you're trying to make for yourself. There is only now.<p>Third, you've got to make time to do the things that you enjoy; unless studying computer science is the thing that you enjoy most in the world, you're going to be miserable if you don't do some other stuff. Carmack and Romero spent all their spare time writing code because that's what they loved to do. If that's what you loved to do, you'd have been doing the same thing.<p>Finally, you're still very young. You have many years ahead of you and what you think will be fulfilling will change, probably more than once. Your life will not turn out how you think it will. That's fine, that's just the way it goes.<p>That's all I have.