always feeling like I've wasted my time

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I am always frustratingly thinking that between the ages of 20 and 30 that I just wasted my time and NOT doing things I seem to think most people in that age range do such as having a number of friends to hang out with, go out to parties, pubs, bars, and clubs and having enjoyable time drinking and taking selfies on a saturday night, go to great concerts and go to exciting places for the day and get a boyfriend or girlfriend and having the greatest moments of their lives and already getting the sense of fulfilment and contentment. I feel like I didn't use my time wisely and properly planning out as to what to. At 20, I did none of those things except a concert I went to, at 21, I didn't do those things, at 22, didn't do those things, at 23, didn't do those things, at 24, didn't do those things, at 25, still didn't do those things, at 26, didn't do those things, at 27, didn't do those things, at 28, didn't do those things and at 29, I still didn't do those things. It seems as though it is a requirement to DO those things when you are in that age range.

I feel like I wasted my life between the ages of 18 and 23. Every middle-aged person I know all say how fun and exciting their days were in their late teens and early 20s, when they went to pubs and clubs and had jokes and laughs with different people, and got in at 4am or later, and had rides on the back of guys motorcycles, and dressed up and danced and drank and met people.
Even my boyfriend (a shy, introverted man) somehow managed to go on exotic vacations with a big group of friends when he was around 19 or 20. He has loads of photographs and memories of all the places he's been to with friends. OK he's no longer in touch with these friends now as they went on to have families and moved away and he doesn't use social media, but at least he had fun during his younger years like most normal people do.

Even an Aspie I know of has more of a social life than me. He's been clubbing a number of times and often gets invited out with a group of friends and has even been to Las Vegas and got drunk there, and now he's just come back from a friend's stag do (bachelor party) in Spain. And these are just men he works with, so I assume they're probably NTs.

So I know how you feel. Seeing others your age or younger, whether they're NT or not, going out and doing things with friends, makes you feel like a loner.

Some might feel that they wasted their lives going to pubs for years. Others may bitterly regret marrying someone they met in a pub while under he influence of alcohol. Some may regret the acquisition of a social disease from someone they met in a pub. There can be all sorts of reasons for regret in life.

It may be more healthy for you to focus on what it is you want and pursue that. If you focus on the "fun" you imagine others are having and become consumed to envy, you may find that you come to the end of your life with little to show for it.

If you cultivate your own interests and appreciate the people you meet along the way that may have similar interests, you might find a more rewarding life. Don't look too much to the past with regret. Such preoccupation often leads people to neglect the present which results in an empty future.

OH crap, me too. Story of my life!

No one in college liked me. No one invited me to house parties or concerts.

Now that I am 31, it is too late.

However, you'd probably hate nightclubs anyways. They are very loud and crowded.

I feel like I've wasted all my replies to you on this obsession.

My deepest sympathies. I totally relate to what the OP is saying.

For at least a decade I've had a pervasive feeling that I'm wasting my time with everything I choose to do. I often feel that I'm making very poor decisions about the use of my time. I call it Nero's Syndrome, a sense that I'm fiddling while Rome burns, and that I'll suffer dreadfully for it.

I don't feel I've wasted much of my time in the past though. I wish I'd been more outgoing and gregarious, and to have made more friends, but that wasn't really a decision, it was a case of insufficient skill. And as the past can't be put right, I rarely beat myself up over it. All my concerns over wasting time are about the present and the future.

This thread may be one year old but I'm at a similar position in life, except I'm turning 20 and realising I didn't enjoy my high school years as much as I should've, if I was even able to. I didn't get invited anywhere, I didn't even date which should've been expected since I even had trouble talking with people of the same gender, didn't go to parties (once again, not invited anywhere). I spent most free time at home. My daily routine was waking up, school, home then sleep and repeat.

As such I feel like I wasted time at home that could've been spent meeting new people outside of school, given that most of my "school friends" were giant jerks that mocked me at any opportunity. They even used autistic as an insult.

If you're looking at this thread still, I hope at least this makes you feel a bit better I suppose. We all waste some parts of our life, I guess. I just have no clue how to cope with it.

I read somewhere that this sense of lost potential is so common with people that it's become a useful Barnum statement for bogus members of the psychic industry. And I think many of us have this idea that we're less happy than we should be because we've taken a wrong turn.

In the case of an Aspie, there would likely be some truth in that idea, simply because of the impairment of social skills (not that I'm entirely convinced that we're necessarily more miserable and misguided than anybody else - how do you measure these things anyway?).

But it doesn't just happen with social matters. I see it in myself even when the subject matter has nothing directly to do with other people. I wrote a program recently to find duplicate song titles in collections of mp3s. Presumably because of my brain wiring, my thinking was that if I tried to make it look for matching whole titles, it wouldn't find them all because sometimes a song title is written slightly differently. So I decided to get the program to extract individual words instead and to compare those, and to compile a big list, divided into groups where each group was a list of every song that had a particular word in it. The result was that it was better at finding matches than it would have been if it had looked for whole song titles, but that it generated far too many unwanted matches, which made the whole thing almost useless because it was as hard to pick out the salient matches as it would have been to just look through the original list of mp3s and find the duplicates that way. In hindsight it would have been better to accept a bit of imperfection and written a simpler program that just looked for matching whole titles. If I'd been less averse to minor imperfections and more able to keep glancing at the overview of what I was trying to do (i.e. if I'd thought like a neurotypical), I wouldn't have wasted all that time. And of course my other wrong turn was not to share my thinking but to barge in and do the job as if I were the only person on the planet.

Utimately I think all we can do is to keep doing post-mortems on bad outcomes of individual endeavours, and to try to learn from our mistakes. I think larger matters such as "I'm not a millionaire" and "I'm not the life and soul of the party" are too big to tackle.