I'm in my late 30s: Here's How I Wasted My Life in my 20s

He was just punching me in the face over and over again. We're lucky to have gotten out of that situation alive. I really messed up. I wasted my life. I fucked up the stupid stuff. Both I cringed at the thought of what my life was like in my twenties. I'm in my late thirties now. And this is the story of how I wasted my life in my twenties.

Now I think about that statement that was declared by George Bernard Shaw that youth is wasted on the young. And he's absolutely right, at least with me. I'm going to take you back to three pivotal moments that put me down this spiral where my twenties essentially became the biggest waste and I am lucky to even be alive. I reflect back on these three pivotal moments in my life, and I'm just playing them over and over again in my head like a nightmare version of Groundhog Day.

But I don't come out of it having won the girl or learn a bunch of skills to better myself. It's actually kind of a sad story. The moments are broken down into three, pleasing my parents, partying without purpose and not taking responsibility, starting with the first one pleasing my parents. They were immigrants. They moved here from Iran. They sacrificed a lot.

So at some point I wanted to repay them. I felt like I owed them something. So I listen to their pitch of pursuing a career in medicine. Being a doctor came with financially, security, prestige. If we're going to be honest with each other, they wanted to be able to brag about how their son is a doctor. And that is something that people look up to.

They assumed that this would lead to happiness, but it was actually quite the opposite. Because the truth is, success through finances and through prestige aren't exclusive. They're just being the doctor. Soccer is counselor. Realize I didn't want to do it. Now, of course, when I told them I was going to quit medicine, I was a letdown. Then that led me to chasing other careers.

Get rich quick schemes, multilevel marketing stuff, and tried and failed startups just so I can make money so that I can win their validation. The second part is partying without purpose. Well, because I wasn't where I wanted to be in my life financially, it started to party without purpose. I would binge drink. I was in a fraternity. It wasn't anybody's particular fault other than my own.

But I didn't know this at the time. I was just easily susceptible to an invitation to a party I was in. And this led to excessive drinking. This led to partying, staying out late. And of course, even one time I got into a fight with one of my roommates. We were on the road. I was driving a stick shift at the time, and he was just punching me in the face over and over again.

We're lucky to have gotten out of that situation alive. We're lucky we didn't hurt anybody else in the process. And I'm really lucky I didn't get pulled over and arrested because I would have gone to jail. Incidents like that weren't very rare. There were arguments. There were conversations and things had that didn't have any substance. In fact, I'm not even hanging out with the same people that I used to go out with and party.

The next thing that that led to was, of course, the lack of taking on more responsibility. I blamed circumstance, luck, other people for me not being where I wanted to be in life. I thought I was unlucky or I thought that was unfortunate. And some people are luckier than me and they get more opportunities and resources. And problem with that is when you don't take on more responsibility.

You waste the free time that you do have. You look for shortcuts, which is what I did with work, with any aspect of life. If I could find a shortcut to get there faster, I would do it because I didn't want to take on more responsibility. I didn't want to look in the mirror and take ownership of the mistakes that I made.

And that sums it up. You know, I look back on those days, and some were great, some were bad. It sucks to look back on your twenties and to think that all those years were wasted. It's a gut punch. It makes me cringe now that I'm in my late thirties. I wish I could go back in time and change things, but unfortunately that's not the case.

The only thing I can do is wish that if anybody is in their twenties and they see this, that they can make different choices for a better life.