Almost 29 and I am still the same as I was last year

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That's probably the biggest mental struggle I face besides my self-esteem. Something made me see achieving certain things in life as tests I had to pass and would lose them forever if I flunked on them. When I saw others being in relationships, I felt like I had failed the test and was doomed to spend the rest of my life single. I did have a short lived relationship when I was 21 but the fact it was short lived didn't allow it to truly sink in. I hope it will not be my only relationship.

Yes you can improve and become more mature but catch up with your chronological age? The maximum speed you can mature at is one year per year. That means that if you're 5 years behind, if you go at top speed the best you can do is ensure that gap doesn't become any wider.

It's like two world class runners. Bob is five seconds behind Adam and Adam is running at the maximum possible speed. If Bob also runs at the maximum possible speed he won't catch up to Adam but he'll ensure the gap doesn't get any wider.No. I'm not being sarcsatic. More like I'm projecting my own feelings that I'm behind everyone else that my rivals/frenemies all achieved that stuff by the time they were 25.

I know they say life begins at 30. It's true. That reminds me of the guy who was my neighbor before I moved. I remember when he first moved into the neighborhood a few houses away from me. He was about 30 years old and his life was just beginning. He and his wife had just bought the house a short distance from me. He had already completed his bachelor of design and he was a well paid graphic designer.

So yes, his life begun at 30. Because he spent his 20s setting up his life so that it could begin at 30. Setting up your life takes years so if you want life to begin at 30 you have to do all the setup before 30. In his 20s he get a bachelor of design, a well paid job, got married and saved enough to buy a house. Thus by 30 he was ready to begin his life.

I don't think life ends at 30. It's just that I've observed it takes about 5 to 10 years to setup your life and most people do this setup in their late teens or 20s. So if you begin the setup at 30, you might not be finished until 40 and by then you only have about 40 years to live (or 30 years to live in which you don't have arthritis and/or dementia).

Yeah I've heard stories about people who met the live of their life when they were more than 50 years old? How inspiring. And then they spent about 30% of their lives together before they succumbed to old age. If you met your partner at 55 and then spent the last 25 years of your life with them, wouldn't you envy someone who married young and lived to see their 50th anniversary?

It's the same with finances. If you buy your first house at 40 you may not live long enough to buy your second house. Those who own multiple investment properties started young. Given time you can reap the rewards of exponential growth but if you start when you're middle aged you won't live long enough to become wealthy.

It's the same with career. If you start late you have less time to climb the ladder. As for wanting to be a CEO who's dating a supermodel, that depends on who I'm comparing myself too. I don't want to be the best, it's just that when I compare myself to my rivals/frenemies, I know that if they accomplished something, that proves that it's possible and that I should have done what they did. None of these people did any superhuman feats. They just did normal feats without screwing up. They made the right choices. They didn't waste years of their lifes on the wrong choices. No resume gaps and they met their partners when they were still young and pretty, not when both they and their partners were middle aged.

Since my company has about 170,000 employees, I'm not expecting to be CEO and management roles don't interest me at all. I just want to get promoted into something more technical and more interesting. The girl I'm dating now could pass for a supermodel. She's skinny. She's fit. She runs triathlons and she smiles a lot. The trouble is I'm not sure if she really likes me.

That's another thing with me. There's such a huge social gap in my life that just seems to get wider all the time. I also read and have heard that social oppurtunities decrease as you get older so my already small chances are getting even smaller. It really hit me hard when I went back to school early this year because most people there are hyper focused on their cellphones and if you don't know anyone on campus, no one wants to talk to you. This only reinforces the fears of the shelf lives I mentioned earlier.

Exactly. It's the same for me and people wonder why I'm depressed. They just expect me to be happy even though it's impossible to catch up with my chronological age.True. We're the same age so we both remember a time without smartphones.

I read somewere that 14 - 21 is the age of socialisation (also the rght time to start dating). Well 14 - 21 wasn't the age of socialisation for me. It was the of watching Star Trek. By myself. It was the age of losing friends. Some of them wanted to hang out with their girlfriends all the time so I felt like a third wheel. Some of them wanted to smoke pot all the time which meant they didn't want to do anything, just sit around. Some of them went to different high schools and some of them dropped out of high school.

So yeah, late 20s/early 30s won't be like 14 - 21 was supposed to be. No parties. No picking up girls in college. Get used to dating girls who are 30+. And you better have a good job because whoever you date, the first question they ask will be "what do you do". In high school/college you weren't expected to have a career. Everyone was on a level playing feild because everyone was just a student.

It was a lot easier at that age. A good age to learn the ropes but we didn't avail ourselves of those opportunities so now we have to learn dating on hard mode.

A hard mode on the level of Battletoads.

That's an apt way of putting it.

I could never beat that game back then and I don't think I'd fare much better today due to its programming. I am better at video games in general today, though. As a kid, I did the same things over and over partly because of how Aspergers wired my brain but I eventually got tired of seeing the same sequences repeated so much. That's how I am also seeing my social experiences.

I've have so much failure behind me and it's discouraged me for many years. Whenever I see other aspies having success while I am still struggling, it makes me wonder why I can't have the same. I know comparisons are not helpful but I can't stop wondering if things will ever get better or if they will remain bad.

It all depends. For me, I feel like North Korea's missile program.

With failure, you have time to reflect, assess, and correct. So maybe I fail more than most...but I also have a deep knowledge base on what NOT to do. Those are the roots of most advice I give. What worked? What did I do the most often in getting dates and relationships? What mistakes did I make to mess up good things? Did I fix those and have more success later? Did I grow from that experience?

After I started figuring things out, having been married with kids a few years, I started wondering, ok, what's the next level? I've come this far and can't help thinking there's got to be more work to do. So I go back to some gold nuggets from different philosophers, religious leaders, motivational speakers, and overall what most consider "successful" businessmen and leaders. Updated my reading material, started putting some new things into practice. Got positive results, and I'm always in the mood for sharing.

So...if better means you stop working to get what you want, then no, it only gets worse. What improves is your practice getting to know people, and eventually you realize you stopped noticing what all you actually go through in a day. It becomes routine.

If better means a continual process of growing and building both your abolities to understand and meet people where they are, winning friends, gaining influence, and even getting a LTR, then, yeah, every day you take a positive step towards those good things is defo better.

Yeah this was irrational thinking, your last sentence is good though.

I do wish you good luck with getting past the mental struggle. Sounds like you are already somewhat self-aware.




Sorry but what's this BS?

No, there is no such thing as "maximum speed of maturing" being "one year per year".




Again quite irrational thinking, what does it matter if it is 40 years or 50 years. Either is better than sitting on your ass and counting the years and losing them doing nothing.




Why do you need to look at others instead of enjoying your own life when it gets going well is what I don't get.

Again, good luck to you too with letting go of this negative thinking and looking ahead instead.

Last edited by itsme82 on 24 Apr 2017, 6:42 pm, edited 6 times in total.

I just hope I won't have to wait until my 40's. I still want to be young when or if my next relationship happens. I know sex shouldn't be the main deal for a relationship but I have a lot of unfulfilled fantasies and I sometimes worry women will tire of sex by their 30's or so. I also worry geeky or nerdy girls will lose their interests. I know those are irrational thoughts but I do remember meeting an aspie girl who my aunt told me liked anime but when I brought up the subject, she told me she had lost interest in it. There's just no way I could be with someone who prefers shopping for clothes, blabbering on her cellphone, only wants to read the bible or sappy fiction, and wants to go to church twice a week.

People who really love something usually don't lose interest in it. My wife is still an astronomy geek (which has nothing to do with her job) at the age of 35. Regarding sex, most women reach their sexual peak in their 30s (though this is very individual). And lots of much older people (myself included) are still very active, thank you.

I'm turning 30 this year and I still haven't done most of the things on this list.

http://www.lifehack.org/274987/11-thing ... ef=sidebar

Why do you care about a random website's opinion? You define success for yourself.

In that list, I didn't do items 2, 8, 9 and 11, and I will never bother with opportunism for fake relationships like it suggests for item 6. (I'm helpful however, regardless of the rest of the suggestion for that item.)

I happen to be working on 8, 9 and 11 since then (past 30). Can't really interpret what 2 means in practice.


As for your ice cream thing. For fuckssake I'm definitely past 30. Yet I don't feel like my life is an ice cream, at all. Lol maybe at age 70 or something. But I will still occupy myself with good things even then.

I just can't understand this fixation on age.

In my experience, it's because life moves painfully slow for me and it feels like everyone else's life is going much faster. I don't know if it's true or if the depression I suffer from distorts how I see things. I sometimes get fears I won't have my next girlfriend until I am in my 50's and I really don't want to live that long if I have to continue being lonely and dateless until then.