I read the article and fight with this from a different angle.

My son was diagnosed with cancer at 3, then during chemo it became abundantly clear that he had far more severe autism than we originally thought. Could have been made worse by the chemo and trauma; no real way to know.

Now my wife and I have had to give up all the dreams we had for when I retired from the military. A few good moves means that I actually retired at 40, though more modestly than I planned. But we will forever be taking care of him.

So we struggle with the unlived dreams often.

We have to distinguish "our" dreams from, let's say, cultural ones. A lot of what we want, what we perceive as living a full life, having fun and so on comes from culture (and increasingly in the last decades/centuries, with mass media).

Besides that, we can't achieve everything, we could not be everywhere when something interesting happens there, at the very least because a lot of those things happened in the past, or do everything because physical condition, economics, or extra conditions (i.e. being an astronaut).

So you draw lines. This is what I can do, I can go, I can be. You may push boundaries, but in the end it will always be more things outside than inside. And try to be the best on what matters on those boundaries.

I had the same mindset about wanting to be good at a lot of things, working on myself, not "wasting time", but now in my mid thirties I figured that if I really wanted to do something, I'd be actually doing it, and a lot of these goals boil down to "it would be cool if I was good at X", and aren't actually things I care about.

One of the best lessons I've learned was that the happiest I've been (so far) was a time when I was dirt poor, while chasing my dream that everyone assured me ends in poverty.

Things have changed, but it takes some of the financial anxiety away when I remember that I would still give up everything to go back to that time.

I would love to be a star ship captain in a universe with faster than light travel. Or a surgeon. But you know actual life is good and I do enjoy watching DS9 with my young adult son, Benjamin. And reading about all the other cool things. It is better to live an imperfect experience than just wish for an ideal imagined experience. And better to act wrongly than to be right but do nothing.

> Sometimes, dreams can just be dreams.

If (for any reason) we know that dreams cannot be achieved, there is a clear cut. And while it might take time to accept the situation, this realization is Stoic/Zen.

It is way harder if there is a chance, we try, yet fail. When do we keep trying, and how do we do so without losing hope piece by piece? It might be even harder when the dream is not something like "win a gold medal in snowboarding", "build a unicorn startup" or "publish a bestseller". But it is in the line of having kids, or being healthy, or other things that a lot of people take for granted.

A life well-lived is really what we should all hope for. What that actually means varies by person.

Sitting and thinking for 10 minutes about snowboarding when your knees are blown out is 10 minutes you could have used differently.

Everyone has regrets but my attitude is: I can’t change the past, but I can change the future.

> And yet, somehow, the more years go by, the more rarely I watch snowboarding videos.

I'd argue that snowboarding wasn't author's "dream" to begin with. I think it's reductive and unfair to compare your "oh it would be cool to do that" with someone else's actual dream: as in, a passion they pour their life and soul into. Being great at anything takes much more than a passing "it would be neat to be able to do X."

And achieving a dream (say, competing at the Olympics) is a lot less glamorous than a casual tourist might imagine.

As I always say - do what you will regret NOT doing once you are old.

Appropos of nothing, snowboarding is so unbelievably fun once you’re past the immediate beginner phase of painfully flip-flopping down a slope, that it’s very reasonable to be a tad angry at not being able to live that dream.

> You know what else I’d like to do besides becoming a great snowboarder? I want to learn kung fu. I’d also love to be a lot better at video games, get my Yu-Gi-Oh! hobby back on, and become at least fluent enough for everyday conversation in oh, I don’t know, eight more languages.

I think this sort of underplays the feeling of "lives unlived, paths not taken" that everyone gets hit with. Just flattens the whole thing that had been building up to that point, instead of allowing it to open up further.

There is an analogy to be made between the space of human possibility and the space of possible Turing machines: in an unconstrained machine everything is possible and nothing is probable. If you accept constraints (e.g. the shape of a language) then most things become impossible but some things become probable. That is you gain access to some space and lose access to other space. It's a very fundamental trade-off and it's foolish to worry about it too much, especially considering that there is always some level of zoom where every hero, every winner of every game, is irrelevant.

Indeed the underlying insight that our lives are arbitrarily small and irrelevant, (yes, even the greatest titans of politics, tech, science and art), that drives the tech-elite long-now accelerationist ideal. Every life is characterized by [trade-offs + luck] and none of them have any meaning unless we get through the Great Filter. (Sure, this belief is mostly a post hoc rationalization to just do what you wanted in the first place, but I appreciate the attempt to paper over the naked self-interest.)

Never let your memes be dreams nor your dreams be memes.

Have you thought about absolutely monster knee braces? And then daily squats. They worked for me. Unfortunately now it’s my neck that’s trying to paralyze me, which would be such a not fun outcome.

I struggled quite a lot with this. I want to do everything, learn everything thus I ended up mastering nothing.

I've learned to play few instruments in last four years so I can jam with people but I still feel it's not enough.

As I got older I started to value relationships much more and overall became a happier person.

But still the knowledge that I never be a skilled doctor, physicist, exceptional chef, biologist, blacksmith, economist, successful entrepreneur and many more will still somehow hunt me.

As someone with less than stellar knees who skis a lot, ski/ride powder. It's way easier on the body and more fun too. And maybe skip the big jumps. You can definitely still ride big/steep enough mountains for a big adrenaline rush.