I know all too well how you feel. I always thought I would have accomplished more in my life so far, but I haven't yet found quite the right combination of factors to make everything happen that I would have liked. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm waiting for already.

But the good news is that you are far from too old to regain the use of your gifts and use them to make your life more what you want it to be...and neither am I. Hell, my mom didn't have anything resembling a career until she turned 35, so I figure I now have three more years before I'm allowed to feel really bad. ;-)

Wallow for a little while if you have to (I usually do when I feel like that), but don't let it control your life and predict your destiny. If you can reach a point where you can use what you're feeling to fuel some introspection and some hard thinking about what you want (and how to get it), you'll be ahead of a lot of folks out there. *hug*

I feel like I'm in the same boat. I've even gone one step further and become the unemployed bum as well.

I wonder though, would you feel better if you had less talent and were the same person as you are now, living to the extent of what you were giving? Isn't drive, focus and perserverence things given to as well? Yes there is laziness, but just like there are people who can train to become world class athelets, that doesn't mean that any Joe on the street can do the same, even with all the practicing in the world.

I've also been pondering the extent of why it matters that we don't waste our gifts? What is our responsiblity to life and society? In the same way were are surrounded by news that makes things seem worse than it is and media laced with the pick of crop for beauty and presense, we are also bombarded by all the people who make it, who had the drive to get further than they could and we forget all the other people who never get past their minium wage job in the fast food industry, despite their intellegence and creativtivity.
Where does this idea come that we've failed if we don't become one of the choosen few? That talent is something weird given, but drive is something that every man can find if they just stop being so lazy? It's like telling the fat person to eat less and exercise. There is some true in it, but not as much as we are lead to believe.
But I'm babbling, and these are still unanswered questions for me. I'm just asking you to question where these ideas come from to help you better judge how they should affect your life.

*hug*

it sounds like you're going through a crisis of identity, chris. as hammercock said, however, wallow for a while if you need to get it out, but don't let how you feel now determine who you are.

you not as magnificent a person as you want to believe you are, but neither are you as bad or useless as you feel now.

there will always be people accomplishing more, doing more with their lives, making "a difference", changing the world, bettering mankind, climbing mountains, running marathons for charity, and a million other things. but there are also countless millions of people, a several billion in fact, who are poor, starving, living in homes cramped and dirty, stuck in dead-end jobs, just trying to make ends meet. but we never hear about their stories. ya, we know they're out there, but they don't make the cover of time, are never given awards at the oscars, or win olympic medals.

I feel immature and like a failure many days. The past year and a half have been hard, and I am both farther along that I was, and not as far along as I'd like to be. A few months ago, my dad whose brother just passed away, told me that he realized relationships are important. He's 70. When I feel down in the dumps, I count myself lucky that I'm trying to be a better person now, so that I don't wake up like that in 40 years.

good luck. hugs. be patient. don't be too hard on yourself. self-awareness is the first step.

...It gets better. Been there, felt that. With all my advantages, why aren't I in orbit around Barnard's Star by now? (Yes, I used to ask myself that.) Having a dream helps (FTL in my case) but it's not the whole story. People are driven for REASONS, usually unhappy ones, some painful deprivation early in life. It's not actually something to wish for.
What you want is not to feel driven.
What you want is to feel inspired.
That you feel bad about not being driven is in fact your hunger to excel showing itself. The Greeks called it arete. The long hard struggle for me was to stop feeling driven so that I could notice that I am inspired. It took ...well, a decade, but then I didn't have many helpful hints.
The difficulty is that your Muse does not like to be micromanaged. Another might be ego--it certainly was for me. I got much happier when I realized that I was not in fact going to change the world. Though my ego felt it like a body blow.
You may not want to DO anything world-shaking. You may want to do a very little thing, but refuse it because it does not seem worthy enough. Pick a little thing that you genuinely want to do, no matter how trivial, and do it well. If the world isn't impressed, tough. If you aren't, remember that you didn't do it to impress yourself--you did it because you WANTED TO.
Practice that. Avoid should. Follow fun. Start small.
I always thought of tutoring as a fallback, a stopgap, something to do because I wasn't a Ph.D. winning the Nobel Prize and breaking the light barrier. It has very slowly dawned on me that literally thousands of people understand math and physics better and had their lives improved in some small way because of my "stopgap". I must reluctantly conclude that that is pretty cool. :)
I don't know what your little piece of magic is, but it is there. I know because you are a cool and talented person. Tune out the "should" and listen for your guilty pleasure. All of which is condensed into "Do what you love" --but really, as a tutor I can see that that expression needs expansion, just as I would do a rotten job if I just wrote F=ma on the board and said, "the rest is details".
--Your friendly neighborhood tutor, who stumbled across your LJ
recently and wishes you well.