From any hopes for a bounceback in career, a healthy love life, a more active friend circle .etc
For me it’s when you start entering your 50s. You start to think more and more in how you’ll end up being as you progress in age. Thoughts of the idea of how to maintain your health and how so much now is going to affect you set in. Thoughts on potentially retiring start setting in.
Things like getting friends and dates won’t be impossible, but they’ll be incredibly hard to get. Even if you have either, they most likely will not turn out how you expect to be whereas when you were younger, you had the time and energy on your side.
Careers and where you’ll work will just dry up where you could likely be stuck just doing retail work for the remainder of your life or any minimum wage position.
Very few people make a difference in their 50s or already had their life planned out to where they’re fine in their 50s. But a lot of the time, people really don’t.
I’d say it’s individual.
For anybody, I’d generally say at death. Even later in life you can still pick up at least some interesting hobbies, which will also help you find friends. I know a lot of people in ham radio and postage stamp collecting are older, already retired, yet they also attract young people.
Sure, learning may get harder, but the amount of free time will compensate for it.
You’re still a person, no matter if you’re 10, 20, 50, 80,… and you’re not the only one. So life just ends with death.
Myself? I don’t know. I can’t encourage myself. It feels like I am late to anything. I never dated, yet most people I know did so in middle school already. I didn’t yet learn any programming, yet I know people who did so since they were 13. One of my teachers was already fixing computers for others for money when he was just 10. I know someone who got CCNA certification mid high school. I know one 16 year old who seems to just know everything related to networking and self-hosting.
Meanwhile I only got my first proper computer when I was 14 and barely knew the concept of operating system. In 2 days I finally got Linux Mint installed on it, but I didn’t even know what a partition is.
It just feels like I am dumb and late to absolutely anything at this point.
Since I’ve spent like the past 1-2 years spiralling down into these thoughts, for myself I’d say 16-17 (I am 18 now). I just wish to be dead.
But if you’re asking because you feel like your life already ended, I am pretty sure you can still get back. You’re definitely not the only one feeling like that, and that alone already unites you with a bunch of people.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Don’t despair because you’re not following along an imaginary and self/societaly imposed “progress”/“achievement” path. You are still so very young and have endless possibilities in front of you. Take things at your own pace, learn new things for the sake of learning, and seek to better yourself incrementally as appropriate. Life will fall into place