Damn, I feel guilty a lot. Since I've come to realize that if I spent more time with constructive things I could do and be so much more I've become acutely aware of how much I fail to do. I'm trying to remedy that but I'm fighting years of ingrained bad habits. I feel exactly like this person who wrote ESR does (or did, hopefully)

When I was a boy, pretty much everybody would call me ‘genius’. I got top grades in school and yadda-yadda. I am now but a shadow of what people would think of me: I have really hit the point where my brains alone can’t take me any further. I have to work hard, but I don’t know how.

Eric goes on to give some great advice, such as take up something which you can be competent but where your 'intelligence' doesn't much help.

Personally I try to deal with my guilt over my not living up to what I should be in two ways. One is to take some measure of pride in things that I have done, be it doing well at some shitty job or playing my favourite song on guitar, or even cooking an awesome looking and tasting dinner. If I can't think of anything I've done that I can be proud of then I try to do something that I can be proud of, like a writer combating writer's block.

Another is to try and meditate a little on the bigger picture. I often do this while I'm hanging out with my wife, playing video games together, realizing that I could fuck up damn near everything else in my life and this is all I would really need (my relationship with me wife, not the game.) I try not to look on my potential (good lord I've come to hate that term) in terms of others, such as my peers who have become doctors, lawyers, etc in the time I've dicked around after high school, or people like Stephan Wolfram who wrote three book son particle physics by the time he was 14. I look at my life and see that I probably still have time to become great at something and all I need is to develop discipline.

Anyway (or as my grandpa says it, 'Anah-whey'), I'm just rambling at this point because I spend far too much time feeling guilty and not enough time dealing with the source of that guilt.