I'm 61 and am dealing with this question on a daily basis as my children are grown, I'm retired from my job, have two college degrees, have written a book, etc.

Everyone works on their life/age-appropriate goals like going to school, getting a job/occupation, getting married, raising kids, becoming an expert in one's field, retiring. You kind of have to do those things? They aren't really goals of an individual but of the species

You have to figure out who you as an individual are and become the best individual you can and that takes an entire life. I changed majors in college, back in 1971, and graduated the next year with a different degree than I started with. When I turned 50 I started thinking about what I would "regret" when I got to be "old" (85 :-) and realized that I still loved the major I had changed from, back when I was 20, because of my anxiety issues. Now, at 50 I wasn't the same person anxiety-wise so I was able to explore going back to that field; I took a course and loved it and got another degree over 5-6 years and then went on to graduate school. I'm still using that degree in my life now and enjoying its use.

As we are living, there are lots of choices to be made and lots of reasons for making the choices we make. However, as we go along, things shift and we decide we might have made different choices or the reasons we went left instead of right no longer apply and now we'd like to explore right? Interests and opportunities change throughout life and it's not all about the "obvious" choices about whether to have children or not or become a doctor or astrophysicist that set you on a path that can't be altered later; nothing is that set in stone.

I was talking in another post about not having paid attention in math in high school so I could not become a good computer programmer but there are many many other aspects of me and computers beside just my affinity/interest in programming! I am not "less" because I cannot become a good programmer; I own three sites and do my own Web design, which I love too. I've been working on writing for nearly 20 years now and have written novels and academic papers and appeared on professional panels, etc.

It's all just living life! It is kind of natural, you just have to pay attention to yourself.