I wasted 10 years on chess!

If your goal was to improve, then unless you played a lot on another site or unless you've been very active OTB, your chess.com stats and activity don't indicate that you've dedicated all that much time to the game. 

Playing an OTB tournament once every few months and playing 800 internet blitz games in a span of 4 years is different than wasting 10 years on chess. 

I've played maybe as much on other sites... And I've spent maybe around as much time OTB. So, you could multiply my time by 3. Certainly, that, too may seem like not enough but, I believe, had I spent half the time on studying I'd be a much stronger player - perhaps having a rating north of 2000. So, from that point of view, the waste of time has been monumental.

Good luck to you in achieving that goal. From what I have experienced, it looks like playing alone won't do it. A systematic dedicated study time is necessary for improvement. I suggest getting the premium membership if you, like me, are lazy to read books. The Lessons are pretty good here and that's what I'm primarily doing nowadays.

I have even seen a good deal of others spend a great deal more time on the game than I did. I've seen people play about 20k games and their ratings have not improved much. So, yeah, I believe that playing alone won't do that - moreover it can be an epic waste of time. Speaking of which, I better go back to studying.

Enter Bell.

Or a, to annihilate the poetic flair in all seriousness, a Roche Lobe. The honours shall be received by Auto Bunny, for encouraging dormancy, a pinnacle moment in our conquest about cataclysmic var. stars. But wait... The instigation of not a cataclysmic variable star but a cataclysmic crisis, remains highly probable, and as the wavefunctions deprive us of confidence, as confidence intervals fall to their demise, as statistics is deemed protean, we cannot but anticipate this devastating event. The rhyme has been extirpated. It is long gone. It shall not return. 

Chapter 2 - Retaliation

Abruptly, the next generation William Wordsworth or Emily Dickinson decided that they could abide with these physically demanding tasks. They did not wish to succumb to the cucumbers of these mere stars. How very erroneous they were in classifying the stars as mere. It was only minutes later that some arbitrary entity exited from its lionised cocoon and bellowed, "OMNISCIENT BEINGS ARE FIRING HUGE KNOWLEDGE MISSILES."

Unfortunately, for the cataclysmic variable stars, the poets interpreted this as a means of invigoration, and at the very hearkening, their demeanours instantly lit up like Cepheid had forced them to undergo tyranny. They did not realise that the entity was alluding to the classification of stars based on colour. Hence, they gleaned adequate vivacity to completely eradicate these stars. It was a cataclysm beyond all - a cataclysm that destroyed the original owners of the soul. The soul, a powerful thing; the soul, playing an ubiquitous role in practically every aspect of power; the soul, a powerful thing. The soul, oh how it got tampered with. After what seemed like a perpetual amount of time, but really was ten picoseconds, as the god of the sea was placing them in a spaceship causing them to accelerate at some fraction of the speed of light, the cataclysmic variable stars, and most importantly, the Roche Lobe were decimated. They were forever gone, and there was no method of revival. Quantum immortality may have inhibited their demise, but alas, it was too late. Clearly, the poets had triumphed with their illusory superiority, and thus the Romantic era came along.

Credit to Bozeman Science, for their insightful video on stellar classification.

The takeaway message I'm getting from this is Study More, Play Less. I learned the game in the late 70s and still enjoy the game. I've only played casually, never seriously studying the game... until now. I'm mid-1600s USCF and look forward to the challenge of reaching 1800, 2000 and eventually 2200.

Psst! Hey, man, you wanna go down the rabbit hole of... determinism? From that point of view, there's nothing you could've done differently, as you living exactly the way you have was the only possible option, your fantasies of a long-gone alternative route being phantasms you use to relive your past life experiences differently, but alas, to no real avail. They, too, are the only option on your path.

I view my life the same way, really; in fact, even the decision to reply to you is still yet another in a line of my only options. Any way I try to zigzag it, I feel that something just prints the results of all my previous life experiences on a reader, and I can't escape it. I can't annihilate the cruel god that sets in me an impression of the crippling permanency and unwavering certainty of my past well-known, my present vainly lived, and my future yet to be revealed but never anything other than it must be.

I feel genuinely trapped by this.

!0 years ? ....... wanna swap ?

The vocabulary in the story is not as extreme.

Someone get Critique of Pure Reason to discuss these dogmas in a formal epistemological context. We need to rigorously define being trapped. Mathemagics or mathematics? That is the Millennium Prize Problem revised to a fuller extent.

haaaa

I've wasted, off and on, 40 years of my life playing chess. If I can waste another 40 years (or more), I'll die a happy person.

I'll totally coach you

if you played and study for 20 years and didnt improve, you did it wrong. i started at 950 5 years ago and went over 2000 this year, playing and studying sporadically. its surely possible to go 950-2200 in 5 years if some structure is applied to the practice.

Help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Gne3UHKHs

I'm a simple man. The only philosophy I can handle is the mgtow philosophy, LOL!