You are not 'behind'

There's a school of design thought that the FOUT (flash of unstyled text) is worse than delayed text loading so they hide the text and reveal it once the web font is loaded). Browsers even put in a default delay before using the fallback font to appease this point of view, but hacks to enforce it even on slow connections still exist from time to time.

https://www.paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/

(Personally I think it's insane, especially when many of these sites have ads which reshuffle content much more violently than any FOUT. Also now you have hacks to enforce the old behaviour: https://css-tricks.com/fout-foit-foft/ )

You have invested your time in some ways; others have invested theirs in other ways.

Lazy is a very loaded term - I'm hesitant to subscribe to the notion that keeping up with Game of Thrones is any less an investment of time. As examples of the value of such an investment, you can then discuss it with your friends and coworkers, facilitating social cohesion and acceptance. You can use it a tool to encourage you to take a step back, and look at other things you are doing from a different perspective.

Sleep is another investment, the value of which has been much-discussed here and elsewhere. I'd encourage you to invest in it.

Perhaps your investments have been commercially focused - this is no bad thing. You will have learned directly about the work you have been doing, people's behaviour around you and yourself. You have learned some of what you are capable of - working so hard in impressive in itself, this is a capability you can understand and rely on later! You will have gained a reputation with some of the people you have been working with. If you are still on good terms with any of them, you can use this to better understand yourself, and you can seek recommendations from them.

That said, not all investments work out. I'm sorry your investment has not brought you what you expected.

Please try to focus on what you have learned and gained, and keep actively choosing your investments. You're almost certainly doing fine, and if not, please ask for help.

This is narrowly tailored advice presented more broadly than to the context it's useful for. And it's not the best way forward in that case, either.

If someone needs a fire lit under their ass to get going, a sense of falling behind their expectations for themselves can be a perfectly useful motivating factor.

Of course it can become all-consuming if that's all they've got as a life planning system. It's a setup that will inevitably trigger the brain's way of telling them there is a contradiction between desires and perceived actions. Regret doesn't have to be stressful, but this guarantees it is.

Throwing it away for a self-evaluation system that nullifies regrets is jumping to another extreme. Best case scenario is lying to yourself long enough to let your actual value system catch up. Or maybe it'll make someone lazy and complacent in a way that they're content with and much later come to regret that too, or maybe it will lead to the clichéd cycle of a "fresh start" every few months.

Building and maintaining a system of motivation, discipline and self-evaluation that lets someone live their life while working towards their goals productively for decades requires good mental hygiene, a topic with suspiciously few quality resources.

You should not feel worse than you are actually feeling, there should be no mandatory feelings. Bad feelings over your extended effort sounds to me like wanting additional unfair punishment. In any case, lazy people feel guilt which you have no reason to feel.

Through, putting enough time away for sleep or needed rest/socialization is not being lazy. People are more effective when they sleep enough, meetings are shorter when people coming in don't feel lonely and so on and so forth. I mean, being lazy is bad, but spending some time watching a show, reading book or keeping friends does not make you lazy.

And I mean, I am pretty sure you learned something from the experience. If you try another project/business, your chances of success go up due to what you learned. If you would watched tv whole time, you would learned precisely zero.

Reading this made me realize that my regret usually targets the previous hours or day. Generally, if I look at the last month or year or decade, I'm impressed with what I've accomplished. And yet I'm always disappointed with my immediate past. I think this short-term regret may be the reaction mass I'm igniting to propel me forward.

To borrow a phrase from finnthehuman above, this short-term regret is the fire lit under my ass. I think I'd better ignore Zack's article and keep feeding it. It drives my overall happiness.