gain or loss?

not able to decide whether in all of my 17 years of working, how many have given me creative satisfaction...well, for all my life i wanted to be a writer and finally started doing that close to my fourth decade in life... slow starter, must say.
that's one way of looking at it. the other is of practical wisdom...back home, i always dreaded travel and if one has to write (i mean, a journo) one has to travel... younger, inexperienced and needing more money (to meet all those worldly expectations of others and the self -- you know those -- the house, the gadgets, the car...), i went into stiff bureaucratic organisations... yes, the house got built and furnished, i rode the car, but the inside was far from satisfied... i was feeling claustrophobic throughout... i was carrying out what others had thought... finally when we shifted countries, got the opportunity to write... the material hunger had, by then, died... only the soul was left to be satisfied...
again, those stiff hierarchies showed me another side of life -- how the small ego can become larger than life... so cannot dub those years of unfulfilment as totally a waste, huh?