It can be said that your thoughts aren't you.
A thought isn't a solid living being.
It is true, however, that you are the one devising
the stories that you are telling yourself, you are
the one interpreting events.
I get those feelings because of my age and constant dead ends to make inroads in socialization.
I would say you have those feelings because you are telling yourself that at your age
you should have achieved such and such a goal.
It's not just your age.
It's your response to the age.
I agree, and it's difficult to put that into practice when you've habituated fusion with thoughts. A way I use to to parse things is this:
You have thoughts that have different qualities that inform how you perceive them.
Thoughts you "receive" are ones you "hear" more than "say" in your mind.
Thoughts you "think" when you say "I think x" are more "said" than "heard".
The difference that makes one type seem like it's coming from the "you" that observes both is the "distance" of your identification with the origin of the thought. In other words, in a depressed state, thoughts that seem to explain why you feel depressed are closer and as a result feel like they are coming from "you".
The difficulty comes then when deciding what threads to identify with. As with the knowledge that you tell yourself stories as a primary mode of understanding, you create a loop and as such, an infinite regress as you can always say "well I'm just telling myself that because x" and apply the same logic to the x until you arrive at distrust of thought and self at base.
I think it's sometimes helpful to think of yourself as a spider on a complex web. The clusters where the web strands are dense and catch most flies are ones where you've spent a lot of time and reinforced, so you catch even more flies there. When you are in " spider mode" and life throws a fly into your web, then you feel the vibrations and scurry there, but once you are there, the thought strands are very dense so the "time to travel" per "absolute distance" expands toward the center of the cluster. The key is to get good at shifting between "spider mode" (operating as an observer
within thought by identifying with the products of thinking) and viewing the web from
above like a map for where the spider is and is going. You need both to have a sense of self and also to not fall victim to mistaking the products of your interaction with reality (as filtered through you) for reality itself.
Try step out of spider mode by not operating "on" the thought strands, but from observing the trends of the thoughts (or strands) themselves. The web is like a map of "stimulus and response over time" so learning to shift a "dimension" up in mental posture means you don't need to traverse through it but across it when the need for distance is recognised.
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