Magnum, and 2+2=5: I hear you loud and clear. I have got ZERO ounces or inches or shades of smoke to blow your way. You have nailed it. There is no silver lining to this monster other than it did not kill whoever is still posting, yet.
Here's my grim take on being too old to start doing what you want. I do not classify it as silver lining. I recently went to the 2014 AAS DPS meeting in Tucson where planetary scientists talk about exoplanets and the Solar System. There were a ton of young grad students (I'm 41), mix of early middle to early senior aged people, and a thin serving of what I could only characterize as spunky gray-haired and white-haired guys who were still doing their science, still getting up before the audience, still razzing the young speakers, still interrupting their peers in their polite way, and they had to be north of 65 years old, maybe 70. Not many of them, but an unambiguous statistical presense. They were doing what they loved doing. I will not make it through any higher degree than I have, but I'm reducing data on an exoplanet (before this lunchbreak), and it fills a huge gap of alienation from the life I think I could have fit into.
I won't get back the life the JWs stole. I can calculate that as being a longer period of time than the actual years you were under the KH roof, because the act of starting some learning experiences after your cohort has moved on carries STEEP opportunity costs in time, money, political and relationship capitol, etc. So just to estimate a metric from my own experience, the years that the JW borg steals from you is roughly a factor of 1.5. If you did not know yourself, you have to meet yourself. If you did not have loving, caring, wise, learned, concerned advice from parents or invested parties who knew how reality worked, then you had a steep learning curve to "catch up", if ever, to something resembling the civilized and socially responsible adult. You never stop experiencing this opportunity cost curve. Things you should have known at a younger age delay learning things you should be knowing now.
There is also the penalty of not being able to focus and finish what you started, because there are so many things you want from life that were prevented by all this delay. I've got zero good advice there. Worldly people have to face the same crisis of focus, but they got to do so in their normal cohort, under the wing of invested persons with experience in reality.
IMHO
