Sir Elton John has admitted that he “wasted” a massive chunk of his life due to drugs and addiction. The 65-year-old singer believes that he was too “self-absorbed” to notice that he was destroying a big part of his life during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, despite so many of his friends dying around him. “I wasted such a big part of my life, when this epidemic was beginning to happen in the early 1980s. And I was a drug addict and self-absorbed,” Contactmusic quoted him as saying. “You know, I was having people die right, left and centre around me, friends. And yet, I didn’t stop the life that I had, which is the terrible thing about addiction. It’s that – you know, it’s that bad of a disease. “I was consumed by cocaine, booze, and who knows what else. I apparently never got the memo that the Me generation had ended,” he said. The singer – who has raised more than 275 million dollars for the Elton John AIDS Foundation – has revealed that he used to think he was “invincible” after drinking and taking drugs, and he now believes he’s the “luckiest man in the world” because he wasn’t infected by AIDS when he was younger. “You know what? When you take a drug and you take a drink and you mix those two together, you think you’re invincible. I came out of this HIV-negative. I was the luckiest man in the world,” he added.