Up until now it was my student time, though I think this depends on personal circumstances and is different for everyone. Childhood was nice, but obviously limited in terms of freedom. Teens where decent, but not 100% great. Student life was easily the best for me, I’d constantly meet like-minded people, there were so many cheap or free activities, and people constantly said shit like “you guys are our future” etc. I also loved having well defined work and goals, limited scope, and lots of depth and interesting challenges. Now that I’m working it’s usually very shallow work in terms of complexity, but with lots of communication and interdependencies. And it goes ever on because agile, no clear quartile or semester goals like university.

Now that I’m working I have the money, but I lost the easy access to like-minded people and fun activities. Organizing something with friends turned from “let’s grab a drink this afternoon” into “let’s align our agendas to find a free spot somewhere in 6 weeks”. And programming turned from “here’s a algorithm someone came up with that you can implement” to “the customer wants this button to do X, hi spend the next week implementing/testing/finding out its meant to work differently”.

I’m a bit biased though, because I’m currently burnt out. Work life was decent for a bit, it just temporarily got worse and kinda pushed me over the edge. If anyone has tips I’d love to hear them :3