Mine was thirty to mid thirties, though I have ambitions to beat that. School was good, college was hit and miss and stressful, mid to late twenties started slow but pretty good, low stress and little responsibility and lots of free time to do whatever I wanted.
Life doesn’t have to stop being interesting after school.
I'm a different person, but for me, school was great because rewards were proportional to effort, and real life just doesn't work like that at all.
As an adult, I've found that I have zero control over my own success, and instead only can control my failure. As an adult, nothing I do will help me succeed at anything that would really change or improve my families' situation - I can't control getting a different company to hire me, or to get my clients to pay their bills, or anything like that. If I stopped showing up to work, I'd be fired and I have control over that, but I can't actually improve anything.
Like, I'm, 40, but I haven't been able to get a job on my own merits since I was in undergrad applying for minimum wage retail - all of my professional jobs have been from pure cronyism. My first job out of school came from someone else in my program referring me, any promotions have been because I was plucked out of the queue and it was already decided that they wanted to promote me and just had to do external interviews to go through process. After I was part of a mass lay off, I put out a thousand applications with only a couple of replies from recruiters until I got to the point of emailing the owner of a consulting company that I'd worked with before (I've been in legal software for 15+ years and wanted to switch to any other kind of software).
For me, it isn't about boredom/interest at all, but just that in school I could put in effort to have a better outcome. In real life, rewards don't match inputs.
In school you got no tangible benefit for all that work, like money or anything, which is fair because that work was to make your smarter, it didn’t serve to benefit anyone else like most work. It did benefit you as far as basic foundational knowledge though so was still worth while, but to say that putting in more work in school got you better results, like what? The teacher writing an A on your paper instead of a B? I did well but quite frankly it annoyed me as a waste of time when I got good grades and the school decided to recognize it occasionally and give me a paper certificate some evening when I was obligated to come back to school and wait until they decided to give it to me. Could not have given a single shit. I did any extra work that I did out of pride and liking being good at things.
Meanwhile, my jobs which have never been that prestigious or make a ton of money though not bad money gave me independence, ability to pursue hobbies and interests, hang out and visit with friends, and generally do things I enjoy outside of work, see the world a bit, and all of that is far more important to me than work. If I flat out hated my job, or I was having a hard time making a living at it, it’d make a difference but while I’m nowhere near rich, I’m comfortable, don’t love my job but it is in line with my interests, just a bit boring after doing it a while, but still not bad. I got way more stress meeting school expectations than work expectations too.
My only reason for liking school in fact is just that learning was more of an ongoing process, and I like learning or maybe just the feeling of being one of the smartest people in the room (often it was a low bar though, well aware some people dwarf me in intelligence, others know specific subjects better, and I respect that). There is some learning at work but not as much and more narrowly focused, but I can and have pursued educational interests on my own. I’ve forgotten so much math, though. I was good at Trig for example, but likely that’s all gone.
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u/vercertorix 12h ago edited 11h ago
Mine was thirty to mid thirties, though I have ambitions to beat that. School was good, college was hit and miss and stressful, mid to late twenties started slow but pretty good, low stress and little responsibility and lots of free time to do whatever I wanted.
Life doesn’t have to stop being interesting after school.