Again hard question to answer, though I’d say the area 15-25 was the one where I learned the most (I learned nothing at all at school, I absolutely detested the place). That 15-25 area was where I really started to deep-dive music, audio, got my first taste of computers, basically everything that has defined my life since. It wasn’t a total win, I left school onto the mass unemployment of the 1980s, and I guess that shaped my politics, though I ducked and dived and had a good time in the counterculture.
The middle decade (25-35 by the way I’m counting) was kind of meh. I always hated work almost as much as school. Though I went through a couple of periods of good pay in IT.
The period from my late 30s to now (60) has been pfm, and that has been, on the whole, great. I’m actually able to scrape a living doing my own thing entirely! I’m still not quite sure if I retired in my late 30s. I may have done. I’ve certainly managed to avoid the rat-race entirely aside from that 25-35 decade where all my conventional employment is concentrated. Even then a lot of it was contracting/consultancy. I’ve certainly never wanted “a career”, in fact that has been the one defining thing of my entire life!
