This is one I've actually thought a lot about. Having gone to an Ivy League school, I'm not sure that it would be worth sending my kids to any university. The quality is going down, the tuition is going up. The cost of establishing a household after school is going up, so giving that 250k and 4 years to a university is a huge opportunity cost. It seems like there should be a lot cheaper and more efficient ways of building a network and developing career skills.

But I also don't want to just hand a 20-year old a trust fund of $250k instead of college tuition. So my current thinking is that I'll say: "We've saved up $250k to get you started in life. You can either spend that on a college education. Or you can get a scholarship or get a job directly, and we'll give you the money for one of the following activities: 1) starting a business 2) going to grad school 3) buying a home to raise a family in 4) Up to 6 months of travel or independent artsy work. The money will remain in the investments accruing returns until it is disbursed."

Long story short, the "one big mistake in life" quote is exactly right.

Parents forcing their children into servitude, so they can only choose among a set of activities deemed to be “acceptable,” sounds like hell.

Some of it's pretty practical.

What I was never able to make her understand was that I needed those cables for my work, as well as to pay her art school tuition; to me it was very hurtful that she demanded I hide them. I never complained about her stone chisels.

More to the point, what I wanted - and really needed - was a place in the house that was mine, and mine alone.

I'm not dead certain but I may have found her street address. She usually goes by her full name - with her middle name - but the woman I found is listed only by her first and last.

Today I bought a blank greeting card with the intention that I would immediately write her a nice letter. Given that I don't know it's really her it's not going to be dripping with romance but more casual, just to say I'd like to be back in contact.

But all afternoon and into the evening I've been dwelling over what we could have had, had her grandmother approved, or had I found some way around her grandmother.

She would be too old to have children by now. That's quite difficult for me to accept but even so I want to see her again, hopefully find some way for us to be together again.

The problem was that she had a boyfriend. One day she asked me if I would be her boyfriend if she broke up with the other guy. I told her not to do that because I would always have trust issues with her, knowing that she was a "cheater."

I know that it's easy to idealize what might have been, but to this day I still think about her and that rejecting her was probably the biggest mistake of my life. Shortly after we went our separate ways, I met my future and current wife of 18 years (it's been a difficult marriage, and probably won't last much longer... and should have ended over 10 years ago).

For various reasons, we never had any children, while my ex-"girlfriend" met someone else, and had two children that I know of. Even after all these years, I still think of my ex at least weekly, and imagine what might have been. I've casually tried to locate her over the years, hoping that she might be single again, but without luck.

Anyway, I know this isn't the proper forum for this, but it's something I've never told anyone about and your comment resonated rather strongly. Good luck with your situation!

But there's a common thread here. This particular collection of thoughts on this site reflect life and career arcs. Parallelism to us is that plenty of us developers are burning out (like eeve), seeking changes, having epiphanies.

That's obviously because we're growing older and maturing like everyone else, computers and stuff are changing drastically, competition and proliferation of tools is high, and we're caught up in middle of it all. Hell, I have a fantasy of becoming a woodworker and am a tool away from having a decent set (router). Maybe I'll try my luck at flea markets.

It's definitely easier for me to center some divs and write a fractal compression algorithm than work 10-hour shifts doing backbreaking labor. I know this because I did it for a couple of weeks replacing all my floors, and I did a pretty good job of it. The part that sucks is that it was more satisfying than programming, but it'll never be sustainable for me to do that kind of labor in the long run. :/

But decades of typing and this kind of work aggravated my carpal tunnel and it was not pleasant. I'd wake up in the mornings because of crippling pain in my right hand. It would take me hours of ice to get it to subside. There's only so much you can do with ergonomics though in flooring, and I did the best I could. The ten hour shifts were deadline-oriented and I won't go into that since I had no choice. But,...

Few weeks after I finished installing my floors (and demolishing what was there before, and carrying 3,000 lbs of material in beforehand) I had my A/C serviced. The guy was in his mid-50s, and he complimented me on the job. "You did this yourself?" Then he asked some more questions. He said my long lines (25'+) were straight, which was a big deal for me since I spent an entire day brooding over the starting line and re-measuring over and over again with a chalk-line and laser levels. "This looks like professional work" he said.

After he left, found out from his supervisor that the guy worked in flooring for 23 years, running his own business, and he watched it die during the last market crash. In the end it was him and another guy doing a job a day, which sq-ft for sq-ft was basically them working 5-6 times faster than me, and better.

The man favored his both knees the entire time he was working here, and had menthol/wet wraps around his hands that he kept renewing. Evaporative cooling does only so much to reduce swelling. Anyhow, I can't imagine working that hard for decades, and my 10 hour shifts were nothing compared to what he did day after day after day.